some points of philosophical corroboration

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Speaking of philosophical work, I’m really not quite so odd as I self-effacingly say. Joseph Margolis (a senior member of America’s philosophical community, author of 30 books, it’s said) has just published Pragmatism’s Advantage, evidently the culminating work of his life, which seeks no less than to prospect and recommend a sense of philosophy as such for the 21st century—and I’m beyond him!—though I’m the only one who knows that, and I lack his erudition (which will be useful for me to appropriate—with all due credit), which is not especially important, by his own argument, for scoping a sense of the future of philosophy, where we’re all girl/boy scouts.

inhabited

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Fascination with the diverse scale of the days, making a fine-grained incohering of labyrinthine times a sign of some fantastic artistry in our evolving, a wealth of a library that interests a few, so much good reason for happy conversation—and serenely fruitful solitude.

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self-reflectivity: where learning never ends

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Genuineness is one mode of validity, which is also about realism/factuality and appropriateness/exemplarity, including a welcoming of critique as a chance to grow.

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a note on “philosophical work”

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6:51 am

Question for today: Why does—might—philosophical work matter?

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2:27 pm

I asked that morning question because...hmmm, I forget. The question is about a kind of work, not: Why does...philosophy matter? That question pertains to lecturing about philosophical topics; but is such lecturing philosophical work? Is “doing” philosophy the same as presenting well-organized explications of philosophical material, i.e., themes, arguments, ideas, taken from standardly “philosophical” works? What can be distinctively said about a kind of work, appropriately called “philosophical”? Why does that matter?

words of love from a mind being disembodied

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“…remember Rilke's admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish…,” Tony Judt, ”Historian’s Progress,” The New York Review of Books, March 11 issue.

Maybe Salinger read Rilke.

Judt is an esteemed intellectual historian who has written for the NYRB for years. He’s writing a lot these days, and each of his articles have the narrative smoothness and lucidity one might expect of NYRB. His present one is on love of trains. There’s no hint of the growing ALS “imprisonment,” which he recently wrote about matter-of-factly.

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good sense of holistic well-being

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I’m enjoying myself. One person’s inappropriateness might be
another’s good conscience. Inquiring minds are open on the matter.

Some persons might think me callous; others, that I need adult supervision. Or I’m essentially and inconsiderately obtuse.

No, I care. But life has to be fun, and I make mine conceptual.

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Searching for Signs of Intelligent Lifein the Universe

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Catching up on news of the day online—“Whose news?” is a relevant question—can be like traipsing through a mall: so much busyness graphically casting for eyeballs, be it a leading site (e.g., The New York Times) or partisan streetlife (e.g., The Huffington Post, from which I stay away)—isn’t it mindboggling?

I cope by relying on Google News’s sense of “Top Stories.”

Here, this blog, is a quiet place, a “green world.”

semantic compression of developmentality

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I know I don’t write plainly sometimes. But that’s not because I can’t. Writing can be the sharing of an exploration, not just conveyance.

Yet, my choices—semantic compressions?—can serve me well for orientation to open-minded, improvised dailiness.

That’s not to say that I’m always satisfied the next day or the next week with what I’ve done. But eventually, things get to a form that stays (compressed and not), though sometimes the staying expresses a developmental period. I’m big on developmentality, you know.

All of that occurred to me this afternoon as I was midstream with some paragraphs of “living brightly,” which I just uploaded.

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one’s [your?] projections may not be the other’s [my?] unconsciousness

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I’m deliberately avoiding allusion to philosophical views that come easily to mind when I do my discursive sketches, because I’m gradually setting up a perspective that would be the basis for traditional philosophical engagements.

conceptuality of a good life

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Sunday, 2/14 — 11:47 pm

Extended free time exposes the suppressed reality that my circadian rhythm doesn’t gel with the turn of the Earth. I want 27 hour days. I want to not need sleep.

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Monday, 11:03 am

The day’s so pretty for you.

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a note on discursive reading

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11:53 am

A philosophical book review can be a useful occasion for discursive inquiry apart from depending on its reading of the book reviewed (having no pretense of letting the review substitute for the richness and detail of the book). Here’s how the story goes.

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fielding resonant feeling

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I may seem foolish by seeking a resonant sense of living relationship with textuality—ambivalence of reading, a marrying of genres, fiction and realism mirroring each other. I want characterization that provides a site for fielding narratology, for gardening inwordness, down the road.
If I have to seem foolish in the process, so be it.

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an unsynoptably-complex feeling for what happens

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revised Friday, 2/12

Each day has too many interesting advents in the news for me to put time into noting that here. So, the archiving process in the morning is comforting: All those things are gradually, aggregatedly shaping the uncounted topics (limited in number, though) that are “self-assembling,” in that sense.

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I’m enthusiastic about Michael Slote’s Moral Sentimentalism, 2010, for many reasons, but especially as excursion into a sense of “natural virtue” that would (I hope) accord significantly with Philipa Foot’s sense of “natural goodness” (which I’ve fleshed out, offline).

ethical art, artful living: discursive homemaking

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E.M. Dadlez argues her book title that David Hume and Jane Austen are “Mirrors to One Another.” What a darling idea.

You think I’m some kind of Romantic, wanting to marry philosophical and literary value. But wanting a mirrorplay of sensibility figured in
an idealized venue of human Relationship is not itself Romantic.
Dadlez, in effect, proves that through her example.

recollective prospecting

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Recapitulation may reorient, recall, and be an appealing, a gathering,
for better intent—granting more promise (potential for constructiveness), thus durability (maybe).

I periodically go back through recent postings and pages to gather up appealing themes that become implicit in the upcoming agenda. I want to do that again soon. But I’m going to shelve that desire for awhile (which causes unwanted repetition).

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you and me and everyone we know

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A creative writer may have an interpretive plight unlike a reader with text in hand: the writer “reading” the invisible audience, if not living with an audacity of anticipating a specific character of mind.

Here we are, where I must trust in your graciousness toward our presence.

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