Ruminations
Monday, May 2, 2022
On Fiction and Fantasy
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Bergson's Theory of Memory
Just had another two essays published with Epoché! These are on Bergson's theory of memory, focusing primarily on chapters two and three of Matter and Memory. His theory has eluded me for some time but I think I really cracked it with this one. Part one goes over the theory itself, how it improves on empiricist theories, the philosophical motivations for it, and the metaphysics of time. The latter will goes over how it solves some outstanding metaphysical issues. Most notably, Bergson's solution to the mind-body problem, which I think is of serious interest. Here they are:
Thursday, March 10, 2022
On Virtue and Goodness
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
A Note on Personal Rationality
I. Bertrand Russell makes a rather funny argument in his thoughtful little essay In Praise of Idleness:
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilised Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man’s economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large amount of human labour, which might have been devoted to producing something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out to be not wanted, he has diverted a mass of labour into channels where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through the failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Propositions of Metaphysics
Tuesday, December 14, 2021
Future Contingents in Leibniz
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Contributions to 'On Human Excellence'
This post is a collection of contributions from friends of mine to my earlier essay "On Human Excellence". As I noted in that essay, there is some peculiar utility in using others as evidence of this phenomenon. This is because, more often than not, human excellence as I have defined it is not even perceptible by some, or even most, unless you have some specific expertise or discernment in any given field of practice. Spending hours of one's life dedicated to studying and immersing yourself in some field or craft allows you to get inside its peculiar technical contours. It allows you to better see the excellence in the first place.
Thus, I had the thought that I could solicit those smart and interesting people around me as to whether they had their own thoughts about, or examples of, human excellence. What follows are their ideas and interpretations, meant as an accompaniment to the ideas sketched out in my original essay.
If you read the original essay and these others' essay's and have your own ideas for examples of human excellence, reach out to me and I'd be happy to publish anything here alongside these pieces!
Follow the link provided to read each piece. Here they are, in the order I received them:
Friday, November 12, 2021
On Human Excellence
I. One particularly interesting feature of human reality that exemplifies our dynamism and creativity is the limits and boundaries to which people push their bodies or their craft. Spurred initially by watching the Olympics, I have begun reflecting on the kind of craft involved with being the best in the world at something. There is something enthralling and beautiful to me about watching someone at the very top of their game performing in ways no other human ever has or ever will, in the foreseeable future. This has led me to think about human excellence more generally.
II. Human excellence isn't merely about being good or talented at something, nor about winning some competition, or even about being the best in the world. Human excellence, as I will be using it, is something more than that. It is when craft becomes art. What do I mean by this? Ordinarily, we seem to make a distinction between craft and art, where craft is some skill or practice and art is a product, imbued with the aesthetic imprint of an artist. Thus, what I take to be human excellence is when some craft itself becomes art. Rather than being merely the process that produces something, acting out the craft becomes itself its own aesthetic product. Human excellence is the peculiar aesthetic quality some skill takes on when it is performed at such a high level, to the point that it seems effortless, and utterly one-of-a-kind.
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Apocryphal Arguments #2: Radical Enfranchiement
I present in this post a funny little argument that states that we are rationally obliged to abolish the voting age. In other words, that there is never a justification for disenfranchising citizens based on age. The apocryphal part of the argument is that this includes young children, toddlers, and even newborns. I make the argument by using a kind of slippery slope argument, often used by detractors of child enfranchisement. (The style of argumentation will be similar to my last entry in this series, so I highly recommend you read that first, here, if you haven't already.) This argument might supply the dumbest reason you could come up with to abolish the voting age, but here we are. This is a shortened version of a longer and more careful essay I have on this. Let's get to it.
Monday, September 20, 2021
A Theory of Friction (For Bayesian Epistemology)
Saturday, August 28, 2021
New Essay With Epoché
In which I attempt to reconstruct Bergson's views on free will, as presented in Time and Free Will in light of the later changes in his ontology. (Makes a nice companion piece with my previous piece on him outlining that ontology.) Check it out!
Rebel Without a Cause - Reconstructing Free Will in Bergson
https://epochemagazine.org/43/rebel-without-a-cause-reconstructing-free-will-in-bergson/
Friday, July 2, 2021
The Tendency to Know
I. I have a theory that human knowledge is analogically like the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. However, it is not that systems of human knowledge tend towards disorder or less knowledge, but instead towards more knowledge. This is not the entropy of Claude Shannon's information theory, in which there is a stochastic rate of loss in the transmission of information. It is rather a theory about how knowledge proliferates in closed social systems (at any scale). I begin by defining the second law of thermodynamics and entropy as I understand them and pointing out how certain parts of a system defy the law (local reversals) even though the system as a whole tends towards an increase in entropy. Next, I outline by analogy how I think a system structured like entropy occurs in systems of human knowledge. Finally, I close with some remarks on Charles Sanders Peirce, who ultimately sowed the seeds of this idea. If you understand entropy and thermodynamics already, you can skip to section three.
Monday, June 21, 2021
Apocryphal Arguments #1: A Rocking Universe
Sunday, June 13, 2021
A Critique of Negation
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Double Feature Series #3: Sex, Love, & Jealousy
This is the third post in what I'm calling my double feature series, in which I post a pairing of two movies that I love. These movies will usually be made 20+ years apart and are thematically related somehow. I see one as a sort of a spiritual successor of the other. The point is to avoid blatantly obvious pairings or homages that have been pointed out before (like certain Woody Allen movies combined with certain Bergman movies, for example). Instead, I aim to bring two seemingly disconnected films together, into one thought.
The third entry in this series, as the title indicates, pulls together two films about relationships. They are:
Thursday, April 29, 2021
Epoché Author!
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
A Sketch of Similarities Between Bergson and Heidegger
There is a remarkable similarity between the philosophies of Bergson and Heidegger. Bergson's notion of the body as a 'centre of action' and Heidegger's notion of Dasein as "that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue" get at this similarity. In both cases, the being is entirely immanent and contiguous with reality; that is, they are merely a part of a larger set of environmental relations (extensity for Bergson, Being for Heidegger).
In their formulation of this aspect of their metaphysics, they both stringently avoid mentioning an inextended consciousness or inextended representations in the form of perception. Instead, they favour a relation that is continuous with its environment. They both want to repudiate a certain kind of dualism or subjective atomism that postulates the observer as a metaphysical island from which we peep at the world through a tiny hole. They prefer to analyse the body in terms of its direct and practical engagement with the world.
What makes humans peculiar for both thinkers is the self-consciousness of our being-in-the-world. We ask the question of being to ourselves and end up thinking we are of a unique kind, which is partially true, in that we seem to be the only kind of thing really asking, but partially false, in that we obviously are extensions of the world.
Bergson reduces perception from a faculty of representation and knowledge to an evolved and fine-tuned faculty for carving up and abstractly select those elements of the fluid world that practically benefit each organism and grant the freedom to navigate the world and itself as it needs to. Heidegger historicises and relativises what beings there are to that which Dasein has as its concern and to the historical epoch or cultural moment in which beings are revealed.
In both cases, the intellectual activity of objectifying the world, the thing that makes us think we grasp Being most intimately, for Bergson 'the intellect', for Heidegger 'ready-to-hand', paradoxically distances us from a true metaphysics - of duration, or Being, respectively. Both reject the presence (in the Derridean sense) of (small-b) beings. Only the former thinks we can go beyond this and intuit this true metaphysic.
Ultimately I think that Bergson ends up giving a more satisfying picture of metaphysics proper (though I am still grappling with his views about memory which make a surprisingly good candidate for a sort of soul). My problem with Heidegger is that he never seems to really escape Kant while I think Bergson really does.
Sunday, September 6, 2020
Objects Aren't Real (Vagueness as Process)
Thursday, September 3, 2020
Rowan Recommends: 5 Great Performances by Women in Film (with Honourable Mentions)
Friday, August 7, 2020
21 Dumb & Boring Reflections on Politics and Moral Philosophy
1
Sunday, July 5, 2020
Balancing the Self With Kierkegaard
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
When Do Friendships Last
"Being-with-one-another in the they is not at all a self-contained, indifferent side-by-sideness, but a tense, ambiguous keeping track of each other, a secretive, reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of the for-one-another, the against one-another is at play."
The maxim:
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Heidegger, Disney & David Lynch
Friday, January 24, 2020
A Certain Lightness
He who says, "Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys...It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound...Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Commitment
Thursday, January 2, 2020
Rowan Recommends: Summer Interlude (1951)
Monday, December 30, 2019
Quick, Dirty, and Dismissive Movie Reviews for the New Year
Thursday, December 26, 2019
Should Transgender Women Compete In Women's Sports?
Thursday, November 28, 2019
The Serious Stance
Monday, November 11, 2019
Double Feature Series #2: Mob Justice
The second entry in this series illustrates the temporal possibilities of influence we see in film! They are two quite harrowing movies about the dangers of mob justice presented by Fritz Lang and Thomas Vinterberg respectively:
Thursday, October 31, 2019
On Vagueness
Monday, October 21, 2019
On 'Old Moralists'
That tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of old Kant as he lures us along the dialectical by paths which lead, more correctly, mislead, to his ‘categorical imperative’ - this spectacle makes us smile, we who find no little amusement in observing the subtle tricks of old moralists and moral-preachers.