Ok, finally to the passages I found most interesting and funny. But some context first:

The philosophy of philosophy is called “metaphilosophy”: It inquires into the nature of philosphical problems, the possibility of philosophical knowledge, what methods to adopt in order to make philosophical progress. One of the perennial questions of metaphilosophy is why philosophy does not make the kind of steady, assured progress that we associate with the sciences and with history, archaeology, or even literary scholarship. In philosophy it seems that every generation repudiates the supposed insights of the previous generation, so that there is no cumulative body of philosophical knowledge that everyone can agree to; philosophers always seem to be bickering and dithering, to put it unkindly…In philosophy we never seem to get the normal phase, in whch a body of theory is generally accepted and built upon; everything always seem more or less up in the air.

He lists the following answers to why philosophy has made such dismal progress as a discipline (It’s the last sentence of each view that I found funny):

It should be apparent to those reading this blog that I have a strong interest in Philosophy. Why? I used to be insatiably curious about everything and asked incessant questions, to the irritation and frustration of my parents, teachers and friends. I learnt that incessant questioning was not socially acceptable and later discovered that all my questions have been dealt with seriously in a discipline called “Philosophy” and the rest, as they say, is history.

McGinn puts it this way after giving some examples of philosophical questions:

These are all questions human beings naturally ask and which they have been puzzling over since articulate thought was first recorded. Children spontaneously ask philosophical questions, much to the frustration of their parents-since the parents are often as philosophically clueless as their children. The philosopher is just someone with a particularly strong interest in these age-old universal questions; she is the embodiment of one kind of human curiosity-the kind that seeks the general, not the particular, the abstract, not the concrete. Of course it is easy to be impatient with such questions, because they do not admit of scientifc resolution. But really this response is just philistinism combined with science fetishism.

Harry Frankfurt (aka the bullshit guy by The Guardian) puts it this way in The Reasons of Love:

We have it on the authority both of Plato and of Aristotle that philosophy began in wonder. People wondered about various natural phenomena that they found surprising. They also puzzled over what struck them as curiously recalcitrant logical, or linguistic, or conceptual problems that turned up unexpectedly in the course of their thinking…Aristotle reports that their inquiries had no further and more practical goals. They were eager to overcome their ignorance, but that was not because they thought they needed the information. In fact, their ambtion was exclusively speculative or theoretical.

Unfortunately, my theoretical ambitions and fixation with exclusively speculative inquiries coupled with a state of curiosity that I’ve yet to outgrow since I was a kid doesn’t pull in the big bucks.

From McGinn’s book, I also found out about the relation between Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of
language.

McGinn wrote that Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning “offers the prospect of analyzing the whole phenomenon of linguistic meaning in terms of propositional attitudes. If we can analyze the notion of speaker meaning in terms of intentions and beliefs, maybe we can analyze sentence meaning in the same terms, once we add a provision to the effect that it is a convention to mean a sentence in a certain way… So maybe linguistic meaning is speaker meaning plus convention: worlds mean what they do because speakers have conventions to use them with certain sorts of second-order intentions. Semantics thus turns into a department of the philosophy of mind, because meaning is a matter of underlying propositional attitudes. Meanings are not, then, ethereal abstract entities floating around in Platonic heaven; rather, they are projections from the humdrum business of belief, desire, and intention. Indeed, if we could just analyze intention in terms of beliefs and desires-as, say, the belief that I will do something or the strong desire I have for something-then we could get the whole thing down to belief and desire: a huge simplification. And then, and then-what if we could go on to reduce belief and desire to brain states? Then we would have a total explanation of meaning and language in physical terms. Philosophers of a materialist persuasion sighed with much yearning at the prospect of such a reduction. Much work was done trying to make the project work, and the mind-body problem assumed an even greater importance in light of this approach to meaning.”

Hmmm…

It is a pleasure
When, in a book which by chance
I am perusing
I come on a character
Who is exactly like me.

So writes Tachibama Akemi his poem Solitary Pleasures.

I finished reading Colin McGinn’s The Making of A Philosopher

on 11 Aug 05 and was delighted to find out that he is a practical-phobe like me when he recounted the “traumatic and soul-destroying” ordeal of his move from the UK to the US:

Moving to the USA was a big step, not least in terms of the practical issues that had to be faced. I have never been one for practical issues, finding them at best distracting and at worst totally paralyzing. What would I do with my furniture? Did I really have to fill out all those immigration forms? What if I came and didn’t like it after all?

This passage recounting the reception of his book The Problem of Consciousness also amused me:

My ideas about consciousness started to attract interest from outside the narrowly academic philosophical world. Scientific American ran a story about consciousness in which I was feature, along with a photograph of me looking like Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs…beneath the picture I was described as a “hardcore Mysterian.” Time magazine had a cover story about conscious minds and computers, prompted by the chess match between Deep Blue and Kasparov-in which I was quoted in the same paragraph as none other than Shirley MacLaine, well-known mystic and reincarnationist. Japanese Newsweek ran its own feature in which I was photographed cradling a conical light for eerie effect. Omni ran a story too, with no special effects…I even appeared in Art Forum of all places, accompanied by a picture of the old rock band The New Mysterians, after whom my position had been named.

Reading McGinn’s intellectual autobiography also made me want to read his other books and Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere. I will be posting some more passages from his book.

I’m sick. I miss reading and writing about Philosophy. I miss having time to myself and I miss seeing my friends.

Much has happened since I last posted, some traumatic and some bizarre. It would take too much energy for me to record the traumatic and bizarre things down. Regarding the traumatic event on 30 Jul 2005, it suffices to say that C and myself were physically unharmed and uninjured; regarding the effect of that incident on our psychic well-being, well, that is another matter. Someone else was not so lucky, someone I did not know, someone whom I met briefly before she died. Like what C said, our hitherto unconnected lives unexpectedly crossed for a brief, strange and unpleasant moment. I’ll stop here.

But I would at least like to record down two things.

First, I have a history of attracting or knowing strange people. As I look back, I see that many of those who have been close to me or are still close to me have an ability to sense, see or hear “things”. “Things” meaning ghosts or spirits. These people also tend to have great artistic and creative potential and an uncanny and above average sensitivity to other people and the environment. Their experiences when recounted to me are too compelling for me to doubt, much as I would like to be a skeptic and dismiss them as hallucinations or mental conditions.

Second, a totally unrelated topic, I have an amusing tidbit from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Skepticism, as a critical philosophical attitude, questions the reliability of the knowledge calims made by philosophers and others.

...Skeptical tendencies appear in some pre-Socratic views. The metaphysical theory of Heraclitus that everything is in flux and that one can’t step twice into the same river was taken as indicating human inability to discover any fixed, immutable truth about reality. The purported development of this theory by Cratylus to the the view that since everything is changing, one can’t step once into the same river, because both that river and onself are changing, leads to a broader skepticism. Cratylus apparently became convinced that communication was impossible because, since the speaker, the auditor, and the words were changing, whatever meaning might have been intended by the words would be altered by the time they were heard. Therefore, Cratylus is supposed to have refused to discuss anything and ony to have wiggled his finger when somebody said something, to indicate that he had heard something but that it would be pointless to reply, since everything was changing.

I’m going to give myself another goal: to be less literal-minded (i.e. not to fall prey to the idea that all meaning comes solely from words said or written) and more discerning about the intentions of the person speaking or writing.

This requires a different operating framework entirely. A conceptual leap for myself. Otherwise, it’ll be hard for an INTP like me to get on further in life.

Also, with great reluctance, I record my decision to think and behave like someone my age, someone approaching 30 and not someone who is 17.

Just finished reading Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund this morning at 3 a.m. Reading this book made me realise that I enjoy his writings as much as when I first discovered Siddhartha, my first favourite novel, almost ten years ago. His writings appeal to me because they articulate the inner world of the seeker, a world of spiritual loneliness, struggle, turmoil, wandering, serenity, a world of mystical and mysterious depths and contradictions that includes depravity, intoxication, and inner compulsions that both estrange and redeem. Self-realisation and awakening are the themes that draw me back to Hesse’s books time and time again.

Hesse was awarded the Nobel prize for Literature in 1946.

For the records, here’s an excerpt from the book:

“...But I’m thinking of Rebekka, of the burned Jews, the mass burials, the Great Death, of the alleys and rooms full of stinking corpses, of all the gruesome looting, the haggard, abandoned children, of dogs starved to death on their chains-and when I think of all that and see these images before me, then my heart aches and it seems to me that our mothers have borne us into a hopeless, cruel, devilish world, and that it would be better if they had never conceived, if God had not created this horrible world, if the Saviour had not let himself be nailed to the cross in vain.”

Narcissus gave Goldmund a friendly nod.

“Your are quite right,”...”...But in one thing you are quite wrong: you think that the things you have said are thoughts. But actually they are feelings. They are the feelings of a man preoccupied with the horror of life, and you must not forget that these sad, desperate emotions are balanced by completely different ones! When you feel happy on a horse, riding through a pretty landscape, or when you sneak somewhat recklessly into a castle at night to court a count’s mistress, then the world looks altogether different to you, and no plague-stricken house or burned Jew can prevent you from fulfilling your desire. Is that not so?” “Certainly, that is so. Because the world is so full of death and horror, I try again and again to console my heart and to pick the flowers that grow in the midst of hell. I find bliss, and for an hour I forget the horror. But that does not mean that it does not exist.” “You expressed that very well. So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.” “Yes, that’s true.” “Most people feel that way, but only a few feel it with such sharpness and violence as you do; few feel the need to become aware of these feelings. But tell me: besides this desperate coming and going between lust and horror, besides this seesaw between lust for life and sadness of death-have you tried no other road?” “Oh yes, of course I have. I’ve tried art…” “...But what has art meant to you, what has art brought to you?” “It was the overcoming of the transitory. I saw that something remained of the fools’ play, the death dance of human life, something lasting: works of art. They too will probably perish some day; they’ll burn or crumble or be destroyed. Still, they outlast many human lives; they form a silent empire of images and relics beyond the fleeting moment. To work at that seems good and comforting to me, because it almost succeeds in making the transitory eternal.”

I passed my fourth bike lesson on the third try! Was late by half an hour today. My darling was right, every time I go late for my lessons I pass! Really didn’t expect to pass this time round.

Today I also bought a book on funk guitar and a book teaching absolute beginners how to play the guitar and sing. Gave Her a first lesson from the book. She’s making good progress, having learnt the C and G chords already!

Roy Buchanan is one of my favourite guitarists. This is a picture of him:

His calm and nonchalent expression belies the fire that burns in his playing. At one point in time, he was referred to as the world’s greatest unknown guitar player. He also turned down an offer to join The Rolling Stones. He committed suicide in jail in 1988. The legendary Jeff Beck dedicated Cos We Ended as Lovers (another guitar tune I like a lot and that I once transcribed and knew how to play) to Roy Buchanan. Roy Buchanan has also been cited as one of Steve Vai’s guitar heroes.

I managed to transcribe half of his Tribute to Elmore James. This is a picture of Elmore James.

Frank Zappa once described Elmore James’ playing as follows “Elmore kept playing the same lick over and over, but I get the feeling he meant it”.

Many people recently told my Love that she gained weight. She complained that although she looks slim, she is actually fat. Being in a rather cheeky (and philosophical) mood, I asked her “Would you rather look skinny but are actually fat or would you rather look fat but are actually skinny?”.

I suspect many women who complain about their weight or tummies never gave serious thought to this question.

By the way, there is a difference between looking like X and actually being X. For example, one might look like a Chinese without being one; one might look like a slut without actually being so; or one might look like a rebel without actually being so.

In response to Cheryl’s post, nah: