Masterdebate Me

There's been some confusion about whether I was being sarcastic or not with the SemanticReasoning.org post. I was. But I realized that I might not have been entirely fair to Alex and I just sent him this note:

I haven't read your entire argument but I couldn't get past the B-Statements.

Here's a quick question: would "my shirt is red" be a B-Statement?

I have a philosophy degree. May be interested in a debate. I would also humbly suggest you check out some phil of language.

A

Until he gets back to me here's another hilarious, but, I admit, possibly revolutionary website.

Write What You Know

David Foster Wallace is this fancy-pants young literary head. He writes interesting, perspective-bending fiction, full of words we don't know. And he also writes about sports, I guess.

In the recent New York Times PLAY magazine he was writing about Roger Federer. He's making some point about how what Federer does can only be described as beautiful. And Wallace thinks this is a big deal, what he is doing describing Federer this way, because we only use the figurative language from the battlefield to describe sports. But, insists Wallace, it really is beautiful, no matter how strange it may seem to describe a sport that way.

It is amazing that, with the World Cup still fresh in our memories, David Foster Wallace is apparently unaware that the world's most popular sport (by a healthy margin) is, in fact, the "Beautiful Game." It was hard to miss Nike's huge "play beautiful" ad campaign this past summer.

The moral of the story: when you know words like "anneal" it doesn't matter what point you're making with them.

In The Future...

All fields of study will be one.

Seriously, it is incredible to me how much different disciplines inform each other yet remain separate in schools, delimited by "major" or "concentration."

Current reading:
-Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
-Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child
-NY Times, The Fame Motive

Experimental psychology, psychoanalysis, and literature/philosophy, and each benefits from the perspective provided by the other two.

The trend is underway. Books like this get me excited.

I Just Gave All My Money

To Alex's remarkable project. He is solving every philosophical problem at once (and helping out with political ones, too).

Studying Economics Could Be Bad For Your Soul

Psychology and philosophy deliver a one-two punch to the dismal science:

People's views of what is right and wrong are, as a matter of fact, influenced by their beliefs about how people in fact behave. There is evidence that studying theories that depict individuals as self-interested leads people to regard self-interested behavior more favorably and to become more self-interested (Marwell and Ames 1981, Frank et al. 1993).

From a crash course on philosophy of economics.

Vignette #1

This morning I was sitting in the park across the street from my house. I was basically alone, on what could only be described as a grassy knoll, and was just casting my gaze around while I thought, when I saw this kid standing behind me, completely transfixed by a Game Boy (or some 21st century version thereof). I hadn't even noticed him. He was just standing there in the grass, in a navy blue t-shirt and navy blue sweatpants, outcast's mullet fluttering in the breeze, rooted to the spot, eyes and awareness burried in the screen.

He didn't acknowledge my presence at all, and every few seconds he would tear some fraction of his attention off his game for long enough to get his shit together and take a single step (or maybe two) in the direction he was trying to go. Then another 30 seconds with the game. Then another excruciating step. Over the course of about ten minutes he managed to "walk" right past me. If I had been sitting five feet away he probably would have "ran" right into me. Amazing.