Invisibles

bodily ambiguity

My skin is kind of sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I'm told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it's silver when it's wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.

—Shel Silverstein

Dear Merleau-Ponty,

Some Merleau-Ponty humor...

http://h2so4.net/philosopher/merleauponty.html

Brandon I thought you would like this quote...

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.

-R.D. Laing  an existential psychiatrist

Here's the "official" Laing website.  Some of his essays are on there.

Very interesting stuff

http://laingsociety.org/

The selection below is from his book KNOTS.  Highly recommended. I would venture to say, phenomenological...

There must be something the matter with him
because he would not be acting as he does
unless there was
therefore he is acting as he is
because there is something the matter with him

He does not think there is anything the matter with him
because
one of the things that is
the matter with him
is that he does not think that there is anything
the matter with him

therefore
we have to help him realize that,
the fact that he does not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things that is
the matter with him

there is something the matter with him
because he thinks
there must be something the matter with us
for trying to help him to see
that there must be something the matter with him
to think that there is something the matter with us
for trying to help him to see that
we are helping him
to see that
we are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see we are not persecuting him
by helping him
to see that
he is refusing to see
that there is something the matter with
him
for not seeing there is something the matter
with him

dreyfus interview

Here's a link to an interview with Bert Dreyfus... I enjoyed it.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Dreyfus/dreyfus-con0.html

Merleau-Ponty works

Here is a quick reference guide to the English translations of Merleau-Ponty.

Freud

When I was at Yale, I was a teaching assistant for Professor Jonathan Lear in his course on Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Mind.  Now, Lear is a distinguished Professor at Univ. of Chicago and a member of the Committee on Social Thought there.   Some of his books include:

Open Minded : Working Out the Logic of the Soul 
Love and Its Place in Nature : A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis
Aristotle : The Desire to Understand

I found a great article online by Lear called "A Counterblast in the War on Freud: The Shrink is In".  The article discusses the current fashion of Freud-bashing and claims that psychoanalysis as "crucial for a truly democratic culture to survive".  I highly recommend that you all have a look at it:

http://www.human-nature.com/articles/lear.html

You can also find a PDF file of an article by Lear on Socratic Method and Psychoanalysis here:

http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/lear/Socratic+Method.pdf

Good article

Crowell was one of my dissertation readers.  I just came across this article and thought some of you might be interested.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~crowell/publications/is_there_a_phenomenological_research_program.htm

Lobsters...the 'in' joke

thought you all would find this amusing

-Sarah

"Beauvoir informs us that for severalyears after his experimentation with mescalin Sartre had periods when 'he could really be convinced that there was a lobster trotting along behind him.' [POL 2101 The lobster, or lobsters, for apparently there could be more than one, evidently came and went, for at times Sartre managed to, 'throw- the lobsters off his track' [POL 2561 or send them packing [POL 2201, but they always seemed to reappear. [POL 2741 The image of Sartre promenading around Europe followed by crustaceans is one that is well known to those who have studied Sartre, and is generally seen as no more than a trivial rather amusing eccentricity about the man, so much so that one might almost say that it has become an 'in joke' in such circles."

Carole Haynes-Curtis, "Sartre and the Drug Connection," Philosophy, Vol. 70, No. 271. (Jan., 1995), pp. 87-106.

Uh... testing?

Or am I late to the party?  Ironic, considering my attendance issues.  :-\

Authoring posts

I have upgraded the blog to permit others to initiate new posts. Most of you have already been invited as "authors" to the blog (unless your email bounced, or something).
If you got an email invite you are supposed to be able to begin a new post but I think it goes to me first for approval.  Can someone try this out so I can make sure/see how it works?

Sarah

Husserlian phenomenology isn't metaphysics

I need to get the blog reconfigured to allow more than one person to initiate a posting. Until then, Sarah T. offered a first post for us.

--------------------------

Husserl wrote,

"Actually, therefore, phenomenal explication is nothing like metaphysical construstion; and it is neither overtly nor covertly a theorizing with adopted presuppitions or helpful thoughts drawn from the historical metaphysical tradition. It stands in sharpest contrast to all that, because it proceeds within the limits of pure intuition, or rather of pure sense-explication based on a fulfilling giveness of the sense itself. Particularly in the case of the Objective world of realities (as well as in the case of each of the many ideal Objective worlds, which are the fields of purely apriori sciences)-and this canot be emphasized enough-phenomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense of this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience-a sense which philosophy can never alter, and which, because of an essential necessity, not because of our weakness, entails (in the case of any actual experience) horizons that need fundemental clarification." Section 62 pg. 150

What does this mean in light of his conversations about science and philosophy in the beggining of the book?

Do you think that he has come up with a method that could truly explain everything?

Freedom and Clarence Darrow

If you are interested in reading about the case of Leopold and Loeb, there is quite a bit on the internet.  Try LeopoldandLoeb.com to read more about the crime.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/leoploeb/leopold.htm is also a good site, with trial transcripts and photos.

Chalmers

This is a link to David Chalmers' weblog... you can see what the high-powered philosophers of consciousness concern themselves with:

http://fragments.consc.net/

http://consc.net/chalmers/  is a link to his main website.  Some great pics in the photo gallery.

He visited my department in grad school so we students got to take him out to dinner, etc.. He is a geuinely brilliant and fun guy.  I hope you like the article we are reading by him on The Matrix as Metaphysics.  But you'd probably have more fun reading his stuff on Zombies.  He's been very generous about putting his papers and collecting online papers about consciousness on the internet.  enjoy!

Descartes - quiz this week

Reminder that the quiz on Descartes has been postponed until Wednesday (Jan 31st).  Be sure to study the definitions sheet I handed out.  Also, know why Descartes' proof of the existence of God is so crucial to the resolution of his skeptical doubts. 

Here is the shortest proof ever that God exists.... ready?

I doubt.   

therefore --> God exists.

We'll talk about this in class today.

cave and film

This is an article linking Plato's allegory of the cave to film theory, so if you are interested in film, have a look...

http://www.mtsu.edu/~jpurcell/Cinema/plato_film.html

link to the reading for Monday

http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_partridge.html

Make sure you have seen the MATRIX before coming to class on Monday.

readings

It looks like some of the things I have assigned are in the fourth edition of the Minton/Shipka text, but are not in the fifth edition which most of you have.  So, anything that I decide you need to read will either be emailed to you, or will be put into the files section for the course (when you go to your my emich page).  I will let you know when I do this.  Some Plato is missing, and the Berkeley dialogue is missing as well.  I didn't have a fifth edition of the text and didn't know what had been removed.  I thought some things were added, but not that things were taken away.  My apologies for the confusion!

end of term recommendations

Hi everyone,

No, I'm not finished grading your exams yet.  In fact, I am not going to start until after Christmas. I am too far behind in my shopping, baking and generall good-doing, to think about the grading right now.  But the deadline is Dec 31st and I have never missed a deadline.

I really enjoyed teaching all of you this semester.  I hope you feel that you learned something in this course.  I also hope that some of you will want to go on to take other philosophy courses in the future.

Jacob V. asked me to post a list of some of the books I mentioned in class... For Leibniz, the book to look at would be Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil. 

I know I recommended quite a number of Kierkegaard texts: first and foremost Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Also:  The Sickness Unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety.  Books by Nietzsche I mentioned:  Beyond Good and Evil,  Ecce Homo, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.  By Sartre:  Being and Nothingness.  By Heidegger, Being and Time and The Question Concerning Technology.  Also Poetry, Language Thought.

Here are some other books I really like-- not philosophy...

The Weight of the World, by Peter Handke

A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Rilke on Love and Other Dificulties , Rainer Maria Rilke

Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (anything by Brautigan)

In the Future Perfect, by Walter Abish

1, No One and One hundred Thousand, Luigi Pirandello

Living High and Letting Die, Peter Unger

Practicalities, Marguerite Duras

Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Everything is Illuminated,  Jonathan Safran Foer

The Erotic Bird,  Maurice Natanson 

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

There are so many others, but this is a good start.

Let's keep in touch, guys!

Sarah

Photos

This is me and my husband at age seventeen.

Taken by a school photographer in the hallway at our high school. 

This is me as a graduate student at Yale, with Maury Natanson, phenomenologist, mentor, inspiration!

So I Made it home safely

Yes, once again the highway had lost its familiarity as I drove home.  I'm sorry that you all were treated to such a spectacle

yesterday...

I got home, desperate to collapse, but a fresh hell awaited me.  I had forgotten that six weeks earlier I had signed up to do my time as the "helper" at my six year old daughter's Brownie meeting.  Did I call and beg off?  No!  I am manic crazy mom, so I go and make foam Santa necklaces and reindeer gift bags for the Girl Scouts Holiday Bazaar this weekend. 

But I am not complaining.