Something that might interest you -- a magazine blog on "The Age of Bullchit" and below line struck me. In his seminal essay “On Bullchit”, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt attempts to provide a theory of bullchit. Frankfurt distinguishes between the bullshitter and the liar. The liar cares about the truth. He believes the world is one way and deliberately tries to deceive us that this it is another way. The bullshitter, however, has no such regard for the truth. What he says may or may not be true: what he really cares about is achieving some other objective, which has nothing to do with the content of what he’s saying. “By virtue of this, bullchit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are,” Frankfurt writes. The original Harry Frankfurt's essay is available online. So, Bullchit = you don't investigate/care for the truth and blabber. Lie = you know the truth and deliberately conceal it. As usual, what interested me on the side is this paragraph. Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, is often referred to as the “biggest slum in the world”, purportedly containing 1-3 million people. Best estimates using satellite imagery place the figure closer to 200,000. Following yet another press tour of Kibera interviewing HIV patients and orphans, journalist Martin Robbins called bullchit. As he later wrote in the Guardian, the trip “confirmed what I already knew…the idea that Kibera holds a million people is completely and utterly absurd”. Several articles were published in recent times hailing bilingual advantages. I wondered how will knowing another language (not international but vernacular) help me. I looked at Kibera and thought to myself, that is familiar, you replace "u" (Kubera, massive wealth) with "i" (Kibera, massive poverty). I am happy now that my forlorn vernacular assists me in memorising stuff Note: System isn't letting me type the word BS in full. Hence tweaked it.
Check out Fra Mauro, who did a better job than Thomas Aquinas. If you had landed in Venice during the mid-15th century, you might have been accosted by a monk with a prominent nose and baggy, smurf-like hat. Ignoring your exhaustion and atrocious body odor after a long sea journey, he would have dragged you to a nearby tavern and cross-examined you about your travels. What was the weather like? What kind of precious gems were mined? What animals did you encounter, and how many heads did they have? More here (I love such characters in history)
OK, here is my exercise sheet. I made two variations of The First Way: Argument from Motion Variation#1: Simple (1) Our senses prove that some things are in motion (Agreed) (2) Things move when potential motion becomes actual motion (May be) (3) Only an actual motion can convert a potential motion into an actual motion (Assumption) (4) Nothing can be at once in both actuality and potentiality in the same respect (Assumption) (5) Therefore nothing can move itself (abrupt conclusion) (6) Therefore each thing in motion is moved by something else (extension of [5] hasty conclusion) (7) The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum (Why not?) (8) Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God (By same logic, who moves the first mover) Variation# 2: For fun, here's a spin on logical fallacies. Let's say you have to identify each line (from the 2nd) with a fallacy taken on from the preceding line (closest fallacy, or shoehorned fallacy if there is no exact match) (1) Our senses prove that some things are in motion (OK) (2) Things move when potential motion becomes actual motion (argument from authority) (3) Only an actual motion can convert a potential motion into an actual motion (appeal to ignorance) (4) Nothing can be at once in both actuality and potentiality in the same respect (appeal to ignorance) (5) Therefore nothing can move itself (statistics of small numbers ) (6) Therefore each thing in motion is moved by something else (non sequitur) (7) The sequence of motion cannot extend ad infinitum (argument from adverse consequences) (8) Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God (begging the question) List of fallacies: Sagan's baloney kit ad hominem argument from authority argument from adverse consequences appeal to ignorance begging the question special pleading statistics of small numbers misunderstanding of the nature of statistics non sequitur post hoc, ergo propter hoc false dichotomy meaningless question straw man slippery slope short-term vs. long-term confusion of correlation and causation suppressed evidence, or half-truth weasel words
Don't do that. I mean, you don't want to do that. Check out lectures of J Rufus Fears. He is a historian and a masterful storyteller. I wish I had come across him earlier. He lectures on philosophy, modern literary movements, Christian gospels, Seneca, Cato, Boethius, Russian literature, Schweitzer (you must check this dude!), Sufferings of Young werther (!) , Shakespeare's plays, Plato's writing, Greek tragedians (compares and contrasts Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), Greek comic playwrights (Aristophanes, Menander), La Mandragola, Erasmus, Thomas More, heroic tales in Odyssey, Song of Roland, Nibelungenlied, El Cid, Perceval, Von Strasburg, journals, speeches, essays and plays of famous Americans. He covers everything! He talks with such animation in his voice that I have learnt and enjoyed more with his storytelling than reading these dry and voluminous books. I love him! I love this rolly-polly Rufoo so much! He rewired my DNA with his story-telling prowess. I fall asleep to his lectures these days. He has become my fuzzy warmth of literary curiosity. My Rufoo! He passed away in 2012. His archived lectures are worth their weight in the combined priceless metals of the periodic table.
Reminded me of Russell Conjugation Russell discussed this by putting three such presentations of a common underlying fact in the form in which a verb is typically conjugated: I am firm. [Positive empathy] You are obstinate. [Neutral to mildly negative empathy] He/She/It is pigheaded. [Very negative empathy] In all three cases, Russell was describing people who did not readily change their minds. Yet by putting these descriptions so close together and without further factual information to separate the individual cases, we were forced to confront the fact that most of us feel positively towards the steadfast narrator and negatively towards the pigheaded fool, all without any basis in fact.
@Gauri03 , do you have a language cheatsheet? I think I have somewhere tucked in my evernote. I scraped the blogs of DWT and prepared the sheet, back in December. Will paste later.
That self-referential and playful sentence of Gary Provost is also used to elucidate "Quine". (forgot to mention back then) Check out Samuel Arbesman, contributor of that Edge entry, and his essays. I mean, when you have time, if you have time, if at all you have time
There should be four haphazardly stitched sheets languishing somewhere in my Evernote on (1) Vocabulary (2) Grammar (3) Style (4) Content A cheat sheet is a stand-in for distillate of DWT blogs (articles that piqued me). I will search and tidy up and post.
You are like a runaway freight train, and I am the slow passenger hauler that stops at every village and hamlet along the way. I am still on page one, mulling over Vonnegut. Billy Pilgrim coming unstuck in time -- time traveling bulk being or a PTSD struck soldier? I'm taking the Tralfamadorian approach to this thread. All times are now and all posts are now. Will hop around responding to posts as and when they tickle my neurons.
