dreamfish

Myth of the cave

| Sunday 23rd March 2008 16:29CDT | → 0 Comments |

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

And so it goes with philosophy - which is both good and bad. The good part is obvious, the bad part is when you’re itching to study a particular work. In my case it’s Heidegger, specifically Being and Time - which I’ve heard is the most amazingly original philosophical work of the 20th Century. However, opinion has it that due to it being such a dense and complex book that builds on the ideas of Heidegger’s predecessors you have to study Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Husserl (e.g. Logical Investigations) first…

… and before you can read them you have to have read Kirkegaard (e.g. Either/Or)…

… and before you can read Kirkegaard you have to have read Kant (e.g. Critique of Pure Reason)…

… and before you can read Kant you have to have read Descartes (e.g. Meditations on First Philosophy).

I think you can get away with starting at Descartes, if you have already have a good understanding of classical and mediaeval philosophy. Alternatively, just read Sophie’s World instead.

Maybe after all that, I can then move forwards to Existentialism and eventually Semiotics (as I see Organizational Semiotics as the next big thing in project management).

BTW trivia note: Sophie’s World is set in Norway and I was co-incidentally in Norway the first time I read it (Mjølfjell, to be precise).

It snowed a bit today. Only a bit.

White Noise

| Saturday 22nd March 2008 10:43CDT | → 0 Comments |

Not much again recently, as my new job has been keeping me very busy. It may be the extended Easter bank holiday weekend but I’m actually doing some work tomorrow, so I can always stay one step ahead.

Just finished reading Girlfriend in a coma, another Coupland classic. Very intense - kind of like reading an extended issue of Adbusters. I well recommend it.

More recent recommendations: do go see The First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum; don’t go see King Tut at The O2 (overpriced and disappointing).

Otherwise, as my default Linux installation, Fedora Core 6, is getting somewhat old (the way to tell is yum updates come back empty) and I have the luxury of dual hard-drives in my machine, I thought I’d try out Ubuntu 7 first. However, it has only confirmed that we still have a way to go. It is indeed much better at installation and hardware detection but it had problems automounting my iPod and, always the killer, handling proprietry media formats is still a nightmare. Even when it comes to MP3. It is, unfortunately, why I still have to have a Windows box to fall back on. Maybe Ubuntu 8 or FC8 will ameliorate my cynicism.