This is just an update to say that I am alive. My comprehensive exams are in two weeks, so I’ve been busy preparing for them. I will continue to be extremely busy until they are over. After the comps, I think I will have so much free time, I won’t know what to do with myself. I will update again when I hear back from my professors about my comps (at which point, graduation will be set in stone).
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
My wife just found this in Google Maps:
Directions from New York City to London.
Pay attention to direction #24…
My MythBox’s uptime stats:
07:22:03 up 42 days, 21:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00.
After many moons and suns, debian has finally released a new stable: Etch. I’ve been running Etch for over a year now (back when it was considered “testing”). With this release also means that the new “testing” version has been codenamed “Lenny.” To many Linux users, Debian is much like the Cadillac of Linux, being a very dependable distribution with a long maintenance cycle. It took the Debian developers 21 months to tweak Etch into a stable distribution. It’ll be at least 18 months before another stable version is released. And that is why I tend to keep my copy in the testing and unstable branches because a lot can happen in 18 months (KDE ought to have its new version 4.0 out well before then). Of course, with Ubuntu’s latest version about to be released, this news won’t last long.
I find that in my desire to understand “contemporary philosophy” and where it’s going, I am bound to understand its past. Take somebody like Alain Badiou. He’s really interesting….but to understand him, one has to understand Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (at the least). To understand Deleuze, one must understand Nietzsche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Lacan, and Bergson. To understand Nietzsche, one must understand Plato, Hegel, and Kant. And the list goes on. Sure, one could jump in and simply learn Nietzsche without understanding his trajectory, but that doesn’t help in understanding how people appropriate Nietzsche. To be a good philosopher, I think one must know the history of philosophy intimately. At times, I feel overwhelmed with all of it because there is no “good starting point.” Unlike something like chemistry where one can start with atoms and move in both directions (macroscopically and microscopically), there isn’t really such a place in philosophy. Some suggest Plato, but reading him before reading someone like Heraclitus (or what we have of him, anyway) skews the way one reads Heraclitus. Starting with one of the recent philosophers (e.g. Badiou) isn’t good because one won’t understand him until one has gone through the “long tail” of philosophy and has a strong understanding of everything prior to today. Derrida was one of these fellows who was popular in the US. Yet very few people who read him recognized Heidegger’s influence. Why? Because they hadn’t read Heidegger. Once one reads Heidegger, however, one can see what’s really original to Derrida and what isn’t.
Because of this dilemma, my reading list grows exponentially because as I read a single book, I become aware of how much I don’t know and how much I should know to understand that single book more fully. My reading list of philosophy is 350 books long….and I haven’t updated it since December. I think that if I took time to update it, I can hit 600. I feel that even though I’ll be receiving my master’s degree in June, it really isn’t much because there’s just so much I haven’t touched upon yet that I should. Will the 5+ years of a doctoral program resolve this? I don’t know.
