Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Philosophy Talk

I've repaired to TaborSpace for the weekly Wittgenstein Study Circle.

Some may think I'm a naughty geek for embracing some brands of quasi-nonsense as pertinent to philosophers. Many had hoped to be free of nonsense, meaning say Heidegger, thanks to logical positivism.

Wittgenstein was to be one of their heroes when, Krishnamurti-like, he turned his back on his following, or at least dispelled notions of his being heir to some crown of the crowd pleasers. He had too much integrity for that.

Aris kindly lent me Sex At Dawn, borrowed through Satya and making the rounds among Portlandia's cogniscenti. I've been writing a lot about anthropology and ethnography lately, ever since our previous meetup, where one of our guests was an anthropologist (this was prior to Dr. Sonnenfeld & son), and on through the C3 event at Reed, which has continued to have repercussions.

Wanderers happened this morning and a lot of it was animist talk, music to my ears in some ways. Trisha spoke of her hummingbird problem, while I regaled people with stories of rats.

On Monday night, Tara and I were pleased to show up at the Bolton residence on invitation from Maureen, to celebrate Dr. Charles Bolton's 90th birthday. Actually, his birthday isn't until December, but this was an opportunity to get together with Erin again. Erin is the son of Maureen and a talented architect, Harold Long. This is a family I've watched evolve since returning to Portland in 1985.

Erin spends a lot of time teaching scuba, putting students at their ease in some of the still destination worthy parts of western Thailand. We shared lore about that part of the world quite a bit, extending into stories about Burma, where some of us had been. We had to leave early because Tara is studying a lot and I have a full plate of work.

Anyway, I've been a naughty geek in not seeing this brave new cyberspace as somehow by default a product of analytic philosophy. Some of their champions take too much for granted I'm thinking, and convey that sense in some of my posting.

Now I'm attending a webinar, organized by Maria Droujkova and hosted by Gizem Karaali (Pomona College) and Mark Huber (Claremont McKenna College). I'm wearing my hat as an OST curriculum writer these days. I was showing Alex the ASCII art version of the Mandelbrot Set we've developed, a pedagogical device taking advantage of Python's expressiveness.