Month: October 2006

Prescott Back’s Right to Wear Veil !

I despair at the political / rhetorical posturing around such important issues, but couldn’t resist a chuckle at the thought of John Prescott donning the veil. Jack Straw had started an interesting debate.

Chicken and egg though, is it the serious politicians or the serious press that demand these polarised simplifications ?

Ongoing reading & blogging …

Blogging still a bit sporadic since the move to the US, something to do with the new domestic habits as much as anything else.

Reading habits are mainly bedtime or when sitting in the countryside during a weekend picnic or evening sunset, though it’s starting to get too cold for the latter.

After concluding Rand, I went onto Machiavelli’s Prince and was a bit disappointed, perhaps the exploits of the Borgia’s just seem tame these days 😉

Been enjoying Dostoevsky’s Karamazov Brothers, finding lots of quotable passages, though still somewhere like a third to go.

To catch up on a couple of must-read references I’ve skipped over earlier, I recently acquired ..
Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations
J S Mill – On Liberty, The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism

Reading the preambles and intros, original and new and skimming their content, they appear to be what the doctor ordered. Dismayed to find that “PI” looks like the most difficult read of the bunch.

Whenever I do get to browse favourite blogs, I seem to get hooked on the YouTube finds of Bifurcated Rivets. Addictive stuff.

In other places I’ve been active on MoQ-Discuss and Friends of Wisdom recently. Took the trouble to read Nick Maxwell’s autobiographical piece earlier today. Sounds familiar ? Taking up where Popper left off put me in mind if David Deutsch.

Averroes (Ibn Rushd)

Latest BBC “In Our Time” is an excellent discussion on Muslim philosopher generally known as Averroes. Worth listening to in it’s entirety. (Ibn Rushd on Wikipedia)

Points of interest for me …

Etymology – I have a thing about spotting B’s and V’s but it’s so clear here. The patronymic family naming prefix “son  of” or simply “from” or “out of” in the Av, Ab, Ave, Aven, Von, Van, Bin, Ben, Ibn, (and all the European son / sen suffices of course) The whole B, V, M, Mp, Mb, N blur. The two versions of the name here are just alternate pronunciations of the same underlying concept of being someones child, and clearly just an evolution of the sound in the telling from Proto-Indo-European (Aryan) origins. But I’m no expert.

Ave … Roes / Rush
Ibn … Rushd / Rushdi / Rashid

(The other example that fascinates me is the R & T – rta / art / craft – combinations that Pirsig dwells on.)

Afterlife – as Aristotle’s continuity of intellect, in limbo in the Dante “Divine Comedy” sense, but also as a continuous (eternal) semantic web whose Platonic forms are merely intersected by temporary brains and individual minds.

Philosophy – as the definitive reading of religious texts. Supported by rationale that only the examined life can provide (“look around” says the Quran). Hierarchical interpretation from the head of a “church” down simply being different abstractions or metaphorical simplifications for different practical purposes. From scholars and theologians down to the “masses”. (Nice lead into St Thomas Aquinas later “scholastic” work.)

Fascinating. Nothing new under the sun.

Anthropogenic Warming ?

I suggested in a recent Friends of Wisdom thread, that  I didn’t really “care” whether global warming was caused by human activity, nor even whether it was “real”. The answer to neither question changes my belief that we should be concerned enough to work out what to do in response to the facts.

That is, we can learn from history, but not in simple “we did that and caused this, therefore if we do this we can achieve that” kinda ways. Life’s just complicated enough. 

Anyway, at first glance, this graph (linked also via Jorn) looks like a pretty random distribution of historical temperature fluctuations …. until you notice the right end of the graph has years as it’s time axis, and the left has hundreds of thousands of years. No idea how good the source data or its representation are, or even whether the western equatorial pacific temperature is a representative data point, but the graph is indeed scary. It’s 400,000 years since we had a period with average temperatures like the last 5 years, and for the last 100 years we’ve been 2 or 3 standard deviations higher than the long time average for the last 1,350,000 years, a period covering several ice-ages and retreats !!!

Plenty of caveats about the distortion of a graph with such a skewed distribution of data points and axes, but it still certainly seems significant.