Socrates my Hero

Still making my way through Gottlieb’s book (see previous blog). Not much new since Democritus and Socrates I reckon – call me dismissive – but I still see the last 2500 years as the “post socratic blind-alley of western civilisation” thanks to Plato and particularly Aristotle, with help from the Romans and Christianity.

Easy to create a philosophical web-timeline from Gottlieb’s book, to compare / contrast and indeed supplement the DoPoM Timeline of Philosophy, part of Garth Kemmerling’s Philosophy Pages.

MAJOR ISSUE with Gottlieb’s book is it’s subtitle should really be “the history of western philosophy ….” There’s only the odd reference to hindus & buddhists, and no chapters where these are the subject matter. As well as a sequel, from the renaissance to the present time, it clearly needs a parallel volume to cover the eastern threads too.

Embedded Software

Met one Alex Lennon last night (in the Pickerell, where else). He has his own personal www.embeddedsoftware.co.uk website and works for Organix in Cambridge.

He spotted I was reading Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason – a History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance” [QUOTE] Already a classic in its first year of publication, this landmark study of Western thought … supplant[s] all others, even the immensely successful History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. [UNQUOTE] says A. C. Grayling. (Gottlieb, executive editor of the Economist amongst other things, is penning a follow-up volume completing the story up to the present day.) Excellent so far, succinct, pithy and easy to read – on Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, the pre-Socratics – looking forward to the rest of it.

What our discussion in the Pickerell did not reveal is that Alex has an inspiration, in common with me, in Robert Pirsig’s ZMM, revealed on his web site.

ZMM at Dave Cox Virtual School

A ZMM site I’ve not noticed before. Will add to Pirsig Pages.

Antidote to Death by PowerPoint

Antidote to Death by PowerPoint ? Thanks to Anol’s Soul Soup for this one. Sociable Media offer antidotes to the corporate toxin that is PowerPoint. Know what they mean.

Though don’t blame the tools, it’s not all bad news for PowerPoint.

Bloomsday Centenary

Talking of anniversaries, how did I overlook that Wednesday this week was the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday – the day to celebrate (!) James Joyce’s Ulysses’ central character Leopold Bloom. Thanks to Frizzy Logic for the reminder.

I finished it here. Learned a lesson here. I’d started here.

30th Anniversary ZMM Rides

This year is 30 years since Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published. To mark the event ….

Fritz Schabmuller and Gregor Schleicher are doing the ZMM route (on Harley’s) to raise money for charities (Medicin sans Frontieres & The White Ring). They leave Ingolstadt on 1st July then starting in Chicago they are doing the whole route from Minneapolis arriving San Francisco 29th July. Their web site includes a daily blog.

Mark Richardson, motoring journalist with the Toronto Star, is also doing the trip, as a sabbatical writing project, departing Minneapolis 19th July, to arrive San Francisco by the 30th.

I wish them all luck. Gary Wegner’s route map. My route map.
If you’re on their route look out for them and give ’em a wave.

The Demystification of Management Systems Science

The Demystification of Management Systems Science. Seems an apt title. Spookily I just came across this PhD course material presented at Helsinki University of Technology, in a cross-search hit on Pirsig, the day after coming back from a meeting / conference at the HUT in Espoo. An interesting paper by David Hawk at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Erwin Schrödinger

Been reading his “What is Life” (1944) and “Mind and Matter” (1958), together with his own autobiographical sketches. Marvellous stuff. These physicists who first came into contact with quantum physics, were clearly all deeply affected by the strange view of “reality” it presented and how this related to human scale everyday reality. Einstein famously struggled with “god playing dice”. Heisenberg too I’ve read and found the same philosophical and moving experience. Stops you in your tracks.

“What is Life” is a very interesting discourse on genetics and evolution – the Lamarckian metaphor, despite the clear Darwinian causality – and the relationship between quantum scale physics and DNA biochemistry – fascinating. Life and crystals as negative entropy or free energy. Roger Penrose provides a glowing introduction of this theorectical physicist’s contribution to molecular biology.

“Mind and Matter” goes further into the subject / object divide in scientific reality – and leads straight into the Vedic Upanishads and Eastern “mystical” “holistic” views being much closer to the quantum world view. He’s no cod philosopher either – he draws on Spinoza, Descartes, Schopenauer, Kant et al, and rails against the Greek legacy in western culture, whilst still naturally defending its correct position in science itself.

(Didn’t notice if Fritjof Capra and Michael Talbot cited Schrödinger – must check that out. I wonder if that erstwhile budding molecular biologist Robert Pirsig ever read Schrödinger. Intriguing.)

Sohail Inayatullah – New Renaissance

Sohail Inayatullah – Paper written in 2001, not long after 9/11 (during Afghanistan but before Iraq) by Sohail Inayatullah editor of New Renaissance. Wonderfully optimistic view of “emergent” and “transcendent” world order likely to arise from common ground amongst creative intellectuals in both the west and muslim / non-west.

That shared common ground being a sustainable, earth-centred, ecological perspective. ie not so much east meets west, but (mystic) east and (rationally scientific) west meet Gaia. I wonder.

Here’s a thought.

I get lots of my post ideas from cross-search-hits – people looking for subjects not really covered by my site, but with some words in common as far as Google’s indexing is concerned.

Well this site “Strip Mining for Whimsy” blogged it’s own cross-hit.

As I do, Joshua has spotted a hit with an item of interest despite the fact that most hits are literally about strip mining in his case. The common metaphor is the real link.