A Curious Little Blog

I have only one thing to add to the last post, on Schopenhauer, concerning his personal behaviour.  Wikipedia cites Betrand Russell's complaint that Schopenhauer did not at all live the life of asceticism that he extolled.  Schopenahuer himself provided an anticipatory response, also cited in the article, "In general, it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses. To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy." While it is true that a person's philosophy does not depend ultimately on whether he himself follows what he teaches, it is nevertheless a relevant matter to consider.  If a person were to proclaim publicly that there can be no earthly happiness outside of complete chastity, and yet spend his eve...

Schopenhauer has a reputation as being a little bit whack (to use the technical term), so I approached "The World as Will and Idea" with some trepidation.  It immediately put me at ease with its clear style.  After having just read "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and finding it little more than gibberish, it was refreshing to read an author who actually intended for his readers to understand him.  Admittedly, Schopenhauer does begin by saying that the only way to understand this massive work is to read it through twice, and he does jump right in with the arrogance by stating that he is going to give a real philosophy where all previous writers had only made attempts at it.  Still, I at least understood what he was saying, and that was more than I could say for Nietzsche or Hegel. I thought "The World as Will and Idea" would be an abstract phrase representing something else, but Schopenhauer means it quite literally:  everything in the world is either will, or i...

I came across a news headline yesterday that interested me:  " The NRA Just Scored One Of Its Biggest Victories In Years ."  I hadn't heard anything about this, so I checked out the article, which is on ThinkProgress.org so naturally it isn't going to like anything that benefits the NRA.  What interested (and, I'll be honest, irritated) me was not the content of the article but one phrase that says a recent Supreme Court decision "expanded the scope of that [the 2nd] amendment significantly — effectively creating a whole new area of constitutional law more than two centuries after the Bill of Rights was ratified." Stop the presses!  The radical Supreme Court has dared to radically expand the meaning of a Bill of Rights amendment!  You might think that the author was a Constitutional originalist, imbued with deep respect for the Constitution as written, sceptical of those who want to modify it with the times.  I don't actually know the author'...

I have been watching TED talks on YouTube recently.  I should immediately qualify myself that many of them are "TEDx" talks, which are just licensed events that aren't organized by the same company, so they don't carry quite the same caché.  There is so much buzz around TED, and the videos I have watched have all had several million viewers (I think I started with a list of 50 of the most popular ones), that I thought there must be something really interesting or useful about them.  With titles like " How to Make Healthy Eating Unbelievably Easy ," " How to Retire by Twenty ," and " How to Learn Any Language in Six Months ," it is easy to be seduced into thinking there is valuable information here.  I have a normal scepticism about outrageous claims, so I don't really expect to accomplish any of these things myself, but I did hope I would learn some valuable techniques from them. I have been disappointed.  I had the idea that the t...

What is real, the things we see and touch around us, or the ideas of those things?  It seems obvious, but Plato argued that things, being merely transitory, don't really exist in the same way that eternal ideas do.  Ever since then, this "idealist" position has been a major branch of philosophy. It always bothered me, and I am thinking about it again as I read Schopenhauer make the same basic argument.  If something exists in time, it is by definition transitory; everything in time is constantly changing, and there must be a time before and after it existed when the object did not exist.  But the idea of this thing, the template for it, always exists; it even exists outside of time and space.  Therefore, the idea is more real than the thing. I have trouble with the concept of anything "existing" outside of time and space, but that's another argument that I'm not prepared to make at the moment.  My more pertinent objection is that it is too hard to de...

I have been operating under the assumption that Trump's candidacy was a sideshow.  I thought he might grab some attention early, but that no one would take him seriously once the campaign really got underway. This assumption has been gradually undermined in the last six months.  Whereas I thought Trump would fade away, he has instead attracted increasingly serious attention, not only from anti-Establishment types but even from mainstream Republican politicians on a national level. This concerns me.  Trump as a candidate would be terrible for the Republican party, and Trump as a president would be terrible for the nation.  I have two main problems with him.  One is the obvious one that he is not a serious person.  His mind operates at a superficial level on (apparently) just about everything, but especially on politics.  He isn't a professional politician, of course, so he has not thought about these things to the same extent that career politicians...

I like gadgets.  My grandfather did, too.  Of course, in his time, there were a lot fewer shiny gadgets to play with, and virtually no electronic ones; but he did have the first answering machine I ever saw.  I try to justify my gadget purchases with the idea that they will make my life easier, but I know a lot of the time that isn't the case.  Many times they just cause frustration.  But you never know if you don't try, and I love the trying part, so I don't mind experimenting with new things even if I know many of them will not work out as expected.  Every so often, though, I like to stop and think about the things I have bought and ask myself whether they lived up to expectations and whether they were worth the money.  Since other people may also be interesting in knowing how gadgets worked for me, and may perhaps learn from my mistakes and my successes, I thought I would post some of the results for everyone to see. (I don't have any affiliate re...