Happy Birthday Meaghan Beattie
As of tonight, I am making an official attempt to move my sleep schedule back to the ideal version I established at UBC: going to sleep at one and waking up at nine. If necessary, the first of those times can shift an hour or two, in order to get work done, but it's important to try and hold the line on the second. Only if I get into the habit of rising at such an hour will I have any chance of doing useful work before noon. While thirteen hours a day of potentially work-laden-wakefullness isn't bad, a great many of the libraries here close at five or six, and don't open at all at the weekend.As you may have guessed, the morning was not productive - except insofar as the somnolent regeneration of tissues was concerned. Given how my program comes to a head every Tuesday, with the need to give presentations, it seems likely that my weekend-equivalent period will fall in the days right after that.
This afternoon, we had our first lecture on 'the advanced study of politics and international relations.' Each week, the lecturer and topic will vary. This time, it was Dr. Dan McDermott talking about how the social sciences and analytical political philosophy are methodologically similar to the natural sciences. Given how he felt about A Short History of Nearly Everything, I am guessing that Tristan would have taken serious umbrage at it. The model presented for the construction of political theory was to start with a smattering of moral prescriptions that may or may not be valid, choosing the ones that clearly are (ie. don't eat your neighbours), and then creating a theory that captures as many of the 'oughts' as can be managed.
Described as I just did, it's a particularly unconvincing framework. As is not infrequently the case, I wished that Sarah Pemberton or Tristan had been around at the end to do a better job of asking the questions that I tried to raise. Notably, the treatment of the 'oughts' at the beginning of the theory as given is problematic. Surely, they come to our attention for some reason. Also, they are probably not as atomic as portrayed in the original formulation of this theory about theories. Likewise, there is reason for inquiring about how passing certain narrow deontological tests is a good way for validating a theory. Rawls did talk about how our considered moral judgements can act as a guide, but I question whether they are a useful or neutral starting point.
After the lecture, I walked to Jericho with James Fribley: an M.Phil student in politics who I met during the class. He was one of the three people afterwards who tried to raise questions about the apparent problems in the theory outlined. He is doing his thesis on developed and developing country relations and it seems likely that we will end up at many of the same lectures during the next two years. From Illinois, he did his undergraduate work at Princeton. He is now at St. Hugh's college, which is off to the north, past Keble College somewhere.
Tonight, I read, responded to emails, and did laundry. I picked up States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China by Theda Skocpol, as recommended by my Uncle Robert, in Vermont. Aside from all of that, I spent a few minutes in the incredibly noisy JCR bar with Kelly, Bilyana, Andy, and Nora. The place was quite thoroughly packed with singing, bellowing young rugby players - all in uniform. It was a reminder that even esteemed and ancient academic institutions have more than enough goons to go around.
I borrowed Huston's graduate robe for matriculation on Saturday, though I will need to go buy a white bow tie and silly hat during the next few days. Since I won't have to wear 'sub fusc' again until exams at the end of the year, it seems less than intelligent to spend £40 on a robe of my own: £40 that could buy a plane ticket to Tallinn, two weeks worth of food, or some books.
PS. Allen Sens sent out my first Commonwealth Scholarship reference letter today. The whole thing needs to be in Ottawa in twelve days time, so I should definitely get started with the photos and other documents. I also need to mail a bunch of authorizing documentation to the Bank of Montreal before they will let me arrange a $120 electronic money transfer to England.
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Today's photo looks strangely familiar, and exceedingly like the sidewalk in front of my house...
Meghan
That is Park Road, southward, between the intersection that leads to Rhodes House and Wadham College. A little ways up, to the north, are the University Parks. Very slightly ahead, to the south, the wall of the Wadham gardens begins.
"Official attempt" not going so well, then?
Well, perhaps a story will answer that question best. Waking up this morning, blinking and puzzled but not actually incapable of thought, I wandered off in search of breakfast and a shower, confident that I had an hour to travel the five minute distance to the Manor Road building for my lecture. Only after both of those things did I realize that I had misread my clock, both in the morning after waking and at the time when I tried to set it. I therefore ended up tearing across Oxford in a great hurry, in order to arrive twenty minutes late at what turned out to be a cancelled lecture.
While not actually problematic today, today's experiences do cement my desire to adjust and regularize my sleep schedule.
You wacky Vancouverites with your brain-enhancing drugs.
I would very much have liked to be at the lecture, but you are most likely right that I would have disagreed with anyone who tauts the virtues of that book. That book, I could argue, or rather the warm reception of it, is an expression of the unwillingness of people to recognize themselves situated in a metaphysical context - where some propositions are simply taken for granted. If the world was only empirical, if it were a repository of facts which we need to "fill up", then the book would be less mistaken, but it still would be very rude to the people of the past whom it implies had no idea about "the place of the world" at all, etc...
The saddest thing is it would not be entirely difficult to have written the book from a more theoretically aware position, it would not make it less readable. Mostly, it would involve only the removal of statements (occuring on almost every other page), which are complete and utter nonsense.
While it doesn't directly relate to the lecture, I found Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" to be entertaining, informative, and even inspiring at times.
I would say that I am more interested in science than most, and certainly more willing to read about it, but I find that the amount out there to be read by a non-scientist isn't enormous, particularly if you expect it to be consistently readable and interesting. While Bryson definitely doesn't have the talent of a master of the genre, like Sagan, I think he does quite a good job.
I suppose a description I once read of the book is apt: "Enlightening or aggravating, according to taste."
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You should understand, my fear of this book (A short history...) is mostly caused by the fact that it is so entertaining, easy and fun to read. I have these perceptions of the book aswell. In fact, I recall myself enjoying it quite well at first, other than a few "well, that's actually not perticularly right" reactions. The problem is, these statements which continually make assertions about contemporary (to historical scientific achievements) worldviews are simply not true - they don't hold up to more rigorous theoretical analysis. The lesson here is really quite simple: we can't understand simply one thing about an age, because knowledge is never knowledge only of a perticular, but always fitting into a context. A good rule of thumb is, people in the past were as reasonable as we are today, so if we read something about "what people thought" and react "that's crazy", we can be damned sure that we misunderstand. Unfortunately, the mistakes in A Short History... are more subtle than that. Rather, he claims after some scientific achievement that, "Now the world had a place", or "Now the world had an age". Now, since we probably want to believe that the world had those places and ages before we came to know them scientifically (just as we'd like to believe water was H20 long before we had the science of chemistry), what he must mean here is that "Now we have an idea of what the place of the world is". This is only not obviously false to the kind of reader that thinks his own historical situation to be the ultimate standard not only by which he is to judge history and the world, but that it is also the historical situation by which people of the past might rightly evaluate their own knowledge. Thus thinking, we might believe that we did not know the place of the world until we know the place of the world as we know it now. But, this is obviously not the case - people judge the world in their own time by their own standards, otherwise we might be pushed into agreeing that we ought believe our own statements about the world inasmuch as they measure up to future standards which we have no access to, and thus our own thoughts may be not only true or false objectivly, but true and false in our own time, only inasmuch as they are true and false in some future time. There is a simple reductio ad absurdem here, as "some future time" is not only indefinite, but logically infinitely distant.
Just as the world has a place for us, it had a place for Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ptolomy, Milton, etc... The world no less "has a place" for us (defined, apparently, but its distance to the sun), as it had a place for Milton (as per Danielson's on-blackboard depiction), or Aristotle (the centre!).
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