Protection Rackets for Philistines

Link via wood s lot

In the cool of the day

The invisible work of reading

Joan Bakewell wonders where wisdom will come from if the public loses access to libraries and to free reading. Oddly, the availability of this BBC podcast is limited to the next seven days.

Hacking Hacker

Note: I've not read Hacker, who seems to have many thoughtful approaches to where and whereof philosophy can speak. But I'll quibble with this (found via Zo)


By doing philosophy you come to realise things about the structure of our conceptual scheme that you would never have realised otherwise. Realization is indeed a dawning of knowledge. But the knowledge here is not knowledge of the world we live in. It is knowledge of the structure of our conceptual scheme. It very often looks like “metaphysical knowledge” of reality – as it were knowledge of the scaffolding of the world. But it’s no such thing.

ok.

The world doesn’t have scaffolding.

If the preceding statement is true, then how can you categorically make any claim about what "the world" does or does not have?

Rather, in doing philosophy, we come to realise the character of the grammatical and linguistic scaffolding from which we describe the world, not the scaffolding of the world.

A more careful analysis might find that such a clean and neat separation of res and verba is one thing philosophy teaches us not to take for granted.

When did you last have something to think?

"God has not died for the white heron...God has not appeared to the birds."

Yeats

more here

Genre definition

Given that advertising is Speech + Bullshit, why is political advertising legal?