If I did graffiti…

…it would probably look like this.

In other news, I’ve been pretty remiss in updating this, mostly because I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything interesting to say in a while (…as though that dwarf/gnome post a little while ago were exemplary of  my standards for “anything interesting”…but I digress).  But I’ll mark out for myself two points to follow up on before I go off abroad again:

1) A reasoned explanation of why I support John McCain and will vote for him.

2) A few comments on the supremely tragic historical similarities between the Muslim conquest of Spain and the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

A Brief Statement of Purpose: Unanswered Questions

I dislike the idea of raising broad questions without actually attempting to push the ball down the field a bit, as it were.  So, while I doubt that I’ll come to any definitive conclusions about many of the matters I raise in this blog, I’d like to think that I’ve at least made some kind of progress measurable in terms of more precise definitions of terms and/or sub-questions along with some footholds in the literature that’s out there.

This being a blog, however, I’m bound to leave a number of threads hanging in mid-air.  So I resolve to try not to leave too many out there at one time.  In order to enforce a check on this behavior, I’ll periodically post lists of things I’ve merely put out to the universe without really giving any real critical examination.  In other words, random bloviation may be useful from time to time as much for the pinpointing emotional fault lines as for general entertainment and steam-letting, but on the whole it’s useless for anyone who actually cares about the matters at hand.

Here’s a current list of things I need to get back to, along with a few potential prompts:

1-The status of myth and fact in the Information age

-C. S. Lewis on Myth become Fact

-Snopes

2- The definition of Modernism viz-a-viz Primitivism and Futurism

-R. Scruton’s “An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture”

3-Language as Instrument vs. Language as Act

-Saussure

-Lacan

-Heidegger (Crap…this one’s going to take a while…)

4-Behavioral Mimicry in Child Development

-Um…not sure where to go on this one.  The sources I’m familiar with for child development are by and large for moral development and the individual’s definition personal need fulfillment (e.g., Piaget, Erickson, Maslow, Gilligan, etc.), of which I’m now wondering whether much has taken into account the Behaviorist side of the coin, which is where the concept of mimicry seems like it might have got its roots.  On that score, start with Skinner and work upward.

5- Tolerance: Different approaches for different contexts.

-Hmm…another topic that’s way too broad.  Let’s see…I suppose I’ll approach this as a question of social ethics…which means philosophy in general…which means I’ve got my work cut out for me on this one…back to Plato and hit all the main stops on the way up.

A Brief Statement of Purpose(3): Contradiction

Contradictions among the opinions in various posts are not to be dismissed or avoided; rather, as in the style of medieval quaestiones, they should be interpreted as opportunities to explore deeper truths through the potential reconciliation of ideas at variance.  “Gotcha” may be a fun game for point-scoring politicians, but it leads nowhere.

1 point for Wikipedia

A bit earlier I mentioned that Wikipedia somewhat rubs me the wrong way academically in that it’s not really that great about citations. I’m about to blatantly contradict that. Just so you know…caveat lector.

I was reading the entry on the “Golem” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem) when I ran across the following passage:

“It is said that the body of Rabbi Loew’s golem still lies in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague. A legend is told of a Nazi agent during World War II ascending the attic and trying to stab the golem, but perishing instead.^{[citation needed]} The attic is not open to the general public.”

I’m particularly tickled by notion that an urban legend requires a citation!

But upon further reflection, it provides fodder for the ponderings of another day. What kind of people would we be if we demanded the strict sifting of myth and fact?

A brief statement of purpose(2): Provenance

A common question not asked nearly as often as it should be is, “How do we know that?”

A brief statement of purpose(1): Context

This is #1 in a series of posts enunciating principles of this blog from which I will likely often veer, but to which I would just as often like to return:

I’m a huge believer in context. Isolated statements can often be made to mean whatever one may wish them to mean by a simple change of backdrop. Likewise isolated data; we all know the old saw about lies, damned lies, and statistics. But even beyond the fear of misrepresentation, there are some things that can be expressed most appropriately by the arrangement of a sequence of experiences rather than by direct linguistic interpretation.