Dem Belanglosen, Niedrigen und rein Technischen

About this blog

2006-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

A place for keeping useful things. It probably should be a wiki.

Study resources

2006-12-12T20:01:00.000-08:00

Hegel

Phenomenology of Spirit - concordance

Hegel.net | links

Biblio

2006-10-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

Dialectics, logic, metaphysics

"F H Bradley's most sustained treatment of logic comes in The Principles of Logic, published contemporaneously with Frege's Grundlagen." :

The benefit of hindsight provides a striking contrast between these works [...]. While both books eschew formal methods, in Frege's case this results merely from an attempt to give a readable account of some applications of mathematical logic. But the absence of formulae (theorems, axioms, rules of inference) from Bradley's book is intrinsic to it, expressing an opposition (shared by Mill) to the formalization of reasoning in principle, as detaching inference from the practical acquisition of scientific knowledge. This, together with the fact that familiar terms (e.g. ‘contradiction’) are used in unfamiliar ways, gives the book an archaic feel. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Principles would no longer ordinarily be consulted by a modern logician unless for historical purposes, it focuses on issues central to logic, and the impression of its being backward-looking is to some extent misleading: for example, it uses the older vocabulary of ‘ideas’ and ‘judgments’ to express views which, often through their (selective) impact upon Russell, gave rise to doctrines subsequently expressed in terms of sentences and propositions; and it effectively exposed the notion of meaning to a sceptical scrutiny which has continued long since.

Traditionally, logic books came divided into three parts, dealing respectively with Conception (usually via ideas, the traditional components of judgments), Judgment and Inference. Bradley both inherits and transforms this tradition, keeping the three-part format but devoting the first to Judgment and both second and third parts to Inference, thus dropping the separate treatment of Conception. This is significant in that it reflects his rejection of the standard view that judgments are formed by somehow conjoining ideas: for example, the Port-Royal Logic's Aristotelian claim that they are ‘necessarily composed of three elements -- the subject-idea, the attribute, and the joining of these two ideas’. Bradley attacks such doctrines on more than one front.

He argues, for instance, that those who, like Hume, think judgments to consist of separable ideas, fail to identify the sense of ‘idea’ in which ideas are important to logic: ideas in this sense are not separate and datable psychological events (such as my now visualizing a rainbow) but abstract universals. Once ideas are properly understood, he suggests, they can no longer even plausibly be thought of as individual and mutually independent entities which can be put together to create a judgment (as Locke maintains in Chapter XIV of Book IV of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding): the order of dependence is the opposite, ideas being abstractions from complete judgments. Here, albeit in his archaic vocabulary, Bradley identifies in advance the difficulties which Russell was later to face in trying to reconcile the unity of the proposition with what he thought to be the mutual independence of its constituents, difficulties which appeared in another guise for Frege in his attempt to maintain a strict division between concepts and objects. (From Stanford E of Ph.)

Morality and history

Bradley

Bradley's views on ethics were expressed at length in his first widely acknowledged publication, Ethical Studies (1876). [...]

Bradley says in his Preface that his object is ‘mainly critical’ and that the ethical theory of his time rests on ‘preconceptions metaphysical and psychological’, which are ‘confused or even false’. In this the most Hegelian of his books, his approach is, in a series of connected essays, to work dialectically through these erroneous theories towards a proper understanding of ethics. Accordingly he tells us that the essays ‘must be read in the order in which they stand’, and a corollary of this is that the common practice of extracting one or two of them (usually the brilliantly written ‘Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake’ and ‘My Station and Its Duties’) from the whole, on the basis of their individual merits, can result in a misleading impression of their significance within Bradley's moral thinking: neither represents some finished position. [...]

These theories are inadequate because they have a deficient conception of the self, a deficiency he begins to remedy in the fifth essay, the famous ‘My Station and Its Duties’, where he outlines a social conception of the self and of morality with such vigour that it is understandable that the mistaken idea that it expresses his own position has gained some currency. This Hegelian account of the moral life, in which the self is fully realized by fulfilling its role in the social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one which greatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed the implicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self as necessarily social and the moral injunction to realize the self in society. (From Stanford E of Ph.)

Bibliography: Education and Pedagogy

2005-09-27T22:39:00.000-07:00

Steven Cahn (ed.), Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education (1997).

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Theodor Adorno, `Education after Auschwitz' and `The Meaning of Working Through the Past' in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords.
---, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit.
---, Der getreue Korrepetitor in Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 15.

John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum.

Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture
---, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia.

Immanuel Kant, `On Education'.

Rousseau, Emile.

Bibliography: Judgement and the Norm

2005-09-19T20:59:00.000-07:00

Foucault - What is Enlightenment?

Land Use and Salinity in Australia

2005-07-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Murray Darling Basin Commission

CSIRO - Land and Water - Research Priorities

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES
Agriculture in Australia: History and contemporary data

Blurb from a BBC4 radio programme on salinity problems in Australia

Language tools

2005-06-25T01:08:00.000-07:00

Dictionaries, bilingual and multilingual

odge.de - online dictionary German-English
yourdictionary.com

Idioms, Redewendungen

Redewendungen, Redensarten, Sprichwörter
A list of idiomatic phrases, German-English

Resources

Links to language and translation related blogs

Research tools

2005-06-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

Coolcat Victorian libraries catalogue

Google Scholar

Index translationum search

Library of Congress catalogue

Bibliography: Philosophy of Right and the History of International Law

2005-06-08T23:20:00.000-07:00

Papers by Professor Martti Koskenniemi, University of Helsinki.

Old - Doug Johnson's post at the weblog discusses a number of works of interest, including Agamben's State of Exception and Benjamin's Critique of Violence.

Bibliographies and Reading Guides

2005-05-29T03:04:00.000-07:00

Chris Wright's Revolutionary Reading Guide - A big list of sources, all the usual suspects and then some, thematically arranged by topics like: the critique of political economy, marxism and philosophy, working-class and revolutionary histories, historical origins of capitalism, global capital and Africa, Latin America etc.

Dr. Andrew Chitty from the University maintains very large bibliographies on Hegel, Marx and social and political philosophy.

Another Hegel bibliography, primary and secondary sources, less comprehensive than Chitty's.

Cosma has a nicely organized set of online notebooks on topics from America, United States of to Zen or Ch'an via historical materialism. They incorporate reading lists and commentary.

Texts online - philosophy & social theory

2005-05-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

johnstonia - Ian Johnston's page. Lots of texts classical and modern, in German and English. Homer, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Malory, Darwin, Diderot, Nietzsche, Conrad, Kafka, etc.

Contemporary social theory

Systems theory, Luhmann

Loet Leydesdorff, Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication in Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17(3) (2000) 273-288. (via OtO)

Eurocentric Blogs

2005-05-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

Ostracised from Österreich[EN]"a voice from Vienna on life, politics, the universe"

blogg.de/tag/

Diskursive Formationen[DE]
Esthers Kaffeehaus[DE]
Kosmoblog[DE] - "Anmerkungen zur Politik"
Liberalismus.at[DE] - "Freiheit. Freihandel. Friede."
DJO Blog[DE] - "Notizbuch zu Politik, Medien und Beratung"

Deutsche Medien

2005-05-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

Sign and Sight - German media in English

Die Zeit | Zeit blogs