It feels, once again, like time to ping-back to the internet (I’m here, big guy!).  I caught a lot of hype a week ago about abandoned blogs (the New York Times claims 95% are dead!), so I thought I would at least make some feeble attempt at proving to myself that I can keep writing every now and then.  To forgive myself for never spouting my thoughts, I formerly had the allowed myself the excuse of a busy end-of-semester, and now I will grant myself the excuse of having no stable internet access–but this excuse will only carry me so far.

Since I was last writing somewhat regularly, have learned and read a fair amount–a healthy legion of unfinished posts in my publishing queue attest to this.  I rather hope to polish up a post or two on what I have learned about Levinas and religion, Levinas and political systems, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the history of the classical world, relativism, Jurgen Habermas, naturalism, Re:, Hangedup, and a few other broad topics like languages, reason, atheism and theism, poverty, and the like.

In the meantime, the Summer Support Group for Philosophers has kicked off, with one meeting under its belt.  We focused that session, as well as the upcoming one, on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.  My immediate reaction to the work was mixed.  If you have not had the pleasure of skimming the work, I suggest trying it.  You can find copies of the Ogden translation (the version I am reading) all over the web, but I suggest finding a good tabular or tree layout version to help encourage you to read it the way it was intended (read: the way I didn’t read it the first time).

So far, Wittgenstein has proven to be a pretty decent discussion generator.  I am not quite sure of his laconic/aphoristic approach was meant to ensure ambiguity or clarity, but it certainly seems to me that the former is the end result.  At times, the lack of explanation for his terminology is befuddling, and it is easy to lose track of the point of his work entirely from time to time.  Still, many of Wittgenstein’s propositions have proven to be good points for discussion–including such greats as 1, 2.0123, 3.02,  3.328, 3.333, 4.002, 4.003, 6.45, 6.54 (don’ t look ahead!).  So far I can see much of Rorty’s thought in this reading already, but I am trying hard to resist the temptation to defer to the Rortian interpretation–while I may be getting a good idea of how Rorty read Wittgenstein, my suspicion is that his reading might not be completely faithful to the author’s own thoughts.  In fact, I rather wish I would have better used my Rorty-reading time to finish trudging through Principia Mathematica, because this probably would have made Wittgenstein’s responses to Russell more intelligible.  Luckily I had the foresight to pick up a little Frege reading beforehand.

I might try to keep more info about thoughts and future readings for the summer group at another location, where members of our smallish group might enjoy doing public exegesis.  For now, I have put up a message board on the yet unused ThoughtAndPraxis.com.