Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

A vote for the efficacy of Underhill's approach - I now believe in the fortis/lenis distinction.

'Scenes from a literary life', I can't work out if this genre is popular with Hungarians or just with translators of Hungarian

But the possibility of further dialectical development always remains open.

"Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a form that the final mind could remember all that you were?" pg 323

"This is why the reading and the rereading and the continuous rereading of the Republic remains indispensable to moral and cultural education" pg 85. Well, he's going to have to work it to convince me of that, fashion seems to play as important a role in the history of philosophy as anywhere else.

Whispering makes sense now, the lack of sound makes the muscle movements the focus of attention.

"-Foglaljátok el magatokat, ammenyire lehet, csendben-" How to cover for a missing teacher (in Hungarian).

Found it easier to follow if I read out aloud. Still a difficult read that could do with proofreading, but fascinating none the less. Struck with the similarities of Periclean Athens with modern America, I reminded myself that America's power is driven by it technological innovation. Then I found this "O wealth and turannis and techné succeeding techné in the competition of life..." from Oedipus Tyrannus.

"It is our duty and destiny to study and preserve the universe's, to spread our own kind, the best and most efficient of all intelligences, to serve the ends of knowledge." - The bad guys are a bunch of insect academics!

The topic choices often seem random - there's a section on whether Philadelphia is a boring city, but no mention of either Delaware or Maryland.

The pot is boiling nicer, but I'm waiting for something to happen.

"However, the correspondence between back vowels and rounded lips, and between front vowels and spread lips, is not necessarily a tendency in other languages."

"The setting of the jaw muscles is characteristically less tense than for some other languages" - see it is easier to speak English.

Sentences far too long - I didn't notice this as a problem with 'After Virtue'. The content however is superb: "Excellence and winning, it is scarcely necessary to repeat, are not the same."

Why do I feel Philip Pullman might have read this?

"Central to every culture is a shared schema of greater or lesser complexity by means of which each agent is able to render the actions of others intelligible so that he or she knows how to respond to them. This schema is not necessarily ever explicitly articulated by agents themselves, and even when it is so articulated, they may make mistakes and misunderstand what it is they do in understanding others." pg 22

Philosophy demands dialogue, or at least someone to pull you out of your own arse.

"One does not always take advantage of one's epistemic opportunities." pg 106

Is the use of 'fictional' words an essential element of science fiction/fantasy?

Science fiction is a misnomer; it should be called technology fiction.

Discussing confirmation without discussing Popper?

"All you ever really have is what you eat."

no mention of an anya neve in Anna's employment book!

"More generally, [dominance principle] gives the wrong result because it makes no provision for the ways in which one's acting can affect the probabilities of outcomes" pg 62 - can actions affect the probabilities of outcomes?