Jan D > Recent Status Updates

something on Hume. Not sure if serious praise or irony or both.

Gelernt: Auch in einer anarchistischen Gesellschaft gibt es Machtungleichgewicht-bedingtes "Mach mich doch zu deinem Co-Autor!"

Perception and not agreeing with Hume.

OK, I started to skip chapters after getting recommendations. So far, pretty good ones: Chapter 11 (Jones) and 14( Laurent et.al.)

So, societies and nexūs. It make a bit more intuitive sense cause nexūs can be things we refer to with words. But it is increadibly broad: A dot, a laughter and 'relations of Rome to europes history' are all nexūs. So that limits the "its intuitively understandable"-feel again.
And I notice again that the German Wikipedia article on Process and Reality is the best intro there is.

Now, the Daves wrap it up and go back the the dawn of everything that was written in this book, that is the indigenous critique of european societies.

Nun etwas politische Intrige. Das ist neu.

"It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead"

I learned about prehensions. It was difficult, as I do not know if I understood a lot. In some sections there are rather lucid and understandable comments but with the rest being so hard to read, I am unsure if my intuitive understanding of "…it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true" are coherent with the rest. Very frequent feel when reading Whitehead.

Langsamer Fortschritt. Liest sich sehr gut, wenn auch bis jetzt weitgehend spannungsfrei; der Protagonist ist gerade zu Gast auf einem anderen Planten, schaut sich an wie die so leben und über seine Reaktionen gibt es viel über seine Heimatwelt zu lernen. Habe ich schon erwähnt, dass es wenig(er) Sci-Fi-Babble gibt?

Seems soon a chapter about the marcoworld is within grasp and maybe stuff makes more sense there than in atomar level we dwelled in so far.
Reading "Modes of Thought" and "Science and the Modern World", Whitehead has been relatively generous with examples, but Process and Reality has very few.

Die Gefängnissepisode ist gruselig

Slow slow slow progress. Every few words I need to look up some concept. At least there is a glossary, which is pretty good.

I noted today that I am pretty much in "experimental ethnography" since quite a while. I now can identityfy it?

Weit weniger schwierig als "Die linke Hand der Dunkelheit" aber immernoch recht viele Welt-Spezifische Wörter und Bezeichner die ich nachschlagen muss. Immerhin ist im Umschlag vorne und hinten eine Karte, das ist gut. Noch besser wäre vorne eine Karte und hinten ein Glossar?

Joining the ranks of many books I have currently started. However, it is the only fiction one, so it has good chances.

The movie was simple but the book has shifting alliances, fractions pulling in different directions and plans with backup-plans etc.

also awesome:

worldliness/saviour (while nausicaä is a savior-character, she very much does not stay detached from worldly conflicts and the savior expectacions are discussed with her in universe)
care/fight/gender (nausicaä’s traits are not clearly gendered and written coherently)

I love it. Caveat: It is sometimes hard to follow who is who and what happened before, as there can be many different places and people mainly distinguishable by differences in the face-masks they are wearing. The former is unlike, the latter similar to living with corona measures.

Lots of different chapters, each chapter with some instructions to explore the concept discussed in the chapter. I like this format.

Dirt is stuff in wrong places.

Let’s see if I learn anything about purifying concepts here – what Latour discusses in "We have never been modern" as preventing concepts/practices like "political", "scientific" etc. from cross-conterminating each other.

Slowly, but steadily. Adding a lot of references back and forth, ’cause so many terms.

I might actually read this further than Process and Reality itself? The language is still pretty obscure (after all, it is a copy-paste of the original with some comments added), but it is at least relatively easy to find pages where something was explained earlier and the glossary is excellent.

Some interesting ideas on cities being not that different than living "in nature"; even for people in the city, the "city" is more of an imaginary, one experiences mostly one’s neighbourhood (as one did experice one’s valley or whatever). Also, non-city-people probably experienced more of the world as they were more mobile (in contrast to today’s ideas of cities being diverse, countryside being local and homogenous)

Now we get cities! And cities that are not goverend by central rulers nor priests nor a combination of both (double-power!).

Also props to pointing out that language=culture=ethnicity is not necessarily so.