But if the mere fact that I can produce from my thought the image of something entails that everything which I clearly and distinctly perceive to belong to that thing really does belong to it, is not this a possible basis for another argument to prove the existence of God?
From the category archives:
writing
Meditations on First Philosophy
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Blake - Urizen
If Blake was not simply stoned out of his mind, then what explanation can there be for this troubling work?
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Keats - This Living Hand
You can’t eye can’t I can’t they can’t she can’t he can’t it can’t why can’t why can’t eye don’t no. Y’no? It’s im-poss-ib-al. If there’s one overwhelming iota that I’ve been shown by some auricle at some distant point in my youth, it’s that things that are written are written and things that aren’t aren’t. It’s not fair to me or anyone else (altho to b honest eye don ot really care about anybody else] to say that one thing in the world of written langu-age means anything. These words : certainly don’t mean anything.
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Brains and Behavior
Logical behaviorism tries to solve the problem of other minds by showing that behavior is the effect of mind states. By examining behavior closely enough, says the logical behaviorist, it is possible to know mental states of others … In his article “Brains and Behavior” Hilary Putnam attacks the school of thought known as logical behaviorism … Putnam believes that the basic premises of even a weakened form of logical behaviorism can be proven to be false …
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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
“I got the regular stuff about race and color and pride and prejudice and the sound and the fury and the cultural implications … but what about me?”
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The Paradox of Popularity
I took a class in the Fall of ‘94 called Desire and Power in Western Literature. I hated the class and I’m pretty sure the professor, Dr. Snodgrass, didn’t like me very much. I wrote this rambling, terrible excuse for a term paper, in November of that year. It is titled “The Paradox of Popularity: or What does the 1994 MLB strike have to do with being a Tom Petty fan?”
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Coleridge and Wordsworth
In which I try to, “Discuss the differences in the ways the image of sunset functions in Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality and Coleridge’s The Lime-Tree.” (1994)
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VW
How lame! Here is a little something I wrote in my senior year of high school. Through the wonders of modern technology, it is now posted here for you to read. I wrote this one day instead of paying attention to Miss Bowman’s English class just to see if a girl named Karin France would like it.
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Titus Andronicus
Representations of Gender Ideologies in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
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Writing Collection
This is a collection of papers, take-home exams, class presentations, essays, fiction, bad poetry, whatever … As much of my writing that I could find on this hard drive …
Enjoy!
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list groupings, correct use of commas
Ending Lists
Why does it seem that nobody knows the correct way to end a comma-delimited list? Did they stop teaching this after 1980 or something? Let’s review, shall we?
First let me explain the philosophy upon which the correct use of “commas in lists” rests. It’s another topic that I realize they almost definitely stopped teaching after 1980: mathematics. Take the following expression:
1 + 1 x 3
If you studied mathematics in school you should remember the algorithm that is used to resolve it. There are no special characters in this expression, so we evaluate any division or multiplication first, then addition and subtraction, and we go from left to right. So this expression - in your mind - looks like this:
Grammar must have algorithms or else it’s useless.
1 + whatever I get when I multiply 1 and 3
The expression evaluates to 4, of course. To make the expression easier, you could add brackets or parentheses.
1 + (1 x 3)
That equals 4 as well, and is, in fact, logically equivalent to the first expression.
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Never Stop Questioning
“The important thing is to never stop questioning.” That quote is often attributed to Einstein. I cannot confirm that he ever actually said this. But I doubt I would hear many arguments if I suggested he was one of the greatest thinkers in history.
Is “questioning” really all that important? I guess it depends on how you interpret “important”. At some point in my life I decided to take that path. “Questioning” … “knowing” … is very important to me.
It’s even more important to me than “happiness”. At caterina.net right now there are some questions about … well … questioning. Caterina says:
I also read a study once of a conjectural connection between intelligence, depression and a “sense of reality”: they tested people who identified themselves as “happy, content” and people who identified themselves as “unhappy, depressed” and gave them a test to assess their knowledge of history and current events. The “happy” people had no idea what went on or what was going on, whereas the “unhappy” people did. Whether they knew these things because they were depressed type people or were depressed because they knew these things is hard to guess.
I know from experience that there is a very definite correlation between how aware I am of current events and how happy I am. I don’t even need to use the example of my extreme “awareness” during the weeks immediately following September 11 to illustrate my point. A much simpler analysis can be made by using the weeks surrounding the whole “Cuban-raft-boy-Elian” episode.
I remember that the events of this boy’s life so overwhelmed the media that I simply stopped listening. I went from being able to tell you which specific bills were before Congress and the names of all of the Cabinet members to barely knowing what the day of the week was. I went from listening to NPR for two or three hours each day and reading the newspaper to listening to nothing but my CD player and reading only mind-numbingly boring tomes on database access.
If you’re waiting for some flash of brilliance here, you’re not going to get it. I apologize, but I’m just thinking out loud now. It’s amazing, sometimes, how reading someone else’s blog will spark a whirlwind of confusion and contemplation in my mind.
In the end I am - and always will be - someone who believes that it is truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. And in the end I think … well … the love you take … is equal to the love …
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The Snows of Kilimanjaro
An essay on “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by David Gagne
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A Farewell to Arms
An essay on A Farewell to Arms by David Gagne
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A Farewell to Arms
An essay on A Farewell to Arms by David Gagne
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