I struggled to come up with a web development angle for this one. I had a brief hope of executing some dazzling metaphorical sleight of hand when I read Thomas DeGregori’s discussion of the “usability” of rocks among proto-humans, but in the end I gave up and decided just to roll with it…
The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into … read on »
Archive for March, 2010…
Fear and Trembling
It is facile to mock or criticize philosophy for its difficult language, and I like to think I’m not a facile thinker, but I had an “oh sod this” moment while reading Kierkegaard this morning. The obscure, tangled, repetitive and willfully paradoxical language is just tedious – at least, so it strikes me so far. I know a little bit about philosophy: I’ve read some Plato, Hume, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and recently Roger Scruton. So I can be quite confident that my repugnance is not a knee-jerk reaction to difficult arguments. I don’t know, perhaps it just isn’t to my taste. Like Nietzsche, it is rhetorical and poetical rather than clear and elegant. I suppose that you can find truth, … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson