This was a mid-term paper I wrote in April of 2007. It is an examination of T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics. I had forgotten about it, and while digging through my old material I happened upon it and was extremely impressed with myself. It’s probably one of my favourite things that I’ve written. This midterm paper entire encapsulates what I’m attempting to draw out in my thesis on Charles Taylor and I think really benefits the ‘Holism’ project I’ve been trying to articulate recently. I intend to go back through several of my old papers throughout my research this term and will let other projects happening here fall to a lower priority while I’m finishing my honours degree. I hope these coming updates will still be entertaining.
If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.
In the Prolegomena to Ethics T.H. Green, speaking to us from 1883, offers a different way of thinking about what a person is. What Green seems to salvage (and by ‘salvage’, I mean ‘preemptively prescribe’) is an account of the individual that is neither isolated from the exterior world, nor biologically determined to carry out their pre-set performances. For Green, a person is not an empty vessel, and knowledge is not a substance in which it might contain. We have rich and developed set of tools as soon on as we are conscious. Continue reading ‘If You Can Read This, You Are Already Presupposing Many Complex Conceptual Frameworks.’
In reference to the previous discussion of Intellectual Property, this is not to be confused as an argument of art being for art’s sake. Keeping in mind that the term ‘art’ was only really used for lack of a better term for ‘the expression of ideas’, ideas for the sake of ideas is more of a correct way to put the goal of putting this argument forward.
More important is that this notion ought to be taken as an argument for ideas, their production and sale as a hyper-pragmatical and transparent process. That we are making sure that what we say is important and productive, and that we are doing these things for good and productive reasons.
This is part of the ‘holistic’ notion that ought to be hammered out a bit more before continuing. To begin with, we are attempting to eliminate the idea that we have a split between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves, and that these selves interact with one another and the end result is a kind of morality. The idea of living ‘morally’ this way in a kind of contractual obligation, is one that we in the capitalist-liberal tradition rest on how our private person acts in public, that they are different in kind from one another and that we rely on other public selves to keep our public self in moral check, even though our private self might want to murder/maim/destroy other public selves. Continue reading ‘Privacy and/in Property’
Art is the expression of ideas.
What are we doing when we engage in the activity and publishing of art or ideas? Here I’m using ‘Art’ in an extremely broad sense, far more broad than is typical. I’d qualify anything from fiction, non-fiction, painting, journalism, photography, patents, or proofs; intangible, or seemingly intangible property is what I would call ‘Art’. This exchange of ideas as the step before we apply or manifest them as physical objects. Admittedly, this applies to any set of ideas about the world.
However, for the sake of simplicity, let’s deal with Intellectual property in the space of ‘Art’. This is admittedly up for grabs, and even slightly contentious in terms of what property in general is. I feel as though property, in general, is property. However, that’s not to be argued here. The focus here is on ideas, and intellectual property, whatever that means. Continue reading ‘Intellectual Property’
I really enjoyed working on the A Cat Named Schrödinger series on epistemology, and I hope it will continue. However, lately I’ve been interested in how those epistemological commitments explored are expressed and developed as applied to our daily lives. I’ll be calling this new series ‘Holism’, as in developing the ideals to be holistic, or wholly coherent in their application.
This entire blogging project has been more about archiving the development of my thinking in a semi-academic way, taking seriously thought and reasons and history. I am still very much open to it changing. However, after having some time to read and write and work on these ideas, I only have some flimsy understanding of how to apply them in the “real world” (whatever that means). It has, and will continue to be, a drafting process for something larger. Books, papers, theses, etc. so please bear with me. As the reader, I hope you feel a compulsion to not let me get away with anything. I like to consider this entire experience as a kind of directed reading with Aaron, and I’d like to develop it to be even more interesting in that regard. Continue reading ‘Holism’
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