Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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Shrunken head - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 2009-10-30
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Thor Heyerdahl recounts in
Kon-Tiki (1947) the various problems of getting into the Jívaro (Shuar) area in Ecuador to get
balsa wood for his expedition boat. Local people would not guide his team into the jungle for fear of becoming themselves shrunken heads.
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Instructor/Advisor Center on 2009-10-13
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Russian Language and Literature | University Bulletin | Brandeis University on 2009-09-30
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RUS
10a
Beginning Russian I
For students who have had no previous study of Russian. A systematic presentation of the basic grammar and vocabulary of the language within the context of Russian culture, with focus on all four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Usually offered every year.
Ms. Dubinina
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A Coat of Many Colors on 2009-09-13
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the Tiutchevean nominalist theme of the
ineffable poetic thought [81] (almost a standard refrain in contemporary discussions of poetry)
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408wk3 on 2009-09-13
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German Romanticism: Its main concerns and characteristics
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German Romanticism: Its main concerns and characteristics
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German Romanticism is special in a number of ways
which make it especially important to environmental thought:
- German Romanticism is especially concerned about certain
negative aspects of modern life, including what it perceives as the
downgrading in the status of nature by modern society and the modern
domination of rationality - It proposes some novel solutions to these problems,
including the re-enchantment of nature through art, and the aestheticisation
of culture - Moreover, German Romanticism is highly philosophical,
and so its approach to defining and trying to solve these problems is
especially engaging.
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At the end of the eighteenth century, German intellectuals
and writers became increasingly troubled by what they saw as an unacceptable
series of conceptual oppositions constructed by the Enlightenment and
embodied in modern social and political institutions. The most central
of these oppositions are between humanity and nature, humanity and God,
duty and desire, and self and others or society. Thus, Edward Craig says
of the German Romantics:
‘Wherever they looked they found division and
conflict in men’s minds and actions: the conception of God as
creator of and eternal to nature, the finite opposed to the infinite;
conscious, feeling man surrounded by inanimate, unfeeling objects;
moral freedom against physical necessity; the battle between reason
and sentiment; the desires of the individual versus the requirements
of society; the tension between church and state; the friction between
I and Thou...’ (Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of
Man, p. 136).
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The problem was seen, above all, to
be the growth of Enlightenment and of the theoretical understanding of
nature to which it aspires.
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The Enlightenment insists that we need to reflect upon
everything instead of responding spontaneously to it, with emotion or
passion.
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The Enlightenment demands that we find a rational explanation
for every phenomenon, and hence deprive nature of any magical, mysterious
and transcendent qualities.
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abandon
the pursuit of theoretical knowledge, to become less reflective
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Schlegel
thought that modernity not only led to the disenchantment of nature, but
also enabled a new form of literature - Romantic literature - which could
re-enchant nature. It wouldn't return us to the world of the Greeks, but
it would invest nature with a new magic and mystery which would mark a
distinctive kind of modern world which retains reverence for nature.
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find a new social and cultural role for art.
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understanding (i.e. rationality)
which is reflective, analytic, and seeks explanations for everything.
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On the Study of Greek Poetry
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modern literature lacks the unity, harmony
and beauty of Greek work
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understanding (i) divides and
analyses
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dispassionate and reflective
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dispassionate rules and
theories dictating how to produce literary works
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tries to take
in everything
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losing any coherent shape
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We will not respond to nature emotionally
but just in a narrowly analytical way
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There
is a contrast throughout between modernity and the world of the ancient
Greeks.
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modern literature was not all bad after all. Rather,
it had an inherent tendency to be romantic
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romantic literature is 'universal' - it tries to include all genres,
subject matters, and to unify them in a single work
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'progressive', it strives
for unity, but never achieves it
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romantic literature is ironic
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Irony arises insofar
as the romantic author realises that he can only be partial and cannot
understand the whole.
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'The romanticist was fully aware of the unbridgeable antithesis
between his metaphysical deamdns and their fulfilment ... there remained
between the infinite and every attempt to put it into words an insuperable
gap. [In irony] the human spirit becomes aware of its inadequacy and
with wise self-limitation offers its pronouncements in a way which in
itself already admits this inadequacy' (German Romanticism,
p. 43).
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Schlegel says that 'it is the nature of spirit to determine
itself and in perennial alteration to expand and return to itself'. This
is a reference back to his theory of romantic irony. The spirit
(i.e. each one of us, as a free being) first 'expands' in trying to grasp
a meaning within disparate events, then 'returns to itself' recognising
it has only produced another partial fragment. The cycle then begins again
(as we've seen above). This process produces the sense of an infinite
meaning which is beyond us, the feeling of a mysterious aura pervading
all events.
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because romantic literature aims for a meaning which
it never grasps, it sets up that meaning as something ineffable, transcendent,
and mysterious - it gives us what Schlegel calls a 'sense of the infinite'.
This makes the events described unfamiliar, as Schlegel's friend Novalis
famously writes:
‘By giving what is commonplace an exalted meaning,
what is ordinary a mysterious aspect, what is familiar the impressiveness
of the unfamiliar, to the finite an appearance of infinity; thus I romanticise
it’ (Novalis, Poeticism 1798)
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we will come to see natural phenomena as pointing to
a meaning that lies beyond them, unknowable.
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Reflectiveness is necessary for irony:
reflectiveness allows the author to draw back and recognise s/he has not
grasped the infinite, cannot understand the meaning of nature.
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desire to explain
everything, to incorporate everything in a single wor
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desire to explain
everything, to incorporate everything in a single work.
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Analysis is necessary so that romantic
literature will focus on details so that they profilerate out
of control and resist complete comprehension.
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this isn't a retreat from modernity. Modernity is opposed to itself
- though it dismembers nature, it gives rise to the abilities which can
bring about a new form of literature that re-members nature
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Buy the Adesso CyberPad A4 Digital Notepad at TigerDirect.ca on 2009-09-12
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DigiMemo Handwriting Recognition software. Unfortunately, even after we installed the Recognition software, we could not get the program to consistently recognize numbers and fractions. It was pretty good with handwriting.
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Buy the Adesso CyberPad A4 Digital Notepad at TigerDirect.ca on 2009-09-12
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MyScript Notes Basic Edition
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that connector software is an additional download
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The Word Turned Upside Down - The New York Review of Books on 2009-09-10
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no doubt be unfair to condemn deconstruction on the basis of this one example
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t would no doubt be unfair to condemn deconstruction on the basis of this one example
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t would no doubt be unfair to condemn deconstruction on the basis of this one example,
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A third strategy is to pay close attention to marginal features of the text such as the sort of metaphors that occur in it, because such marginal features "are clues to what is truly important" (p. 146).
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Minding the Brain - The New York Review of Books on 2009-09-09
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Humphrey's account of mind concentrates on visual experiences.
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Humphrey's account of mind concentrates on visual experiences.
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By "consciousness," I mean those states of sentience or feeling or awareness that begin when you wake up from a dreamless sleep and continue on throughout the day until you fall asleep again, or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are also a form of consciousness.
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Consciousness, so defined, has three remarkable characteristics.
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always a qualitative feel
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always subjective in the sense that it only exists as experienced by human or animal subjects
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requires some "I" that actually experiences the conscious states
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ach conscious state comes to us as part of a single, unified conscious field
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These three features are not independent. They are different aspects of the essential character of consciousness that can be accurately called qualitative subjectivity.
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It might seem from these characteristics that understanding consciousness is just a matter of neurobiological research. Let the neuroscientists go to work on the brain, and find out how it causes consciousness, where exactly consciousness occurs in the brain, and how it functions causally. In the end, I think that is exactly the right approach. But there are many philosophical and conceptual obstacles along the way. It also turns out that the brain is an extremely difficult object to study.
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But he takes exception to my claim that one of its important functions is conscious perception and he strongly disagrees with my claim that a central problem is to try to get an account of how brain processes cause conscious experiences.
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thinks that all perception is unconscious, and that instead of trying to find a causal explanation for consciousness we should try to find an equation: i.e., if we are going to solve the problem of the relation of the mind to the body, we have to show that conscious mental experience is identical with the content of the physical brain.
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"neuronal correlate of consciousness" (NCC)
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He dismisses the search for the NCC on the grounds that it "privileges neuronal events over all the other ways we might wish to describe what is going on in the brain." For him any explanation has to be of the form mind = brain, m = b.
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Mind and brain appear to be in different dimensions, because mind has qualitative subjectivity and brain does not.
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It is a first-person phenomenon, whereas neuron firings are objective, third-person phenomena that would theoretically look the same to any observer, if they could be observed.
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Humphrey's account of mind concentrates on visual experiences.
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The Storm Over the University - The New York Review of Books on 2009-09-09
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Anybody who has been to such a conference will recognize the atmosphere. It is only within such a setting that Bloom and Hirsch (one a professor of philosophy in Chicago, the other a professor of English in Virginia) can seem (to people who are themselves professors somewhere) to exemplify "the privileged and the powerful."
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he central objection. It runs something like this: the history of "Western Civilization" is in large part a history of oppression. Internally, Western civilization oppressed women, various slave and serf populations, and ethnic and cultural minorities generally. In foreign affairs, the history of Western civilization is one of imperialism and colonialism. The so-called canon of Western civilization consists in the official publications of this system of oppression, and it is no accident that the authors in the "canon" are almost exclusively Western white males, because the civilization itself is ruled by a caste consisting almost entirely of Western white males. So you cannot reform education by admitting new members to the club, by opening up the canon; the whole idea of "the canon" has to be abolished. It has to be abolished in favor of something that is "multicultural" and "nonhierarchical."
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