Reminiscences of one who was there 12 Apr 2010 Early on, when I thought I would be an intellectual, a dilettante but still an intellectual, at the age of 17 or so, I read several books that I found at a second hand bookstore (my usual place of recreation). One was a little volume called Critique of Pure Tolerance, and one of the editors was Robert Paul Wolff. In part it led me to think of myself as philosophical, if not then a philosopher. Anyway, he is blogging his memoirs, and I strongly recommend anyone interested in philosophy reads them. Resumption of my Memoirs Memoir — Second Installment Memoirs Third Part Memoir Fourth Installment Memoir Fifth Installment Memoir Sixth Installment Memoir Seventh Installment Memoirs Eighth Installment Memoirs Ninth Installment History Philosophy
Philosophy A philosopher faces her own mortality 7 Nov 2009 Havi Carel has a disease that is life shortening, and describes her experiences in this poignant essay in the Independent. She is a philosopher who has written on death, before her diagnosis. Read More
Evolution On the origins of creativity 25 Sep 2010 I’m not a very creative guy. I had an idea back in the 1970s, but I managed not to do anything about it in time for someone else to do something with an almost identical idea. I think I dodged a bullet: once you come up with one great idea,… Read More
Biology Humans are the only animals that… 11 Jul 201311 Jul 2013 Psychologist Daniel Gilbert once wrote on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists: Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: ‘The human being is… Read More
Sorry to disillusion you but you *are* an intellectual by any reasonable definition of the word. And that’s a good thing. You have achieved the goal you set when you were 17. You also have a motorcycle. Very impressive!
This does not disillusion me. It was only that at 17, I thought I’d be a dilettante, since my teachers had uniformly announced that I was actually rather stupid, before I was thrown out of school.
Shame Kant was not a biker. Can you imagine what his Critique Of Pure Motorcycle Maintenance would have been like?
Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind. –in words from the definitive work on motorcycle maintenance.