Monthly Archives: July 2019

Waking the Beast

In the event anyone listening out there has been paying attention, it will be clear that this blog has been dormant for some time. Singleness of purpose will do that to you. Since early 2014, my coursework was my focus and, now that I have completed and passed my examinations, the focus is on completing my dissertation proposal and getting to work.

The reason for returning to the blog is, principally, to get myself WRITING . . . something I am not particularly good about. I have seen how others have used blogging as a means of writing a little bit each day and have decided to give it a try. I may not write daily but I want to write freely, with no constraints causing me to frame my thoughts in advance or necessarily choose my words ‘carefully’. The goal will be writing that is for the most part unedited, though not unmotivated. I will be using cues from things I am reading or situations to which I am reacting. The core idea will be to JUST WRITE.

I already do something like this in a daily diary sort of way in which I ‘talk’ to myself, pencil in hand, about what I have been reading that day or write out ‘quotable’ quotes from those readings. But I need a bit more space to take those ideas up in a critical way. That is one direction toward which a part of this project will be directed, in part because it will help me shape my ideas for the dissertation.

If that sort of thing interests you, tag along. It could be a bumpy ride but it won’t be dull.

Well, maybe I cannot legitimately promise that last . . . it could get dull. No apologies offered.

The ‘turns’ Just Keep Piling Up!

This is an OLD post that has been hanging around in the DRAFT folder for the last several years. And, in the interim, I have turned up several other ‘turns’ along the way but stopped trying to keep track of them. This might, though, be an opportunity staring me in the face: follow each turn, write about it, try to unwrap it a little, if only for myself.

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So, here I sit absolutely confounded that I did not ‘see’ this particular ‘turn’ staring me in the face, given the number of times that I referenced it in conference papers.

  • Pictorial turn – the opening chapter of WJT Mitchell’s 1994 book, Picture Theory.

Mitchell opens the chapter citing Richard Rorty’s characterization of the trend in philosophy over time as comprised of “a series of ‘turns’ in which ‘a new set of problems emerges and the old ones begin to fade away'” (11). This is “the final stage in Rorty’s history of philosophy,” that is, the linguistic turn.