Well, I am back to blogging. And this time I will be updating more often, because I will be using this blog to express my thoughts and my confusion about things going in my philosophical education. So I apologize from the outset: this will be a little rawer than most blog entries one may read on the internet, but hopefully as the year goes on, the obscurities will lessen and there will be understanding -- both you and me, and between me and the text that I am reading.
HOUSEKEEPING:
I will be including bibliographic information, just in case there is anyone out there curious to read what I am reading and with whom a dialogue would develop. Citations will be in Chicago style, or if not, at least consistent. I will mainly be interacting with Aristotle, so I will be using the Bekker numbers liberally. Okay. That's housekeeping.
WHY?
A good question. I am currently a graduate student, and this year I will be working on my thesis, which is still in an infantile stage. And I need a place where I can process my thoughts, and since I am a verbal processor, I feel the need that I have to be talking to someone. Even if no one ever reads this blog, it will feel like I am talking to someone. Cool? And if someone is reading this, thank you so much! Seriously. Lots of validation going on. Also, if you think you have a thought or idea, please share. I'm going to need all the help I can get. I should learn how to cite from a blog post...
THE PROJECT:
The project that I am undertaking for my thesis is an investigation of the sense of touch in Aristotle, particularly in the de Anima. I will be focusing on how the sense of touch is paramount to the human soul, arguing how this is one of Aristotle's responses to Platonic dualism. Hopefully, I will be able to return to what started me on this project in the first place: contemporary phenomenology. In the last sixty years or so, there has been a growing, renewed interest in describing the phenomenon/phenomena of touch, and so Aristotle thoughts on it have been revisited. If I have the room, I will be defending Aristotle's notions of touch with Merleau-Ponty, and perhaps Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. But in the end, that may have to be a different project.
Well, if you are still reading this, thank you again. It will be an adventure, that's not in doubt. Will it be exciting? For some, I hope it will be. So, as Edmund Husserl admonished: to the things themselves!
4 comments:
I will be reading.
You are assured at least two readers. Write, write on.
I will be reading it with much desire and love
here's another reader for you, and possibly a visitor early this spring. Leslie and I bought tickets over the pond and we'll be "in the area" in mid-january...as in Scotland. hope to keep up with you this way till then...caleb.
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