Euro Liberals may Recognise Turkish Cypriot Parties (http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html)

Euro Liberals may Recognise Turkish Cypriot Parties.  Click on link to go to mac.com blog site and read the whole of the entry.

Self-Correction on Derrida and Anglo-American Commentary on Kant's Aesthetics (http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html)

Self-Correction on Derrida and Anglo-American Commentary on Kant's Aesthetics (http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html)

Kierkegaard and the Literature of Manners. http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/6/23_.html

Kierkegaard and the Literature of Manners.  Click to go to the entry on my Mac blog.

Kirkegaard and James Joyce: Finnegans Wake is a Kierkegaardian Novel

SEE ANOTHER VERSION OF THIS ENTRY AT 

http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Entries/2008/6/22_Finnegans_Wake_is_a_Kierkegaardian_Novel.html

Joyce’s notoriously complex last ‘novel’, Finnegans Wake is in some ways a novel after Kierkegaard, particularly the Kierkegaard of Either/Or I. This volume in Kierkegaard is an exploration of the aesthetic, but it should not be separated from his ethical and religious dimensions, and it should not be given a lower status than those texts of Kierkegaard which are more directly about ethics and religious. If Kierkegaard thought these distinctions could be kept so strictly he would not have written the kind of texts he did.

Leaving aside questions of Kierkegaard commentary aside in this entry, we should note the presence of Kierkegaard and Either/Or in Finnegans Wake. On many occasions Joyce refers to ‘Kirk yard’, a play on the meaning of Kierkegaard’s name (church yard) and its closeness to Scots (the dialect of English spoken, some would claim it’s a language distinct from English though related to it, in lowland Scotland and Ulster) which has many Scandinavian influences going back to the Vikings. There are other points about that little example of Joyce’s extreme polyglot linguistic play in the Wake. The allusions to church and the church yard where the dead are buried brings out themes of the sacred, death and the commemoration of death which recur in the Wake. Joyce also frequently plays with Enten-Eller, which is the Danish title of Either/Or. The whole of the Wake can be looked upon as an attempt to follow up the idea of a purely aesthetic attitude which Kierkegaard explored in Either/Or I, and shortly before that in Concept of Irony. What he was particularly concerned with was he the Irony of the Jena Romantics or Romantic Ironists, Friedrich Schegel, Novalis and others who collaborated in the last two years of the Eighteenth Century. Concept of Irony makes this explicit and consider the relation of Romantic Irony with Fichte’s earlier philosophy, and in a more general way with Socratic Irony.

A particular issue that comes up from Eiher/Or in the Wake is the relation between hearing and vision. There are frequent references to eye and ear in the Wake which should be read in conjunction with the discussion of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in Either/Or. One of Kierkegaard’s concerns is the relation between seeing and hearing in opera, a tense relation for him as opera has an obvious visual aspect but Kierkegaard thinks music is primary in opera and that is exemplified in Don Giovanni. The figure of the Don serves that because he is pure sensuality and music appeals to the most pure sensuality, The erotic side of the Don fits with the heightened aesthetic of opera. The Wake is concerned in many ways with the relation between sound and inscription in language. Don Juan/Don Giovanni is also a recurring figure who seems to belong to a general theme of the journey of life and essential human struggle.

Why closing Turkey's AKP would be a liberal act. John Stuart Mill would have agreed.

Theories of Representative Democracy or Republicanism have not been concerned with a a majoritarian theory in which the most popular force in politics has the right to decide everything. That is the path that led to the execution of Socrates in Ancient Athens. In Aristotle, Monteseuiu, Mill and many others, democracy is a means to promote liberty. For Mill, it was quite necessary to push the conditions for secular liberty from above, and democracy rested on those conditions. Like all the Liberal and Republican thinkers, he thought that liberty and law are the necessary foundations of any democracy worth having, that is a democracy that is not mere majoritarianism. AKP are eroding the conditions for secular democracy. The Millian response is clear. The democratic means for liberty can be highly regarded but they are means. Mill followed Tocqueille’s phrase, tyranny of the majority, which itself probably has some origin in the Federalist Papers of Hamilton, Madison and Jay. The point in all case is that momentary majority opinion is a very dangerous thing which can lead to violence and law breaking. Authority is necessary to stop the majority,or the shifting nature of majority opinion, from violating basic freedoms. Previous Liberal and Republican thinkers have said similar thing about majority democracy. Even Rousseau though that the general ill is only formed when citizens are isolated from each other, and engages with the necessity of different parts of sovereignty. AKP is a threat to the secular foundations of democracy and should go.

Kierkegaard: Free Will and Ethics

What is important about Kierkegaard's philosophy, including his ethics?  Is is it that he has a Christian message?  No.  Of course he had a deeply Christian message but what is important is the ways in which he expressed it through aesthetics, psychology, ethical, metaphysical and epistemic theory.  

The ethics in Kierkegaard is not defined through Christianity.  Christianity is a given for Kierkegaard, what is important is the work he did on the kind of subjectivity necessary for grasping the 'Christian message'.  Despite Kierkegaard's apparent commitment to militant Biblical Christianiy, his approach is an Enlightnment one in which the historical claims of the Bible are interpreted as spiritual communication in which the historical content does not need to be true.   This is particularly evident in Philosophical Fragments.  The point is to appeal to subjectivity and that is done through a variety of strategies.  The most obvious strategies are those of ironic aesthetic reflection and the construction of a theory of subjectivity.

For Kierkegaard, subjectivity is freedom.  The free reflection of subjectivity on itself properly understood leads us to an an ethics beyond the metaphysical in Concept of Anxiety.  Metaphysics can only refer to a fixity of subjectivity which denies its freedom.  Kierkegaard does refer to the second ethics as concerned with (Christian) doctrine.  Nevertheless, Christian doctrine in Kierkegaard is a commitment to subjectivity which is grasped through ironic reflection, psychological theory, epistemological scepticism of a pre-Cartesian antique kind, and the paradoxes of the relation of subjectivity with the absolute.  That can be grasped as the relation between the succeeding empirical stages of the self and the continuity of the self over time    

I'm now posting the blog at http://web.mac.com/barrystocker/Site/Blog/Blog.html

I'm experimenting with the blogging facilities provided by .mac, an Apple service which integrates with the iWeb application in the iLife suite on Macintosh computers.  If this works well I will migrate this blog entirely  to the address in the title using the name Barry Stocker's Weblog

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Using a Macintosh

I've been a bit slow learning how to use the Apple online services and how  to use their integration with the iLife software on a a Mac computer.  The correct address for the Apple Mac version of this Blog is Barry Stocker's Weblog

I've now been using a MacBook (white 2.4 GHz) for about 4 weeks.  The MacBook is the basic Apple Macintosh laptop/notebook computer.   It's been  a highly positive experience with the hardware and with the Mac OS X.5 Leopard software.  The MacBook is very portable, not as portable as the MacBook Air but very portable by most standards.  I've been carrying it round with a shoulder bag and hardly felt the weight.  I've edited documents and watched dvds on it in quite cramped conditions on long distance buses.  It fits nicely on the lap without feeling much weight and does not create too much heat, certainly when my legs are covered.  OS X takes some getting used to after years of exclusively Windows experience but it is not a very steep learning curve.  I put some labour into the process through a study of David Pogue's Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly and Partners).

Obvious advantages include an uncluttered desktop.  The Mac OS does  not allow the desktop to fill with icons.  Icon disappear when the computer shuts down.  Widgets are reached through pulling up a reserve desktop, which is the only place widgets can be stored.  Some are preinstalled like weather  and calender.  I've downloaded some others from the Apple website, including one that monitors RAM, available space on discs and all storage devices, CPU usage, internet activity.  

The computer has a video camera installed, which be used very easily as a normal camera,  It integrates very smoothly with iChat (which includes video chat), Photo Booth (takes photos) and iPhoto (photograph library).

There is an automatic back up application Time Machine which does a complete back up to a connected external hard drive every hour.  All back ups are kept for  day, and then just one back up remains from that day.  It works with no complication and is a great back up function.  

Despite what the more extreme Apple fans claim, Macs can certainly freeze up, however, I found that the more I used the Mac the less problems there are of that kind.  There is an unconscious habit forming process behind this, the most conscious part of this is I find it helps to keep an eye on which applications are on, easily done through checking the dock and seeing which applications are in the dock and have a light underneath.  

Interface with iTunes and iPod is perfect, as is he interface with dot mac online services, which  will appear next month in an improved form under the name of MobileMe.  

Other great touches.  The caps lock key is a bit sticky which avoids the problem of finding that you have accidentally typed several sentences in capitals.  You have to press the key a few seconds longer than the others so that you only get capitalisation where you ask for it.  

Power cord is attached to Mac with magnetic plug, so that tripping over cord leads to the plug disconnecting not pulling the computer to the floor.