New Book Action

I got a new Wittgenstein book today, Culture and Value, which is a collection of excerpts from his notebooks that don't pertain directly to his philosophy, but that treat other random subjects, ie culture and values. The very first excerpt is worth quoting here.

Quote of the Day

"We tend to take the speech of the Chinese for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in man."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1914

Washington DC

I have been to Washington DC twice in the last month, first for a debate tournament at the Catholic University of America, and more recently at a Model UN Conference at Johns Hopkins SAIS graduate school. (I know what you're thinking; Debate and Model UN? This guy must be a killer with the ladies. And you'd be right.) Anyway, I retract any previous comments about how DC sucks, its actually a fun place - at least Georgetown and Dupont Circle are. Also, I stay repping the Jefferson Memorial, which is super-money.

Highlights from the Model UN conference: the four BC delegates got to meet with two limeys from the British Embassy who told us exactly what their official positions on everything were, then we won an "outstanding delegation award," while also managing to ingest staggering amounts of alcohol in our nation's capital.

LSATS

On Thursday John is going to accomplish exactly seven tasks: Drink 10 Pots of Coffee (D), Take 2 Complete LSAT exams (L1 and L2), Break-down in tears (B), Fly to Washington DC for a Model UN Conference (F), Miss work (M), and Iron Dress Shirts (I). John will accomplish these tasks between the hours of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, in accordance with the following rules:

Either three or four of the tasks must be accomplished in the AM.
John cannot Drink Ten Pots of Coffee in the same hour he Flies to Washington DC.
John must Take one of the LSAT exams in Washington DC.
If John Irons Dress Shirts in the Morning he must Break Down in Tears in the Morning.
John must Miss work in the Afternoon.

1. What is a complete list of tasks John could complete in the Morning?


2. If a plane to Washington must seperate John's taking the first LSAT and Ironing Dress Shirts, how many tasks will John Complete in the Afternoon?


3. If Rule 5 is suspended, what activity must John copmplete in the Morning?


The previous Logic Game is a Logically accurate rewording of a real LSAT logic game. Answers will be posted December 4th.


Quote of the Day: (Brace yourself, this one is for people who think Field Goals are part of Basketball.)

Wittgenstein's philosophy requires us to "think in a new way," and hence its great difficulty. He is the first philosopher who is really outside of modern philosophy - that is, outside the philosophy of the last three hundred years. In an exact way he is the first philosopher of our time who is not a Cartesian.

We have heard this before about other philosophers. It has indeed been fashionable for a long time, on various provocationsm, to sound the death-knell for Cartesianism. But when the noise abates, the patient is found to be still there, gasping but alive. Why is it any different this time?

We will see that is different. This time the patient is gone, and the entire situation is changed. It is as if someone else has taken over the institution.

-Henry Finch

Yet Another Sketchy Appointment

Bush is awesome at appointing unqualified people to extremely important roles. Here's yet another example, again from the New Republic:

Take Paul J. Bonicelli, who was just appointed to oversee the U.S. Agency for International Development's democracy and governance programs, which play a vital role in Bush's efforts to democratize Iraq and the broader Middle East.

No doubt, Bonicelli will be a welcome addition. After all, he isn't just any run-of-the-mill Bush hack. He's an academic. Just before his appointment, Bonicelli served as dean of academic affairs at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia, a fundamentalist institution whose motto is "For Christ and for liberty," and which has had notable success placing its students in White House internships. Patrick Henry College requires all its affiliates to sign a "statement of faith" indicating that they believe "Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, is God come in the flesh," "Jesus Christ literally rose bodily from the dead," and "all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity."

How brilliant: If bringing democracy to the Middle East is the Bush administration's crusade (and Muslims have been very touchy about Bush's use of that word), why not put a real evangelist in charge? No doubt Muslims the world over will welcome someone looking to save them, not just from oppressive regimes, but from "conscious torment for eternity" as well.

Quotes

As I've mentioned here before, I am way too busy this semester to continuously update this thing. BUT, in the interest of maintaning some sort of entertaining content for those few people who have the misfortune of stumbling onto the link in my AIM profile. I have decided to start puting up quotes on the blog. These will come from wherever I see fit, and will be about whatever I want, with no predetermined theme or order. The only goal as currently defined will be one of making fun of Steven Perezelli as much as possible - who has recently made his coming-out-of-the-closet official and public, so do feel free to congratulate him on that whenever you see him. That took a lot of courage big guy.

Anyway, the historic first quotes of the day are as follows:

"Biology is destiny. There's no way in hell this guy would have been elected mayor of Scranton, much less leader of the free world, if he'd been born into a less exalted family."

Michelle Cottle
The New Republic

"Sociological and political factors have combined with the intellectual to ensure that Catholic lawyers continually dominate dominate the pool of Republican candidates for the [Supreme Court's] bench. For starters, there are so many of them. During the early twentieth century, law provided Catholics with an important vehicle for traveling into the middle class.While Catholics couldn’t enter top law schools, they could attend places like Fordham and Villanova.“There was a vast culture of Catholic DAs, lawyers, and judges,” says John McGreevy, the author of Catholicism and American Freedom. Even when discrimination against Catholics faded, the law’s prestige among white Catholics persisted."

Frank Foer
"Brain Trust" (An article about how Catholics are smarter than Evangelicals)
The New Republic