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Cleaning up the 'rents PC has me looking at some thing. The woes with my rig appear to be taken care of - after installing the new PSU, I've no crashes (when I had determined precisely what would crash it before.) Could change of course, but so far, so good.
There is a dying breed in this world. True philosophers seem to be few and far between, lacking more than ever before, though we have exponentially increased in population. This would seem to be a contradictory statement, but there can be no other truth. Rather than having real philosophers, great thinkers pondering the infinite, we have those who would critique the writings of dead men – though those dead men may be great men, they are not in the here and now, and they have not seen our world as it stands today. Rather than developing ideas that need no backing other than pure logic, we take from others, we place their names in our works to show that we have read such well-known men and have comprehended their works. We have comprehended nothing. It is more a construct of prestige than it is of knowledge, wisdom or academic prowess.
So many vain attempts at adapting the works of men from eras where globalization did not exist. When a city razed to the ground would not be heard of for months, years, if ever. When man did not have mass media, the Internet: those countless stores and displayers of information that dwarf the largest of libraries, sages and historians in ancient times. We use those works to replace our own words. Whether it is out of laziness, or merely out of great respect, one cannot say. Though the former appears to be a better explanation. We simply do not want to waste our time saying what has been said before, do we?
But the problem is not so much being “lazy” as it is making our works unlikely to be understood by future generations, and even the present one. So many writers are willing to cite book after book, thesis after thesis, discourse after discourse. These writers may be completely familiar with these works, but surely they cannot expect their readers to be. How then can we really achieve our connection with our readers? The only choice is to change our self intrinsically. We must think and write like the layman – as Plato believed and I believe, we must use logic and only logic: our minds and only our minds. That is what a real philosopher is after all, at his or her core. That is the definition of a philosopher, and he or she must love personal wisdom most of all.
A secondary problem is that of defining said personal wisdom. What is personal now, when we have been subjected to countless experiences and ideas that we can never truly call our own alone? Yes, each human perceives each experience differently. But that is not the difficulty here. The problem is hearing another’s idea, such as, for example, Plato’s archetype. We then internalize it, and in a sense it becomes such a part of us that we may not be able to differentiate between what is our own idea of an archetype and what Plato’s was. When we start writing about it, we fear that we may be using Plato’s idea rather than our own, and so we cite him. Is it really his idea anymore? As soon as that idea is in the mind of another, it is either a combined ownership of the idea or it is a singular ownership – of the containing mind, of course. The difference between the two is miniscule, but there is a difference.
It is not just ideas such as Plato’s archetype that serve to cause problems, however. The whole of one’s accumulated knowledge cannot really be called personal at all. We are definitely personal with the knowledge itself – it is a part of our mind, and floating around with everything else happens to be all it can really do. In fact, the whole of any man’s accumulated knowledge is likely quite different from any other man’s – much like a fingerprint, indeed. But this can all cause a problem when one is writing anything from a paper to a series of books. I highly doubt you can go back and find that history book from grade school that taught you George Washington was the first president of the United States. This is a rather extreme example, but the thought is was counts.
What I mean is not that we have a need to cite such “common sensical” truths, but rather that we seem to not place enough weight on the difference between knowledge that is so-called “common sense” (or what I would call “hive info”) and what is not so well-known (or “orbital info” in the sense that it’s in outer orbit and the greater consensus of people have no idea it is out there.) Citing the first president of the US is absurd (and if we believe it is not, we’ve likely gone off of the deep end), but we learned it from somewhere. Just like we learned about Plato’s archetype from somewhere, but the latter happens to have a need to be cited. The difference between personal knowledge – hive info – and external knowledge – orbital info – seems to be decided by society at large. Whatever is deemed something that everyone should know is considered a posteriori knowledge, left unquestioned, empirical and objective in the greatest sense. Sadly enough, this is not the case at all. How can we say we know objectively what should and should not be cited?
We grow up in a community, we learn communally, and yet in the end we are forced to recognize the individual and their individual works. Indeed, one reads a book of a well-renowned philosopher from even a few hundred years ago and one finds a hundred citations that continually leave one more and more in the dark. If one starts in the now, and follows just one book citation back, he or she will find a hundred more citations that likely each have a hundred more a piece. This is a rather disorganized method of achieving “copyright protection” – though one must wonder how a copyright exists if each man has, for the most part, learned communally and not individually. Even a man who learns on his own is reading the works of the community and not those of an individual – all men have lived life surrounded by others, this cannot be denied. One man’s writing in and of itself is a personal, owned work, but the ideas it contains therein are the accumulated experiences and knowledge of his life lived in the community. They cannot be owned. They should not be owned. The only citations necessary are when we do not use our own words to describe the ideas, thoughts and facts that came from another writer. When we use our own words to describe the ideas, thoughts and facts of another, we are paraphrasing. Often this requires citation as well, but in the communal sense, all things are paraphrased from somewhere.
I therefore must conclude that it is in the most self-evident fashion an absurdity to cite everything we know. Yet a form of this is required of any academic writing.
There is a dying breed in this world. True philosophers seem to be few and far between, lacking more than ever before, though we have exponentially increased in population. This would seem to be a contradictory statement, but there can be no other truth. Rather than having real philosophers, great thinkers pondering the infinite, we have those who would critique the writings of dead men – though those dead men may be great men, they are not in the here and now, and they have not seen our world as it stands today. Rather than developing ideas that need no backing other than pure logic, we take from others, we place their names in our works to show that we have read such well-known men and have comprehended their works. We have comprehended nothing. It is more a construct of prestige than it is of knowledge, wisdom or academic prowess.
So many vain attempts at adapting the works of men from eras where globalization did not exist. When a city razed to the ground would not be heard of for months, years, if ever. When man did not have mass media, the Internet: those countless stores and displayers of information that dwarf the largest of libraries, sages and historians in ancient times. We use those works to replace our own words. Whether it is out of laziness, or merely out of great respect, one cannot say. Though the former appears to be a better explanation. We simply do not want to waste our time saying what has been said before, do we?
But the problem is not so much being “lazy” as it is making our works unlikely to be understood by future generations, and even the present one. So many writers are willing to cite book after book, thesis after thesis, discourse after discourse. These writers may be completely familiar with these works, but surely they cannot expect their readers to be. How then can we really achieve our connection with our readers? The only choice is to change our self intrinsically. We must think and write like the layman – as Plato believed and I believe, we must use logic and only logic: our minds and only our minds. That is what a real philosopher is after all, at his or her core. That is the definition of a philosopher, and he or she must love personal wisdom most of all.
A secondary problem is that of defining said personal wisdom. What is personal now, when we have been subjected to countless experiences and ideas that we can never truly call our own alone? Yes, each human perceives each experience differently. But that is not the difficulty here. The problem is hearing another’s idea, such as, for example, Plato’s archetype. We then internalize it, and in a sense it becomes such a part of us that we may not be able to differentiate between what is our own idea of an archetype and what Plato’s was. When we start writing about it, we fear that we may be using Plato’s idea rather than our own, and so we cite him. Is it really his idea anymore? As soon as that idea is in the mind of another, it is either a combined ownership of the idea or it is a singular ownership – of the containing mind, of course. The difference between the two is miniscule, but there is a difference.
It is not just ideas such as Plato’s archetype that serve to cause problems, however. The whole of one’s accumulated knowledge cannot really be called personal at all. We are definitely personal with the knowledge itself – it is a part of our mind, and floating around with everything else happens to be all it can really do. In fact, the whole of any man’s accumulated knowledge is likely quite different from any other man’s – much like a fingerprint, indeed. But this can all cause a problem when one is writing anything from a paper to a series of books. I highly doubt you can go back and find that history book from grade school that taught you George Washington was the first president of the United States. This is a rather extreme example, but the thought is was counts.
What I mean is not that we have a need to cite such “common sensical” truths, but rather that we seem to not place enough weight on the difference between knowledge that is so-called “common sense” (or what I would call “hive info”) and what is not so well-known (or “orbital info” in the sense that it’s in outer orbit and the greater consensus of people have no idea it is out there.) Citing the first president of the US is absurd (and if we believe it is not, we’ve likely gone off of the deep end), but we learned it from somewhere. Just like we learned about Plato’s archetype from somewhere, but the latter happens to have a need to be cited. The difference between personal knowledge – hive info – and external knowledge – orbital info – seems to be decided by society at large. Whatever is deemed something that everyone should know is considered a posteriori knowledge, left unquestioned, empirical and objective in the greatest sense. Sadly enough, this is not the case at all. How can we say we know objectively what should and should not be cited?
We grow up in a community, we learn communally, and yet in the end we are forced to recognize the individual and their individual works. Indeed, one reads a book of a well-renowned philosopher from even a few hundred years ago and one finds a hundred citations that continually leave one more and more in the dark. If one starts in the now, and follows just one book citation back, he or she will find a hundred more citations that likely each have a hundred more a piece. This is a rather disorganized method of achieving “copyright protection” – though one must wonder how a copyright exists if each man has, for the most part, learned communally and not individually. Even a man who learns on his own is reading the works of the community and not those of an individual – all men have lived life surrounded by others, this cannot be denied. One man’s writing in and of itself is a personal, owned work, but the ideas it contains therein are the accumulated experiences and knowledge of his life lived in the community. They cannot be owned. They should not be owned. The only citations necessary are when we do not use our own words to describe the ideas, thoughts and facts that came from another writer. When we use our own words to describe the ideas, thoughts and facts of another, we are paraphrasing. Often this requires citation as well, but in the communal sense, all things are paraphrased from somewhere.
I therefore must conclude that it is in the most self-evident fashion an absurdity to cite everything we know. Yet a form of this is required of any academic writing.
