Brian Cantwell Smith

02 Oct 2022 06:16 - 16 Jan 2024 06:59
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    • His paper "The Semantics of Clocks" I recommend to everybody, hell I'll count it as an influence
      • Point seems to be about the same as the sunflower story told here The middle distance – drossbucket That is: Mental machinery is of the world (it has its own causal machinery) and also tracks the world (that is, it is in a semantic-ish relationship with the outside).
      • Well – the sunflower is maybe richer, it has an account of how causal coupling between representation and world can vary, become more or less disconnected.
    • (47) 3. Dr. Brian Cantwell Smith - Deference, Humility, and Awe - YouTube
      • Notes:
      • Good and evil, narratives and characters, "factive beliefs"
      • Complete frustration at the usual dumb interaction between science and religion (yes)
      • He grew up in a "strange" christian sect. Essence: love trumps justice
      • God is not a word he uses at all
      • God-talk is a way of orienting towards that which is beyond human comprehension
      • "I know Allah is greater than I know Allah to be"
      • The mysteries of reference (I think he overdoes this a bit but whatever)
    • His book On The Origin of Objects owes a lot to Latour and that really means I should read it!
    • The Third Day (rec very strongly by John Vervaeke )
      • Although we have no word for it, establishing an appropriate degree of “middle connectivity” to the world is such a basic feature of the human condition that doing it successfully has been lifted into the rarefied reaches of sainthood and enlightenment; failing to accomplish it, identified as a cause of paralytic anxiety.
      • ...the ineliminable separation between representation and represented—a distance that keeps the two apart. This semantic disconnection is so basic that it is impossible to imagine life without it. Sans representation’s separation, the mere thought of an eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s would bathe Seattle in ash....
      • What is the origin of all these boundaries—semantic boundaries between subjects and objects, ontological boundaries in the world, conceptual boundaries in our theorising, abstractive boundaries between our concepts and the things we apply them to?
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