Philosophy

I had some free time. So after stumbling across extralogical.net whilst hunting for WordPress themes I thought I’d look for some blogs on philosophy (it’s what I did my first degree in). Oh the joy…

I’ll start with one of Benedict Eastaugh’s (he of extralogical.net) posts from his previous blog in February 2007:

In the spirit of enquiry, then, here’s a list of what soon-to-be graduates (perhaps in Philosophy) might know.

• They know quite a bit about their discipline: its fields and sub-fields, some of the big names, some of the big ideas.
• They’ve learned some techniques: how to generate counterexamples and formalise arguments, how to spot equivocation and split hairs.
• They know where to find the worst coffee, and the best beer.
• They know a lot of jargon

The greatest thing that philosophy taught me was that the structures that most people see in the world are man-made and actually quite fragile. Being a teacher, this means instead of focusing on what schooling has been, I focus on what it ought to be. I’ve got the bigger picture.

Allied to this is the fact that I continued my studies to do an MA in Modern History to become a History teacher at seconday level. This has given me a perspective from the history of ideas which shows the current age as simply the knife-edge upon which we are travelling (to use a poetic metaphor…)

A quick Technorati search for ‘philosophy’ took me straight to a YouTube video of Monty Python’s Philosophers Football Match. Classic:

Unfortunately, a Google search for related:extralogical.net returned stuff pretty much exclusively about WordPress themes. And then when I searched Technorati and Google Blog search for posts tagged with ‘philosophy’ I was disappointed. I don’t want long, technical posts like this or this thank-you-very-much. I prefer the Montaigne approach: you know, discursive writing on a theme that brings in social commentary, history and philosophy. I suppose the problem is that bloggers like that are a) few and far between, and b) don’t tag their posts with ‘philosophy’!

Oh well, if anyone wants me to point me in the direction of a few good blogs, feel free. In the meantime, I’ll be reading Benedict’s blog. He doesn’t update regularly enough, though… 😉

(image: in ur mind @ Flickr)