joe ferrare's blog

If you’ve ever been here before you can see the new look.  I’ve decided to give the blog a serious go and see if I can actually maintain some momentum.

The theme is based on the jillig WordPress theme, but I changed the top graphic and some of the text colors.  The graphic is just a bit of a photo of a fountain in Rome.  Actually, it was a photo of me and my daughter, but I liked the orange-green-blue progression of the basin of the fountain.  So I pulled it out, manipulated it (just blurring and a Lomo filter, mostly), and threw my name on there.  Didn’t like the WordPress blog-name insert, though I may mess with the CSS and put it back if I get it looking better.

Until then, happy Easter.

In Leviathan Hobbes wrote:

For commentaries are commonly more subject to cavil than the text, and therefore need other commentaries; and so there will be no end of such interpretation.

If that doesn’t describe and explain flame wars — and perhaps the whole internet, nothing ever will.  It also explains the whole cottage industry of political writers who do nothing but parse other people’s words.  I’m going to write something long on parsing soon.  It’s the scourge of our age.

The day shot by after the long (six-day) snowcapalyse weekend I had. Went from meeting to meeting so fast I couldn’t catch up on the old e-mail until after I was supposed to be gone. Now I’m getting ready to read some of Hobbes’ Leviathan.  I’ve read parts of it before, and the underlining pen got a workout.

Reading Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge I was struck that his thought of abstract ideas, of which he seems none too fond so far, is what we now depend on for a good part of our lives: icons. Here’s his definition of abstraction, more or less:

For example, the mind having observed that Peter, James, and John resemble each other in certain common agreements of shape and other qualities, leaves out of the complex or compounded idea it has of Peter, James, and any other particular man, that which is peculiar to each, retaining only what is common to all, and so makes an abstract idea wherein all the particulars equally partake- abstracting entirely from and cutting off all those circumstances and differences which might determine it to any particular existence. And after this manner it is said we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature…

Look at the icons on your computer screen.  Somewhere there is an icon of a person, and the more universal the icon — black and white and having no gender — the closer it comes to what Berkeley is taking about.  Look at the old Mac icons here, and you can see where those ultimately generic abstract ideas have been made to stand in for all things under that definition — all documents are one-page documents with lines of type.  Tellingly, the icons with the most particular features are those of the Mac itself, which I’m sure we owe to marketing.

I’m not through with the part of Berkeley I’m reading yet, but he seems to be headed in the same direction as Locke, in that he sees such abstractions as not real. The abstract idea of man is not  any man in particular.  The man exists, but the abstraction does not.  Berkeley seems to be going further to say that these general ideas are the cause of some of our problems.  That by thinking and speaking of that generality we confound ourselves because that generality does not exist — there is no there there.  That we — as I am fond of saying — think we’re so smart we think ourselves up our own asses.

Been busy on the school front and meant to post about it.  Went from one extreme to another and found some new favorite authors (Hobbes, Locke) and some I just need to plow through (Augustine, Aquinas).  I really need to start blogging this stuff to get my thoughts down.

Forgot to put the pic on the USB stick, so nothing to update with. I tried using the upload file option in WordPess, but no go. Tonight, I guess.

Working on a new site design. Downloaded some new themes and am trying to customize them for my own use. This one (blue mountain) obviously still needs work. I think less blue, a touch of orange. Anyway, I’m going to do a site I’m happy with and start posting more. Reading the internet without sharing is getting old.