It is estimated as of February 2008 that there are over 112 million blogs on the internet (and I will admit to creating at least 8 or 9 of them). With this consideration in mind, we might wonder this: when you have created 8 or 9 blogs and only one of them has received any significant attention, why create another one? And further, why not just start using the one I already have?
The first purpose of this entry is to defend my choice to start “just another wordpress blog”. Against whom I am defending consists most significantly of myself for now, but I would presume that others may be interested in my reasons for such an endeavor as well. Other purposes of this entry include, but may not be limited to explaining my various inspirations for this blog (aka giving credit where credit is due!), detailing the subject matters that are to be covered by it, and finally giving a description of what I hope to gain out of the effort that I plan to put into writing and maintaining another blog. The contents of this post are divided as such in order to give the reader some help in consuming it.
defense of a new blog
My current weblog has as a main focus of actionscript design and development, and despite how heavily involved I am in those two things, I have found it difficult to keep writing about those activities. Maintaining a blog takes a lot of time, and writing about actionscript feels a bit too much like work to keep doing it in my spare time. While I could begin posting my investigations into philosophy over there, I have found that successful blogs are those ones which have a specific focus, and don’t stray too far from it. Because of these reasons, I think it prudent to start a new blog with a focus on philosophy. Perhaps the two can co-exist, and in fact complement each other.
inspirations
My inspirations for this undertaking come from a number of sources, which I will mention as quickly as possible.
I first began thinking about web development and coding in a new way after reading my friend joe’s article about debugging php. I came away from reading his article with the thought that writing code is a lot like doing science- your code is your hypothesis that a certain thing will work, and it is the developer’s job to test that hypothesis, break it, fix it, and break it again until it can be accepted as a useful application. Viewing the process of writing code through the paradigm of the scientific method changed what I thought about what I do, and as I have thought further about this, it has become clear to me that important topics in the field of philosophy of science have direct implications to how I practice my work.
Another source if inspiration is my current employer at Analog Interactive, Shawn Sheely. Shawn is the first employer of mine to recognize my training and skill in philosophy as a valuable one, and, further, to actually put these skills to work. He has provided an excellent environment for me in which to do research and development in various languages ( example example) , and that research has become valuable to us in our client work.
Further, Shawn is the one who actually sparked my current track of research into the nature of discovery, on which I plan to write much more later. But his spark led me down a path of thought in which I bumped into the late Robert K. Merton. Reading his post-humous work The Three Princes of Serendip has been a very interesting experience, and one of my main goals of starting this blog is so that I can process the volumes of ideas he has so carefully and kindly shared with us.
Another inspiration of mine has been a short email conversation I’ve had with David Humphrey, who I would presume at this moment is either debugging C++ or reading Heidegger. He remarked that it is rather uncommon to meet a developer with a training in the humanities. In response I wrote that I wanted to study how my background in philosophy influences my work as a developer, but that that may take a few pages. I hope to write those few pages here.
Lastly, I must mention my friend Maran. Over the fall I have been helping her think about her doctoral thesis ( On The Production of Medical Knowledge), and the collaborative discussions we’ve shared on the topic remind me of my days as an undergraduate, and the pleasure that comes with the practice of philosophy.
map
Before finishing up this post, I’d like to quickly sketch out the topics I intend to cover, and what I hope to get out of them.
I would like to first start out with a quick investigation of the question What is Philosopy?, as I think it might be a prudent question for anyone to start out with before starting to practice philosophy. Hopefully that investigation will be useful to me in any activities that ensue. Following that, my first series of posts will almost exclusively study the works of Robert K. Merton, both The Three Princes of Serendib, and later his most famous work On the Shoulders of Giants. These works mainly deal with the philosophy and sociology of science, and I am interested in investigating how his ideas may be applied to computer science.
Other areas of interest of mine include the philosophy of language, the divide between analytic/anglo-american philosophy and European continental philosophy, bio-medical ethics and the production of medical knowledge, and finally the philosophy of pedagogy or education. I have been most influenced in these fields by most of the ancients, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Camus, Kripke, Dewey, Carl Elliot, and probably most importantly one Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. I would not be surprised to see any of these names come up in my investigations.
One main goal of this endeavor is to create a symposium where I can discuss with others how our studies in the humanities can inform our work as developers. I am confident that there are many others who have much deeper and more mature knowledge on these subjects than I possess, and it is my hope to be guided- in whatever manner occurs- in my investigations by others who have gone before.
I intend to make this a welcome space for discussion, should others wish to share, and hopefully things may get so interesting that we can even have some respectful argument and disagreement every once and a while.
If you’ve read this far, I thank the length of your attention span, and welcome you to philosophy and modern carpentry.
on flickr...
in defense of a new blog, or, hello world!
It is estimated as of February 2008 that there are over 112 million blogs on the internet (and I will admit to creating at least 8 or 9 of them). With this consideration in mind, we might wonder this: when you have created 8 or 9 blogs and only one of them has received any significant attention, why create another one? And further, why not just start using the one I already have?
The first purpose of this entry is to defend my choice to start “just another wordpress blog”. Against whom I am defending consists most significantly of myself for now, but I would presume that others may be interested in my reasons for such an endeavor as well. Other purposes of this entry include, but may not be limited to explaining my various inspirations for this blog (aka giving credit where credit is due!), detailing the subject matters that are to be covered by it, and finally giving a description of what I hope to gain out of the effort that I plan to put into writing and maintaining another blog. The contents of this post are divided as such in order to give the reader some help in consuming it.
defense of a new blog
My current weblog has as a main focus of actionscript design and development, and despite how heavily involved I am in those two things, I have found it difficult to keep writing about those activities. Maintaining a blog takes a lot of time, and writing about actionscript feels a bit too much like work to keep doing it in my spare time. While I could begin posting my investigations into philosophy over there, I have found that successful blogs are those ones which have a specific focus, and don’t stray too far from it. Because of these reasons, I think it prudent to start a new blog with a focus on philosophy. Perhaps the two can co-exist, and in fact complement each other.
inspirations
My inspirations for this undertaking come from a number of sources, which I will mention as quickly as possible.
I first began thinking about web development and coding in a new way after reading my friend joe’s article about debugging php. I came away from reading his article with the thought that writing code is a lot like doing science- your code is your hypothesis that a certain thing will work, and it is the developer’s job to test that hypothesis, break it, fix it, and break it again until it can be accepted as a useful application. Viewing the process of writing code through the paradigm of the scientific method changed what I thought about what I do, and as I have thought further about this, it has become clear to me that important topics in the field of philosophy of science have direct implications to how I practice my work.
Another source if inspiration is my current employer at Analog Interactive, Shawn Sheely. Shawn is the first employer of mine to recognize my training and skill in philosophy as a valuable one, and, further, to actually put these skills to work. He has provided an excellent environment for me in which to do research and development in various languages ( example example) , and that research has become valuable to us in our client work.
Further, Shawn is the one who actually sparked my current track of research into the nature of discovery, on which I plan to write much more later. But his spark led me down a path of thought in which I bumped into the late Robert K. Merton. Reading his post-humous work The Three Princes of Serendip has been a very interesting experience, and one of my main goals of starting this blog is so that I can process the volumes of ideas he has so carefully and kindly shared with us.
Another inspiration of mine has been a short email conversation I’ve had with David Humphrey, who I would presume at this moment is either debugging C++ or reading Heidegger. He remarked that it is rather uncommon to meet a developer with a training in the humanities. In response I wrote that I wanted to study how my background in philosophy influences my work as a developer, but that that may take a few pages. I hope to write those few pages here.
Lastly, I must mention my friend Maran. Over the fall I have been helping her think about her doctoral thesis ( On The Production of Medical Knowledge), and the collaborative discussions we’ve shared on the topic remind me of my days as an undergraduate, and the pleasure that comes with the practice of philosophy.
map
Before finishing up this post, I’d like to quickly sketch out the topics I intend to cover, and what I hope to get out of them.
I would like to first start out with a quick investigation of the question What is Philosopy?, as I think it might be a prudent question for anyone to start out with before starting to practice philosophy. Hopefully that investigation will be useful to me in any activities that ensue. Following that, my first series of posts will almost exclusively study the works of Robert K. Merton, both The Three Princes of Serendib, and later his most famous work On the Shoulders of Giants. These works mainly deal with the philosophy and sociology of science, and I am interested in investigating how his ideas may be applied to computer science.
Other areas of interest of mine include the philosophy of language, the divide between analytic/anglo-american philosophy and European continental philosophy, bio-medical ethics and the production of medical knowledge, and finally the philosophy of pedagogy or education. I have been most influenced in these fields by most of the ancients, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, Russell, Camus, Kripke, Dewey, Carl Elliot, and probably most importantly one Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein. I would not be surprised to see any of these names come up in my investigations.
One main goal of this endeavor is to create a symposium where I can discuss with others how our studies in the humanities can inform our work as developers. I am confident that there are many others who have much deeper and more mature knowledge on these subjects than I possess, and it is my hope to be guided- in whatever manner occurs- in my investigations by others who have gone before.
I intend to make this a welcome space for discussion, should others wish to share, and hopefully things may get so interesting that we can even have some respectful argument and disagreement every once and a while.
If you’ve read this far, I thank the length of your attention span, and welcome you to philosophy and modern carpentry.