sherlock holmes
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
I have been musing about a remark made by John Stuart Mill, “The habit of analysis wears away the feelings.” One of my friends confessed to me that he suffered what he called a breakdown on completion of his doctoral work in philosophy. He lost his marriage and was deeply hurt. He did not go into it too deeply. It was clearly a painful experience. A similar thing happened to me before I started my dissertation. I was completely worn out, incapable of reading any more or doing philosophy. I didn’t read for more than my work for about eight years. I was depressed, empty, haunted. I didn’t complete my dissertation.
I regained my desire to work in the late nineties when I saw a show on TV exposing the problem of the drug war in the US. Judge James P. Gray was opposed to the drug war for some very good reasons. This piqued my interest and I started working again leading to some interesting consequences, none of which I could have predicted at that time.
Speaking to the title of this post, Sherlock Holmes, I had a dream. In it I watched my supposed aunt and myself. She had concocted an elaborate method of giving me a coat like that of Sherlock Holmes. The narrative led me to believe that I was a very fragile individual and that she didn’t want to make me think the coat would obligate me to do the sort of detective work Holmes was famous for. It is as if this were an invitation to meaningful work that could not be driven out of duty but could arise out of the tender spark of my interest. This interest is fragile and some mistreatment of my person in pursuit of this goal would destroy the value of it.
Posted in My Muse | No Comments »
february musings
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
Here I am at 2 am on Thursday morning thinking about my life. I am thankful for the technological world we have made. I am appreciative of the grace of God and not ashamed to be a child of God.
I have been occupied lately with Michael Shermer’s book “Why Darwin Matters.” In it he describes the failure of any of the modern attempts to disprove the theory of evolution in favor of an Intelligent Design model (ID).
I think the ID model is generated by an interest in both disproving the Darwinian evolutionary model and proving a theistic creation.
I am not sanguine about the moves ID makes on our reason. There are problems both with the supposition that defends the necessity of disproving Darwinism and the necessity of proving that God did the heavy lifting of speciation. I am waiting on more information. I am not content with the procrustean intention of the ID community. In it they are breaking the rules of science which detects and avoids premature conclusions about the real world.
Posted in Whatever | No Comments »