Sveinbjorn Thordarson

Are you a problem thinker?

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But honey, surely it's not that serious?"

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently, and she began to cry. I'd had enough. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

E: blessaður
E: mér varð hugsað til þín þegar ég las um aðalfund 
frjálshyggjufélagsins um helgina
S: hahaha
E: sástu eitthvað af því?
S: já, meira bullið
E: algjörlega frábært
E: á að giska 2/3 fundarmanna í stjórn
E: sem er eitthvert svakalegasta bákn sem þekkist
E: sendu svo frá sér frábæra yfirlýsingu sem var 
kórónuð með argumentum ad hitlerum
E: ég og G erum búnir að ákveða að stofna félag þeim til höfuðs 
- félag áhugamanna um slippery slope röksemdafærslur

Úr þessari grein:

I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories and arguments. I thereby help to turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace which protects it against criticism and change.

Via Leiter Reports.

Hann Gunni Hrafn deildi með mér um daginn ljóði eftir vinkonu sína:

Ég dreymdi að verið væri að nauðga mér. Allir nauðgararnir eru frægir grínarar svo að ég hló og hló allan tímann. Hlýtur að vera ömurlegt að vera aldrei tekinn alvarlega.

So Heidegger and a hippo stroll up to the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter says, "Listen, we've only got room for one more today. So whoever of the two of you gives me the best answer to the question 'What is the meaning of life?' gets to come in."

And Heidegger says, "To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics."

But before the hippo can grunt one word, Saint Peter says to him, "Today's your lucky day."

Upplýstir indeed... Úr Transactions of the American Philosophical Society frá árinu 1799:

Mikið rosalega líst mér vel á þetta...

S: þau eru að hreinsa upp einstaklega nasty skít
S: þetta er algjört landmine-svæði sem þau ganga á
S: og eru að föst að reyna að gera það með mannafla 
sem hefur meira og minna tilheyrt Sjöllunum í áratugi
B: þetta er eins og þegar Atreides fluttu inn í Arrakeen

Í anda síðustu færslu, nokkrar tilvitnanir sem skáldið W. H. Auden safnaði saman um Ísland og Íslendinga í bók sinni Letters from Iceland (1937):

Concerning the Capital
Reykjavik is, unquestionably, the worst place in which to spend the winter in Iceland. The tone of society is the lowest that can well be imagined .... It not only presents a lamentable blank to the view of the religious observer, but is totally devoid of every source of intellectual gratification -- Henderson

Concerning their eyes
A very characteristic feature of the race is the eye, dure and cold as a pebble -- the mesmerist would despair at first sight. -- Burton

Concerning their mouths
The oral region is often coarse and unpleasant -- Burton

Concerning their temparament
The Icelander's temparament is nervoso-lymphatic and at best nervoso-sanguineous -- Burton

Concerning their apperance
The Icelanders are of a good, honest disposition, but they are at the same time so serious and sullen that I hardly remember to have seen any of them laugh -- Van Troil

Concerning their sensibility
The Icelanders in general are civil and well-disposed, but they are said not to feel strongly -- Barrow

Concerning their food
It cannot afford any great pleasure to examine the manner in which the Icelanders prepare their food. -- Van Troil

Concerning Hákarl
This had so disagreeable a taste that the small quantity we took of it drove us from the table long before our intention. -- Van Troil

Concerning their habits
If I attempted to describe some of their nauseous habits, I might fill volumes -- Pfeiffer

Concerning their dress
The dress of the women is not calculated to show the person to advantage. -- McKenzie

First sight of Iceland
We were delighted to see some new faces, in spite of their nastiness and stench; and their grotesque appearance afforded us much amusement. -- Hooker

It is very hard for a European, and perhaps especially hard for a graduate of one of the older English Universities to appreciate the squalid culture of these northern peoples -- Annandale

From The Living Races of Mankind. A Popular Illustrated Account of the Customs, Habits, Pursuits, Feats & Ceremonies of the Races of Mankind throughout the World (circa 1900):

In physical characteristics [the Icelander] does not compare favourably with his fellow Scandinavians.

The stony stare has caused the women to be described as generally ill-featured.

....[Icelanders] have thick, clumsy bodies, apparently too long and heavy for the legs...

...the eye ... is nearly always hard, cold and expressionless.

...exempt from most vices, except the national failing -- drink.

...their directness in criticising and ridiculing other people's weaknesses ... has created an impression that they are boorish and ill-natured.

Ég er búinn að henda inn á YouTube sex þátta seríu frá 1972 um heimspeki við Oxford-háskóla. Þarna má finna löng viðtöl við menn á borð við Alfred Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle, Iris Murdoch og David Pears um sögu 20. aldar heimspeki, um þekkingarfræði, málspeki, stjórnspeki o.fl.

1. Logic Lane: A Philosophical Retrospective
2. "I'm going to tamper with your beliefs a little"
3. Language and Creativity
4. Appearance and Reality
5. The Idea of Freedom
6. You might just as well say 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'.

Jahá...ég á ekki orð...

Smellið á plakatið til þess að sjá trailerinn.

Ég hef lengi haft mikið dálæti á heimspekingnum og hugmyndasagnfræðingnum Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), og hef eignast og lesið flestallar bækur eftir hann. Um árið las ég The Roots of Romanticism, sem fjallar um rætur rómantísku stefnunnar í evrópsku hugmynda- og menningarlífi. Skilgreining Berlins á rómantíkinni er ein sú rosalegasta sem ég rekist á:

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley’s dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great ‘I Am’, harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one’s unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk—the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-cheeked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, ‘la terre et les morts’, as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand’s aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet’s loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle’s worship of authority, and Hugo’s hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, life étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero—the rebel, l’homme fatal, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron’s heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake’s vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and ‘the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul’. It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.