Writing philosophy
Has your enthusiasm for your project dampened now?
This is the first time that I have felt like my work has had a direction since I started writing this blog. I remember how laid back I used to be about writing my thesis back when I was doing my MPhil. It usually wouldn't take me more than a day or two to write the ten pages that I needed for my next meeting with my supervisor, and then I would be happy to wait the two weeks it took for my next meeting with him. I always looked forward to our discussions, because I loved watching my work evolve based on those discussions and my own reflection. It didn't matter to me that I wasn't working day and night to produce the work. I felt its progress to an extent that I was content simply to watch it grow in between the meetings and savour the very experience of my own writing in the meantime. Often this would mean re-reading and simulatneously proofreading my work, removing any typographical errors that I found along the way. When I had to re-submit my thesis, my supervisor actually merely looked for some typos that he could get me to correct in lieu of the substantial revision that the external reviewer was demanding, but he couldn't find any. It was an unusually clean manuscript. So he had to settle for a more modest version of the revision that the reviewer had recommended, but made it clear to me that I deserved the MPhil as it stood. I had no qualms, therefore, about making only superficial changes to the work, and it was accepted without critical commentary.
Similarly, I really feel like this dictionary project is giving my book a new direction. Each new five pages of the dictionary is revealing something that I can use for the book in one way or another. One of the more surprising discoveries has been the notion of different modalities: the alethic, the epistemic and the deontic. This can be used to deepen my analogies sometimes made between ethics and epistemology to arrive at a rationality of transmodality. Such a topic, however, would have such a potentially enormous scope that I would have to limit it strictly to something that I could reasonably hope to work out thoroughly in a thousand words. But while I have some steady goal set for the day, I feel like once I have completed it, my work is done, and I can do whatever I like for the rest of the time that I have. In a way, this is good, because it means that I can more easily put my philosophical thoughts to one side for the sake of getting on with the more practical matters of life. However, I also do not want to see the pace of the work slow down either. If you are only going to read ten pages of the dictionary in a day, then you are already committing yourself to over two months' work just to write the outline for the book! I presume that in the meantime you should be writing about the thoughts that you are having about the different sections that you are adding to the book. You can still use your blog as a space to develop those thoughts, so that by the time you come around to writing the thing, your task will be facilitated by the ability to copy and paste large sections from the blog.
Part of the frustration that I have had in trying to write something has been the paradox of analysis. My thoughts about this started when I wrote to my supervisor saying that I often find that, when using philosophy to get to the truth, truth is quite uncontentious. The reason that it still seems interesting and important to pursue is simply the learning and the difference that it makes to my life. He wrote back saying that on the matter of truth and non-controversy, I was right. He went on to observe that philosophy is full of matters that either initially seem trivial (and are not) or that initially seem controversial (and are really trivial). One of the most frustrating aspects of arguing a philosophical case is that the ultimate goal of ultimate cogency destroys the purpose of the argument, by making it sound trivial or banal. And now that I am reading this philosophical dictionary, I know why: the paradox of analysis! There is a problem with philosophical analyses of forms such as "BC is the same as A", which is mainly the kind of statement for which one strives in philosophy. If such a statement is correct, then "A" and "BC" have the same meaning, so the statement is trivial--but if the two expressions do not have the same meaning, then the analysis is not correct. Therefore, a philosophical analysis cannot be both interesting (i.e. non-trivial) and correct. I am always finding that in striving to argue with cogency, I end up saying something banal, which will not be taken seriously--and yet if I do not say something banal, then I say something controversial, which can be dismissed offhand.
The difficulty with that argument is that it does not make a distinction between analysis and synthesis. Obviously, the trivial claims are analytic, but the interesting claims are synthetic. It seems to me that philosophy should be capable of arriving at synthetic truths, although I know of no serious study of the means by which it is actually meant to do this. We know how science arrives at its synthetic truths, but not how philosophy is meant to arrive at its.
This is the first time that I have felt like my work has had a direction since I started writing this blog. I remember how laid back I used to be about writing my thesis back when I was doing my MPhil. It usually wouldn't take me more than a day or two to write the ten pages that I needed for my next meeting with my supervisor, and then I would be happy to wait the two weeks it took for my next meeting with him. I always looked forward to our discussions, because I loved watching my work evolve based on those discussions and my own reflection. It didn't matter to me that I wasn't working day and night to produce the work. I felt its progress to an extent that I was content simply to watch it grow in between the meetings and savour the very experience of my own writing in the meantime. Often this would mean re-reading and simulatneously proofreading my work, removing any typographical errors that I found along the way. When I had to re-submit my thesis, my supervisor actually merely looked for some typos that he could get me to correct in lieu of the substantial revision that the external reviewer was demanding, but he couldn't find any. It was an unusually clean manuscript. So he had to settle for a more modest version of the revision that the reviewer had recommended, but made it clear to me that I deserved the MPhil as it stood. I had no qualms, therefore, about making only superficial changes to the work, and it was accepted without critical commentary.
Similarly, I really feel like this dictionary project is giving my book a new direction. Each new five pages of the dictionary is revealing something that I can use for the book in one way or another. One of the more surprising discoveries has been the notion of different modalities: the alethic, the epistemic and the deontic. This can be used to deepen my analogies sometimes made between ethics and epistemology to arrive at a rationality of transmodality. Such a topic, however, would have such a potentially enormous scope that I would have to limit it strictly to something that I could reasonably hope to work out thoroughly in a thousand words. But while I have some steady goal set for the day, I feel like once I have completed it, my work is done, and I can do whatever I like for the rest of the time that I have. In a way, this is good, because it means that I can more easily put my philosophical thoughts to one side for the sake of getting on with the more practical matters of life. However, I also do not want to see the pace of the work slow down either. If you are only going to read ten pages of the dictionary in a day, then you are already committing yourself to over two months' work just to write the outline for the book! I presume that in the meantime you should be writing about the thoughts that you are having about the different sections that you are adding to the book. You can still use your blog as a space to develop those thoughts, so that by the time you come around to writing the thing, your task will be facilitated by the ability to copy and paste large sections from the blog.
Part of the frustration that I have had in trying to write something has been the paradox of analysis. My thoughts about this started when I wrote to my supervisor saying that I often find that, when using philosophy to get to the truth, truth is quite uncontentious. The reason that it still seems interesting and important to pursue is simply the learning and the difference that it makes to my life. He wrote back saying that on the matter of truth and non-controversy, I was right. He went on to observe that philosophy is full of matters that either initially seem trivial (and are not) or that initially seem controversial (and are really trivial). One of the most frustrating aspects of arguing a philosophical case is that the ultimate goal of ultimate cogency destroys the purpose of the argument, by making it sound trivial or banal. And now that I am reading this philosophical dictionary, I know why: the paradox of analysis! There is a problem with philosophical analyses of forms such as "BC is the same as A", which is mainly the kind of statement for which one strives in philosophy. If such a statement is correct, then "A" and "BC" have the same meaning, so the statement is trivial--but if the two expressions do not have the same meaning, then the analysis is not correct. Therefore, a philosophical analysis cannot be both interesting (i.e. non-trivial) and correct. I am always finding that in striving to argue with cogency, I end up saying something banal, which will not be taken seriously--and yet if I do not say something banal, then I say something controversial, which can be dismissed offhand.
The difficulty with that argument is that it does not make a distinction between analysis and synthesis. Obviously, the trivial claims are analytic, but the interesting claims are synthetic. It seems to me that philosophy should be capable of arriving at synthetic truths, although I know of no serious study of the means by which it is actually meant to do this. We know how science arrives at its synthetic truths, but not how philosophy is meant to arrive at its.
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