Before I go any further let me just share the album I’m currently
going mad about, Rustie’s ‘Glass Swords’, which is I am told
‘post-dubstep’. To me it’s a dubstep swaggering beat overlaid with
liquidy melodies. I particularly like Ultra Thizz, Death Mountain and
After Light which have been running through my head these past few
days. Check it out.
Third year is sweet, and bittersweet when I note this: being a third
year is so much better than being a second year, but as soon as I
remember this I then remember that I’ve only got one year of ordinary
degree left. There are two main reasons for third year being so good.
Firstly I’m living in college again which is so great. There’s the
library, the bar, the JCR, lots of friends, Hall, and a place to sleep
and I don’t really need much more. My room is a split set which means
separate study and bedroom so there’s an actual sitting area, so I’ve
had people over for work, StarCraft and just to chat, which is great.
I have a lecture every day so I do actually leave college most days
but if I didn’t have that, I’d probably stay within the quadrangles.
Secondly I’ve finally ‘got’ the process of doing my degree. When I
have too much work e.g. an essay with an imminent deadline it’s a case
of “yeah, got an essay, going to be up late” rather than “oh my
goodness can’t cope so much work going to have to stay up arggggh”. I
know I can do it basically. I’m not so strong on Maths but still, I’m
far calmer about it all because I know how it works. This is
something older friends have echoed when we’ve discussed the
ridiculous fact that I’m as old as they were when I first met them as
a fresher.
An example of this came Monday night. Stayed up until 2am doing Maths
(well, 12:30ish for my maths before I decided I was too tired, then
another good while helping a friend), but at around midnight I was
like, let’s play StarCraft, so we did, then we went back to Maths,
totally casually.
I’m finding that my organisational setup in Org-mode is mostly
redundant nowadays in term time, because all I really do is my work,
and I know what that is, aside from Maths deadlines being all over the
place which I leave Org-mode to keep track of. I have some JCR duties
and some other minor things to be done but they don’t take up very
much time really. This means that I get out of the habit of using
Org-mode to run things and thus I forget the things it is actually
telling me to do, such as JCR stuff or whatever. I will try to find
the time to simplify it a bit to make it more useful.
The fact I’m now not doing much extra-curricular stuff, like most
third years, makes me wonder what I did for first and second year: did
I work hard enough, and if I didn’t, do I actually have anything to
show for it? I mean it’s not like I’m going to say “I didn’t work but
went out drinking a lot so it was worth it”, like some might. Then
again, my work ethic in first year was ten times better than what it’s
been since. This is the influence of my peers. I wish I’d worked
harder. I could have got so much more out of the maths side of my
degree. But then again, I don’t care that much about maths, so is
this valuable? It’s not so long as I was busily doing something else,
and I’m not so sure that that time was well-spent now.
Speaking of the changing years, I’m increasingly comfortable with the
fact that my friends aren’t in my year group because I’ve realised
that I’ve been lucky to land in between several groups of interesting
people to spend time with. I used to wish that I was in the year
above, that I’d been a year older, but actually then I’d miss out on
my friends that are younger than me. All the same I was incredibly
nostalgic in the bar the other night when a group of people who were
third years when I arrived were there after their graduation. I’ve
barely been in the bar this term and being there with them reminded me
of when I had a clique of my own back in first year and even into last
year when several of them were still around for various reasons. I
should write about all the different groups I know at some point.
On Sunday we had a memorial service for Vince, Balliol’s night porter
who died just before term began from cancer; it was a pretty quick
process and he wasn’t in hospital for long. The service was in
Balliol’s chapel and was very well done; religion is good at this sort
of thing and fortunately there wasn’t too much talk of god and zero
talk about heaven/any kind of afterlife. Hearing about someone who
really was a very notable member of the Balliol community—I won’t go
into details of that here as you had to know him I suspect—really does
inspire one to actually live life properly. You know, to get up and
to get on with things and to remain cheerful cos it’s basically all
alright.
As well as his fellow lodge staff and lots of students (and only about
three or four fellows which surprised me), Vince’s family were
present, pretty tearful as you might imagine, and the class divide
struck me powerfully. Vince was pretty badly overweight and so was
basically every member of his family. While the Balliollites wore
suits (even me) and smart dresses the family just had shirts and
perhaps slightly more formal tops. The children had more vacant
expressions, less turned on and aware—I guess this is probably not
actually true, but the appearance was there. This has obviously got
nothing to do with wealth or privilege or who you were born to because
while we have some rich students here, most are really not. It’s just
a case of education, right, that we got lucky with our teachers and
schools? Waking people up. Why can’t we solve this? Certainly won’t
with the Tories in power I guess. And of course I don’t for a moment
suggest there is something better about us wearing suits and looking
more intellectually awake. It was good to be brought together with
the family to remember Vince, whatever else. But the divide, even if
only on a visual level, was still there.
So being occupied with my work, even if I’m not really doing enough,
stops be from being sad. This is good. It sort of puts sorting
out my attitudes on hold, though, which is less good as they do need
sorting eventually.
entitled: Third year | posted: 08:28Z
filed: /writing/diary | 1 comment(s)
It’s the end of 1st week and the freshers are shaking with exhaustion
and I’m figuring out how with a kind of kind curiosity how I’m going
to do this term. My plan to work 9–6 each day is proving to be
untenable because I actually need to work 9am–10pm in order to get
everything done. This realisation deflated me and has left me doing
rather less than either of these timings, unsurprisingly, and so
things are beginning to mount up. An example of this is how on
Wednesday evening I had spent the entire week thus far working on
philosophy, not turning to Maths and following up lectures, so despite
having until 2pm Thursday to hand the essay in I just said, I’m just
going to stay here until this is done because that’s the least bad
option. So I stayed in the library until 2(am), unusual for me but it
worked out the best.
This doesn’t panic or upset me too much anymore. I feel like I’ve
come to an acceptance that this degree can only be done sensibly with
perfect organisation and motivation to follow through, as I’ve
discussed before, and given that no-one can manage that, one is forced
into stupid things like staying up to write essays. I’m just okay
with it, I’m used to it at last, which is really nice. A bunch of
English freshers were up in the library too; starting young I see.
They were in their pajamas and it was amusing to see them all troop
into the library at one point while a bunch of third years dressed up
to go clubbing walked in the opposite direction.
Keeping busy with all this has drastically improved my mood. It’s a
cliche but there is less time to think/ruminate. And I can enjoy the
work when I actually do it, which I do when in Oxford rather than at
home. There is still the issue of concentration though, and I would
like to return to reading about what I wrote about in my last post to
see if I can use mindfulness to improve my focus. An example of this
is that yesterday I started reading some parts of Kant’s First
Critique for Philosophy of Maths. Reading Kant is hard and I decided
that I would rely on secondary texts and make notes from them rather
than attempt to finetooth-comb Kant because there just isn’t time for
that—this is another thing that has come with me being more okay with
Oxford study, in that I’m way more realistic about what it is worth
spending time doing—but unlike other Math/Phils I did actually read
Kant, even if I wasn’t doing so with a super-careful eye.
Actually studying Kant, even if it’s just for one isolated essay,
instead of just going to lots of lectures about him, excites me a
great deal. It’s a simplified picture but in both ethics and
epistemology/metaphysics Kant digs his heels in and attempts to answer
the worldview of the Humeans and the Millians, whose thinking
dominates modern outlooks. Naturalistic reduction of worthwhile human
enquiry to the scientific and of if-you’re-really-honest ethics to
making society one which most people are pretty happy with is how we
tend to want to look at things and I feel the pull myself, but as
always things are not this simple: the magic of Maths cannot be
explained away in empirical terms, and utilitarian ethics are way too
simple. Kant presents the first response in what is probably the
second most influential philosophical work of all time, second only to
Plato’s Republic. We have a priori non-analytic knowledge about the world. And, morality makes the same kind of demand on us practical rational problem solving does. Or so he wishes to claim. Figuring
out whether this can work is really worth doing, if extremely
difficult.
The romantic story is also pretty decent: Hume was famous for being
very “good with the ladies”; Kant never left his hometown and his
virginity. Science is popular and successful and glorious, and
speculative philosophy and pure Maths are uncool and unwanted and dry.
Compare:
You’ve got to follow the story, the people, if you’re going to really
understand the ideas, for philosophy is just the study of worldviews
and people, not logical symbols, hold worldviews—whatever the analytic
philosophers say.
Oh and the term “transcendental aesthetic”, a major idea of Kant’s, is
up there with “propositional calculus” and “algebraic geometry” as
being an incredibly cool name for an intellectual subject.
So, yeah, I’d quite like to be able to actually sit down and read
things.
Something unrelated now is that as of this moment, for the next week,
I’m taking an Internet detox. Since I don’t use social media this
isn’t a big of a deal for me as it might be for some people, but I
definitely want to wake myself up out of browsing. It’s stopping me
from (non-academic) reading, it’s stopping me from sleeping, it’s
stopping me from working. So I’m going to limit myself to e-mail and
my RSS feeds, and I’m going to confine this to two hours a day
tops—this is for cases when there is lots to read but it will probably
take a lot less time than this. Obviously I will still use the
Internet to make sure my servers are still up and to back up my files,
but I have decided to cut out StarCraft, which is in the process of
wrapping up a season anyway and since I’m looking forward to being
placed higher than bronze at the beginning of the next one, I’m happy
to step back. Exception is playing StarCraft with IRL friends, ofc.
And I’m allowed to write blog posts because that doesn’t require
opening up a web browser; web browsing is the basic thing here. A
detox is a good way to figure out what parts of something
all-consuming you actually value, and that’s my aim.
Time to head back the library and read some more Kant.
entitled: 1st week & Internet detox | posted: 14:49Z
filed: /writing/diary | 0 comment(s)
For Plato an important, perhaps man’s most important, intellectual
task was to distinguish appearance from reality. It is a task
required not only of the contemplative philosopher or scientist but,
even more, of the man of action, in particular the administrator or
ruler, who has to find his bearings in the world of appearance and who
must know what is the case, what can be done, and what ought to be
done. To achieve order, theoretical or practical, in the world of
appearances, which is always changing, we must know the reality, which
never changes. Only in so far as we know that, can we understand and
dominate the world of appearance around us. (S. Körner, The Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introductory Essay (London: Hutchinson & Co.,
1960), p. 14)
entitled: Körner on Plato | posted: 10:49Z
filed: /philosophy/maths | 0 comment(s)
The full-strength doctrine carries not only the implication that
non-empirical knowledge can exist but also, unfortunately, that
empirical knowledge cannot exist. This latter thesis could be
sugar-coated with the plea that since Plato is willing to admit what
we call ‘empirical knowledge’ under the name of ‘true belief’, nothing
is changed except the name. … In refusing the term ‘knowledge’ to
propositions of ordinary experience and of the observational sciences
Plato is downgrading quite deliberately those truth-seeking and
truth-grounding procedures which cannot be assimilated to deductive
reasoning and cannot yield formal certainty; and this has enormous
implications, theoretical, and also practical ones, as can be seen in
the exclusion of disciplines like medicine, biology, and history from
the curriculum of higher learning in the Republic. —G. Vlastos,
‘Anamnesis in the Meno’ in Plato’s Meno in Focus (ed. J.M. Day)
(London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 101–2
Fire alarm this morning, I was in the shower, so had to walk across
two quads to the assembly point in just a towel, ouch my feet.
entitled: Vlastos on Anamnesis in the Meno | posted: 08:35Z
filed: /philosophy/maths | 0 comment(s)
