bryankam

bryankam, 3 days ago to philosophy

You can tell #Kuhn is thinking of #Wittgenstein, PI here: "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life." This is from "Scientific Knowledge as Historical Product," 1977, first essay in The Essential Tension and also in The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn.

#philosophy of #science @philosophy @science

bryankam, 11 days ago to Podcast

I released a #podcast! Eternity and Time with Kit Tempest-Walters, on #translating [#Plotinus and other aspects of #philosophy https://pod.fo/e/2393d5 @philosophy

bryankam, 26 days ago to philosophy

#philosophy #Nietzsche "Beyond Good and Evil" @icymi_philosophy @philosophy

A video discussion of a passage of "Beyond Good and Evil"

bryankam, 28 days ago to philosophy

"Conceit is epilepsy and eyesight is a lying sense."
— #Heraclitus (dubious) fragment 46

"All humans by nature desire to know. An indication of this is our liking for the perceptual capacities. For even apart from their utility, these are liked because of themselves — and most of all the one because of the eyes."
— #Aristotle, (dubious) #Metaphysics, 980a21

@philosophy #philosophy #vision

A tiktok video in which I talk about a quote from Heraclitus, "Eyesight is a lying sense"

bryankam, 1 month ago to Podcast

I released a Clerestory #podcast: https://pod.fo/e/228c45

Has the Human Experience Changed? with Isabela Granic @IsabelaG

#Schopenhauer #Nietzsche #Jaynes #Kuhn #Althusser #history #philosophy @philosophy @history

Trailer video in which Isabela and Bryan speak the following text: Isabela: because as soon as we start being attuned to the possibility that there are obviousnesses that we are not aware of, the questions become more interesting and they become historical questions. Bryan: Yeah. Where Neither/Nor nor comes to is that: All concepts are cultural artifacts that are generated by some kind of evolutionary processes. That means they have a birth in time, that means they are subject to evolutionary pressure over time. They shift meanings a lot; they change, and yet they can be so baked into the fabric of society that we don't perceive them as things that have a beginning in history. Right? Mm-hmm. Something like an iPhone now is this just obviously self evidently natural part of our reality. But of course, a few decades ago, that word has no meaning at all. And so that's just an extreme example. But what I'm saying in Neither/Nor nor is that all words are like iPhone. Yes, yes. Which is that, there was a time before there was this word, and knowing about an iPhone doesn't tell you a lot about how microprocessors developed in the 20th century. The developments in different types of computing architecture, and it doesn't tell you anything about the mining techniques required to get the rare earth metals to make these things. It tells you none of that, right? Mm-hmm. And yet all of those are necessary conditions for the existence of the iPhone.

bryankam, 3 months ago to buddhism

Words as "mere expressions." In this passage of the #PaliCanon of #Buddhism (Samyutta Nikaya 1.25), the question is: Does the "Arahant" (who has attained the goal) use the word "I"? The answer is yes, but only conventionally:

https://suttacentral.net/sn1.25/en/sujato

> Skillful, understanding the world’s conventions, they’d use these terms as no more than expressions.”

Bhikkhu Bodhi:
> Skilful, knowing the world’s parlance, He uses such terms as mere expressions.”

bryankam, 3 months ago to philosophy

They seem to have removed this list of Western philosophers who put processes over objects on wikipedia but I appreciated the list while it lasted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy #philosophy @philosophy

bryankam, 3 months ago to philosophy

I've updated this post with recent details about the #philosophy book I'm writing, Neither/Nor https://bryankam.com/neither #literature @philosophy @literature

bryankam, 3 months ago to philosophy

I released a new #philosophy and #literature #podcast: Jaynes, Tolstoy, and Zhuangzi, with Isabela Granic @IsabelaG https://pod.fo/e/21903c @philosophy @literature

bryankam, 4 months ago to literature

Anyone know Dickens well enough to point me to some of his best ephemeral characters? I.e. the ones that are described in a page or two then never mentioned again #literature

bryankam, 5 months ago to literature

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." I wrote a piece about Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox," how he divides up thinkers and writers, and the effects of dichotomies like these https://bryankam.com/d2 #literature #philosophy @philosophy @literature

bryankam, 5 months ago to random

I'm putting out some writing tonight, stay tuned!

bryankam, 6 months ago to philosophy

Anyone have read Eric Havelock? #philosophy

bryankam, 8 months ago to random

Finally got a decent laptop, an AMD one for the first time in probably decades. Lenovo, Ryzen 7.

I'm dual-booting Windows 11 and Arch Linux, again for the first time in decades. Seems to be working well. Less of a hassle than I thought.

Yumi helped get multiple ISOs on one drive. In this case an SD card. I dunno why I used USB sticks for years when I could have used a USB card reader and microSD cards.

EFI is not as much of a nightmare as I feared, works quite well

bryankam, 10 months ago to random

Graham #Greene on keeping life superficial to #write

bryankam, 1 year ago to random

Does anyone know any 18-21 year olds located in Europe who have not been to uni, who might be interested in taking part in this study on social media and mental health?

More information here: https://cutt.ly/RfPpDFj

Please boost :)

bryankam, 1 year ago to random

I'm doing a series of podcasts to lay the groundwork for the book I'm writing, Neither/Nor ❤️‍🔥

Here is the first podcast in a series that I'm doing with @IsabelaG (1) This one is on Buddhist dependent origination https://pod.fo/e/15cef4