Hello all, I'm Michael. I'm currently an undergraduate at the University of Chicago finishing up a degree in English Literature. I went to Deep Springs college for a couple of years (26 guys in the desert studying the classics, doing farm and ranch work, and tasked with college governance and administration) where I learned how to read and got a pretty good foundation in the history of philosophy and some classics of literature. I now study a lot of poetry and literature but have kept up dabbling in philosophy by chatting up first and second years regarding their sosc papers (they're a lot more tolerable than most philosophy undergrads who think they know it all or who regurgitate the same old cud) . Other than that I do a bit of work with magazines and publishing, and most recently have been doing administrative works for coops. More generally I'm interested in education, and my thesis work has been on the problems of humanism--how can we learn how to live from fiction or philosophy?
I've only read a little bit of William James for a class I took on his brother, Henry James--a few of his essays refuting traditional conceptions of consciousness in favor of radical or pure experience. I found it compelling but felt he didn't sufficiently account for memory, at least in the stuff I read, as well as his brother or their friend Henri Bergson. I'm interested in delving further, especially now that I've gotten a firmer grasp on the turn-of-the-century phenomenology scene by way of a class on Levinas. In general I like seeing how different smart thinkers depict our our experience of the world, and find it helpful to figure our the stakes of their claims or depictions. Once I understand what an author is worried about, I find it easier to situate and comprehend the thrust of what they're saying. In particular, I've noticed that psychologists and philosophers in the wake of the "discovery of the unconscious" have a lot to try to explain, and a lot at stake in how they do so.
Thanks! Michael --
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Wang D damonwang@uchicago.edu wrote:
Oh, no. I just realized everybody on this list knows me from Chicago. So my name is Damon and I live in New Jersey near New York City. Sorry for the confusion.
Wang
2013/12/8 Wang D damonwang@uchicago.edu:
Hi, my name is Wang and I live in Fort Lee. I studied sciences and then went to EMT school, so my academic background is pretty irrelevant. I'm generally interested in categorizing things and studying different variations of the same phenomenon because that often distinguishes the fundamentals from the incidentals.
Wang
2013/12/8 Steven Lucy slucy@moomers.org:
Hi everyone,
I spent my academic career waffling between social sciences and hard
sciences
before saying fuck it all to start a produce store. I'm looking
forward to
this group because (spoiler alert) my new year's resolution is to read
more
books. It's amazing how easy it is to fall off the intellectual
reading wagon
once you exit academia.
I live in Chicago and have for a long time, but I've also lived a lot
of other
places.
Steven _______________________________________________ WilliamJames mailing list WilliamJames@moomers.org http://mailman.moomers.org/mailman/listinfo/williamjames
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