The Greek word synesis – literally, “togethering” – means understanding. In synesis many forms of bringing together are brought together: bringing together one’s own various intuitions, which bring together various perceptions and ideas into understandings, which are then brought together with the rest of one’s understandings in a general understanding of everything. And once something … Continue reading Synesis and intellectual conscience
If an atheist were to make an exhaustive list of all their disbeliefs, they would likely match the items on my own disbelief list. Yet, I am not an atheist. * I share the disbeliefs of atheists, but I share the faith of the religious. I respect the former, but the latter is more important. … Continue reading List of disbeliefs
Until quite recently, design has been monocentric. All the various x-centric design disciplines were named after the single protagonist of the design. User-centered. Employee-centered. Customer-centered. Citizen-centered. In search of something more general and accommodating, most designers have settled on “human-centered’. Human-centered design centers design on the experience of a person. While “human” can, of course, … Continue reading Polycentric virtues
After 20+ years of intense yearning I finally got my ultimate bicycle, a Rivendell. I love beautiful objects, especially beautiful useful objects. This is why I am a designer. But the most beautiful and most useful object of all is the bicycle. Inconceivable amounts of intelligence, love and effort — heart, and soul and strength … Continue reading Rivendell
I unofficially call the kind of thinking I do “design instrumentalism” after Dewey’s flavor of pragmatism, “instrumentalism”. Crudely, “instrumentalism” means approaching ideas as tools used for understanding. My spin on it is: ok, cool, if our philosophies are our tools for understanding, let’s be smart in how we construct and select these tools. Let’s use … Continue reading Another account of design instrumentalism
I am going to quote several pages from Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms that are relevant to my own project. I am going to break it up with comments of my own: The “revolution in the way of thinking” that Kant undertook within theoretical philosophy was based on the basic idea that the relationship … Continue reading Cassirer’s interrupted project
Why is it that reading Nietzsche always sends me back into working in my wiki? I just made a new theme: Reciprocity. And under that page I created three headings: Of help Of harm Of love I will offer a chord of quotes to indicate the theme that unites these three reciprocities. Of help: “Pity … Continue reading Reciprocities
This morning, for no particular reason I’ve been poking around in Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer In addition to the various particular errors we may make regarding particular thinkers, there is also a common mistake that we commit again and again in our interpretation of all … Continue reading Esoterism practice
I recently cooriginated a new kind of design artifact that seems to be taking off in the service design world. I gave it its name. I call it “experience mesh”. The purpose of experience mesh is to represent a multi-actor design without taking any of the actors to be more primary or central than any … Continue reading Experience mesh
Ok, this is going to be ridiculous, but I have some fundamental sorting to do. I need to clarify the relationships between thatness, whatness, whichness and whoness. Laugh away; I’m doing this. The need for clarity began when I stumbled over this line in Schutz: “…in self-knowledge there is a sphere of absolute intimacy whose … Continue reading Scholastoidal definitions
I have (in agonistic dialogue with Nick Gall) found a way to distinguish a relative value from a universal moral principle in pragmatic terms. What, precisely, is the difference that makes a difference if we believe in universal moral principles? My short answer is that if we believe a universal moral principle applies to a … Continue reading Moral meta-judgments
I move around in a world of enworldments. When I meet a person, their enworldment is what I am trying to intuit. When an artifact — object, environment, artwork, anything — attracts my attention, it is because it implies an enworldment with a person at its center. At times I’ve wanted to call a particular … Continue reading Enworldments
Chantal Mouffe taught me the concept of agonism: that conflict among adversaries is an essential feature of liberal democratic life, and that the attempt to suppress such conflict and to treat our adversaries as enemies is the root of illiberalism.
I am trying to understand at least four (possibly) kindred philosophies before I finish and release my own: 1) Deleuze/Guattari, 2) Whitehead, 3) Jaspers and 4) Spinoza. Deleuze and Guattari’s late collaboration What Is Philosophy? outlines the components of philosophy and the relationships among them as philosophies are brought into existence. There is a lot … Continue reading Deleuze and Guattari on the philosophical trinity
Sunday morning I was talking with Zoe about different varieties of unattainable ideals, and further developing a distinction I made last week, when I criticized altruism for belonging to a misconception of being and relationship that produces ineffective practices and bad results, contrasting it with “impossible” ideals which can never be fully actualized but which … Continue reading Glossary of unattainable ideals
Maybe this is true: Levinas :: Buber ::: Deleuze :: Whitehead If :: is the symbol of an analogy, ::: should be the symbol for an anomalogy. Ideally ::: would be arranged as a little hexagon made of 6 dots, to indicate that the system of analogies can crisscross at strange grid-defying angles. Levinas :: … Continue reading An anomalogy
Because design instrumentalism views knowledge as a result of conceptualizations of perceptions of particular experiences — that is, as a product of one of myriad possible praxes capable of producing different and even conflicting truths — with a particular set of design tradeoffs — that is, with varying degrees of descriptive, predictive, prescriptive, logical, practical, … Continue reading The pluralism of design instrumentalism
The best name for my approach to philosophy might be “design Instrumentalism”, a variant of John Dewey’s instrumentalism. According to Wikipedia, Instrumentalism is a pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey that thought is an instrument for solving practical problems, and that truth is not fixed but changes as problems change. Instrumentalism is the view that scientific … Continue reading Design Instrumentalism
This passage from Bruno Latour expresses a humility that I feel is disappearing from the world: “It is us, the social scientists, who lack knowledge of what they do, and not they who are missing the explanation of why they are unwittingly manipulated by forces exterior to themselves and known to the social scientist’s powerful … Continue reading Reject the conflict
Our humanity is bound up with freedom of interpretation. The capacity to interpret and respond effectively is what is meant by the word judgment. To the degree an individual’s capacity to interpret is denied and interpretations suppressed, that person’s individuality and humanity is denied. * Society always requires some degree of denial — tempering — … Continue reading Judgment and liberalism