Friday, January 7, 2011

Blog news

I'm working on a post that has veered from Coetzee to swear words.  Hopefully I'll get it under control soon.  In the meantime, here is some news about blogs you might not know about:

  • Susan Sterrett (of Wittgenstein Flies a Kite fame) is starting a blog called matters of proportion
  • DuckRabbit (which is always good) is promising to start up again, just when I had deleted it from my bookmarks
  • I don't have links in the sidebar to any foreign language blogs, but Orienteringsforsøk by Vidar Halgunset and Betänkligheter by Lars Hertzberg are worth reading, even if you have to rely on Google Translate to understand them
  • Thanks to Michael Cholbi at In Socrates' Wake I've discovered Worst Professor Ever, who is no longer a professor and has some interesting thoughts on why she chose to leave academia
  • She also has some criticisms of academic conferences, as does Jon Cogburn.  There might be good reasons for big conferences like the three APA meetings, but I much prefer (and think I get more out of) smaller, more narrowly focused ones.  That seems too obvious to make into a blog post of its own though. 

4 comments:

  1. Tusen takk!

    I started blogging only a couple of months ago (inspired by reading your blog in fact), so I didn't expect to have any readers except for family and friends, and certainly no one not at home in the norwegian language.

    I have been thinking of writing a little more of the stuff in english, but I hesitate because, as Rai Gaita has written quoting Cora Diamond, so much of the things we want to discuss in philosophy goes on in the realm of meaning, where 'language is used at full stretch' -- and my english is nowhere near as elastic as my norwegian. But perhaps I should reconsider now... To accommodate all your english speaking readers that now might find their way to my blog.

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  2. You're welcome. I haven't read all of your posts yet because it feels wrong to rely on software to translate them. As far as I can tell, though, the translations are pretty good, so I'll be coming back. I can't imagine doing philosophy in anything but my first language. Even Wittgenstein didn't try to (with the exception of the Lecture on Ethics). I'm always impressed when people manage it.

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  3. Yes, it is sort of impressive, though perhaps less so from a norwegian perspective than from an english one. Norwegian is a small language. By the time we reach university most of what we read will be in english. So I can imagine doing philosophy this way -- in fact, learning how to write for international publications was a part of my academic training. But still, it does feel a little funny to me too, not least when I'm writing to a largely norwegian speaking audience, as the case is with my blog. Reading philosophy in english is one thing, writing quite another. My thoughts always seem somehow foreign -- or dressed up -- to me in a foreign language. And I'd like to feel at home on my own blog spot, so I maybe not...

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  4. Yes, reading a language and writing in it are very different things. Google translator seems to think you are saying "Hubble" quite a lot, but otherwise it presents you as making pretty good sense. So I think we non-Norwegians can manage if you stick to your native tongue.

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