Friday, September 12, 2008

My anti-intellectualism is showing

I'm pursuing a Masters Degree in Military History.

After all these years I had forgotten what I disliked so about University.

Check out this passage from a book I'm wading through

"The logic of historical thought is not a formal logic of deductive inference.  It is not a symmetrical structure of Aristotelian syllogisms, or inference, or Ramean dialectics, or Boolean equations.  Nor is it precisely an inductive logic, like that of Mill or Keynes or Carnap.  It consists neither in inductive reasoning from the particular to the general, nor in deductive reasoning from the general to the particular..."

Oh my,  I think I need to lie down.

Mannie

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mannie,

Good goin'! Have fun reading all those books with colons in the title! Imagine if everybody used them - "No Country for Old Men: A Story of Nothing Good Happening in 1980" by Cormac McArthy. or "The Old Man and the Sea: A Story of an Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway. What a wonderful world it would be.

Paradigms, memes, didactics...happy happy joy joy!

See you this weekend!

Anonymous said...

Ummmmm ... what???

Barry

Anonymous said...

Mannie,
If only they wrote in plain English. If that was the case then I think I would learn what they are trying to share a little more quickly.
Cheers, John

Kevin said...

Ahh...a lovely passage from D.H. Fischer's _Historian's Fallacies_. It's a classic Mannie

Anonymous said...

Mannie, having been through this myself in the last couple of years, my advice to you is to take a nap for a couple of hours. Half of it will make sense when you wake up. The rest is filler. For some reason, eventually everything seems to make sense. Six weeks before you graduate suddenly you discover that you have actually learned something and that you are now smart. The problem is you only get to enjoy being smart for a couple of weeks and then you graduate.

John C. Nicholas