Sunday, January 21, 2007

Learning Curves

I'm cramming reading in for sanity's sake. I've finished one and am halfway through another short but important philosophical texts. I took notes on Berkeley's Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and am forcing myself through Hume's Enquiry into the Principles of Human Understanding. Berkeley is hard to follow everywhere he goes; Hume is an extremely pleasingly written disaster. It's amazing how true the blood runs: AngloAmerican analytic philosophy is still running in so many of these assumptions and techniques. I see Quine and Wittgenstein and Austin and Ryle in this phrase and that.

On the other end of life, I'm trying to learn how to introduce adult cats to one another. Both our Alora and Mom's Ippi (for Mississippi) were street cats, strays taken in and thus fighters and survivors. I just really can imagine a lot of disastrous scenarios. Neither is an indoor cat, but Mom's is new and may leave or go out and get killed (our neighborhood is a good deal rougher, petwise, than Mom's was), which would devastate Mom; and ours can no longer keep the area toms at bay and was getting badly mauled, so we brought her, much against her will, in, only a few months ago. And of course Dixie, all hundred pounds of her, is indoors at least at night. Soooo...we'll see, I guess.

3 Comments:

Blogger pickleandcake said...

Introducing cats: if possible, for the first while till you know they're (probably) not going to attack each other, good if you can leave them in separate rooms, especially if no one is home. Then they can smell each other under doors and such. Another tip is to feed them at the same time in different parts of the room, so their gaurds are down and they are having snacks (which = good). Calm tones of voice and reassurance help too, like if the cats are eyeing each other, for someone (a good bunch for calming tones) says something along the lines of "everything's ok". And of course scritches behind the ear always good.

12:24 PM  
Blogger some chick said...

see, this is what's great about dogs - all you gotta do is introduce them on neutral turf, let 'em sniff each other's butts a few times, and you're golden. none of this walking on pins and needles stuff like with cats.

5:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i definitely think lorenloo is on to something, and the principles should be applied to philosophers as well. good snacks help relieve paradigm anxiety syndrome and occasionally help us back down from catfights over those highly detailed decisional and precisional issues.

oh well.

just a thot to sharpen your wit-tgenstein!

1:34 AM  

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