One draft of a co-authored piece, sent off Friday morning: done.
One piece of substantial and enjoyable assistant-editorial work, sent off Friday evening: done.
One draft lesson plan of a session for our arriving faculty workshop: done.
One enormously pleasant afternoon — today — showing an old, good friend around campus, said friend enthusiastic and intrigued by all the military training going on with M16s and camouflage and the balance between that training and the academic project: done.
(And I kinda wish it wasn’t done. Today was a fine day.)
Still to do before summer’s end: a quick-turnaround response piece that’s going to occupy a lot of my time for the next few weeks.
Still to try to do before summer’s end: condense my dissertation’s overarching argument about political economy and teaching writing in the information age into a digestible piece and send it out.
Still to do before year’s end: turn my conference presentation on Tacitus and weblog rhetoric into something to send out.
Still to do right away: stay in better touch with old, good friends.
Since you’re writing about things academic today, here’s a question about the academy on the Hudson for you–does West Point have summer school?
Indeed they do. And, as with all things military, it has an acronym: STAP, for Summer Term Academic Program. There’s also Cadet Basic Training (CBT, but most refer to it as “Beast Barracks”), which began July 2.
I see you have made some comments about Sraffa. There is important work being done in the historiography of set theory which sheds important light on Sraffa’s mathematical orientation. Here is a comment on it:
Ryskamp, John Henry, “Paradox, Natural Mathematics, Relativity and Twentieth-Century Ideas” (May 19, 2007). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=897085
John, my comments on Sraffa were made from a position of scant knowledge, as I tried to make clear. I’m grateful for your input, and I’ve taken an initial look at your paper and realized that my lack of mathematical knowledge was certainly an immense barrier to understanding Sraffa and critiques of Sraffa. My position as a non-mathematician and non-economist is in trying to understand the value of student writing as work with technological inputs; in trying to understand it as production after Marx. Sraffa, in my scant understanding, offered a strong critique of counting inputs as a way of measuring the economic value of work. I’d be grateful and very interested in hearing how you might critique these small steps I’m trying to take in applying economic analyses to the study of how writing gets done. Can you tell me more?
I think you have to step way, WAY far back. As you will see from the paper, Aristotle thinks paradoxes have to be avoided. If there are no paradoxes (and Zeno’s is not one), then the entire mathematical program of the west has, for a LONG time, been concerned with putting logically irrelevant statements in arguments (such as the notion of “natural” coincidence in the relativity of simultaneity), in order to make sure arguments don’t wind up generating paradoxes.
But there is no evidence that any argument generates a paradox, so this idiotic research “program” comes to an end after a brief 2500 years. Whew!
So we have to start very far back and very “deeply.” Here’s something to try: so far, only one argument has invalidated the Pythagorean theorem. It is general relativity, under which conditions the theoremis invalid. Fine.
However, it is clear now that we cannot logically get to general relativity, because–since I have spotted “natural” coincidence–we cannot logically get past the relativity of simultaneity. Does this mean that the Pythagorean theorem is internally consistent?
I think not. I think it contains an impermissible “natural” coincidence. But where? I don’t know–but that is THE question of the moment.
I think you could approach it through Sraffa, because his work is probably an indirect comment on these issues. Not that he knew this, but given the state of the art, YOU need to know that. It means that you would have to treat EVERY word in Production of Commodities as a term of art (which is what I suggest, in my paper, we do with ALL arguments from now on).
Once you do, I think you will discard all questions–now antiquarian–regarding Sraffa and Marx as “economists.” I don’t really see any disciplinary boundaries being internally consistent anymore. All of them are permeated by natural mathematics, which is utterly bogus and hogwash (if you want to see just what nonsense it is, read Maddy’s polemic, NATURALISM IN MATHEMATICS).
The so-called “achievements” of the past can only be of use to us now if they shed light on what is wrong with the Pythagorean theorem.