I think in every couple of million averages Joes you get a person capable of brilliance, someone with a rare spark, that if ignited changes the way the whole world functions.

Through out history there have risen up individuals capable of the most amazing feats. You find them scattered through out the recorded world. Alexander the Great, Rasputin, Napoleon Bonaparte. They arise from no where and are able to alter the course of history. Who are they, where do they come from, how are they able to arise against the herd and change the whole discourse of reality?

Why were they incapable of killing Rasputin after poisoning, shooting, hanging, castrating, and then weighing him down with weights, and dropping him into a hole in the ice? How was Napoleon able to rise up and change a thousand years of military theory and institution to become one of the greatest generals in the history of European conquest? How did Alexander manage to invade and defeat the sprawling empire of Persia?

They all studied some precise method of mental discipline. Rasputin was a Siberian monk, and studied under various Russian mystics, he was able to perfect his powers of hypnotism, mesmerism, and controlling physical powers inherent in the body. Alexander the Great studied under Aristotle, the Godfather of logic, poetics, Virtue ethics, and metaphysics. Napoleon studied microbiology, he was later able to implement his microbiological thinking into his army strategies to come up with new techniques that utilised management of command and discipline on the battlefield on a microbiological level.
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I don’t know, it makes me wonder. . .

I am just hanging out for the Holidays.

I got the money together for both Wittgenstein, and the 2 Latin courses.

I realised at the end of my first year, at university, I was not applying myself as well as I could be to the prospect of learning and thinking as an absolute. It’s all very well to be smarter, and have a little more background knowledge than everyone else, but I knew at the time I was drifting through my subjects, with credits, distinctions, but still drifting.

I figured I was just like an animal performing tricks. That is I wasn’t really learning anything new, just applying skills I picked up, or that were generic to most people who’d done a few years of high school or a Tafe bridging course.

Then I got knocked a six by Quilter’s Philosophy of Language course, and the Latin course I did at the annual Grammar school at Sydney Uni.

By the time I figured this out, the Holidays were over

Thank Fuck I figured out what I needed to learn so early. I’d hate to get into my third year and have only a literary understanding of philosophy, and a hazy one at that. All very well for doing essays and bringing in the marks, but fuck, I don’t want to be stuck on Cartesian dualism or Hobbs and the social contract. I want the discipline of philosophy, the instrument of thinking and analysis, I want it holas bolas, like Hegal, like the analytical schools, like Aristotle. I don’t want the answers, I had enough of them in first year, now what I want is method, and not just as a wanky abstract meditation exercise, I mean fair enough you need your tricky demons and your backwards self analysis and the like, but philosophy of mind has well and truly advanced over the last four hundred years.

How amazing is it they developed a method of reasoning, a language for arguing, so that you can offer a logical proof as a thesis statement in your essay? People are under the assumption that there is no right or wrong answer in the humanities, it’s not like mathematics, but that’s entirely nonsense. With Fuzzy logic it is possible to offer a qualitative analysis of a painting, a novel, a sculpture, a play, because it is a logical system of non absolutes, a logical system that works like the human mind, in shades of meaning. The predicate calculus gives us a method for thinking and arguing a valid thesis, but more than this, it gives us a calculus for taking apart ideas, and mapping things to ontological space (truth functions) so we can understand which arguments are conductive, and which arguments are nonsense. So truly mastered in the humanities, it is a priceless skill for arguing and reasoning history, English, philosophy, even theology.




Syllabus for the Holidays.

LOGIC: HOW I CONQUERED THE HUMANITIES

The Formal Logics

Elementary Logic 1901
John Russel.

An Introduction to logical thinking. 1979
David J. Crossly.

The predicate and mathematical logics.

First Course in Mathematical Logic 1964
Shirley Hill

Elementary symbolic logic 1973
D. Ulrich

Introduction to the logical calculus. 1963
Dinkines

Advanced optional

Introduction to Symbolic Logic applications. 1954
Rudolf Carnap.

Philosophy of Logics 1979
Susan Haack.

Philosophy of language. The Routledge introduction
William C. Lycan

Fuzzy Logic
Paul Freiberger

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ENGLISH: ROAD MAP TO ETYMOLOGY

Runes

Runes
Catharine Duane

Runic workbook
Prepared by Tony Willis.

Old English/ West Saxon/ The King’s English.

Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader: Fifteenth Edition

Old English Grammar with dialects.
E.E. Wardale.

______________________________________________________ Latin Studies - Various



Middle English

Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, with grammar and Glossary.
Prepared by Keneth Sisam

Additional texts for study

- Thomas Malory. (Complete works)
- Chaucer

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PHILOSOPHY

"To understand Wittgenstein is to understand why philosophy is dead." (That's the coolest thing I've ever heard, how could I not study him?)

Wittgenstein (Focus on)
- The Tractartas
- Wittgenstein’s Note books 1914 -1916
- Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic

Scaffolding
- Wittgenstein On Mind and Language
David G. Stern
- Wittgenstein by
David Pears

As well as the six week course on Wittgenstein

Frege
- Frege: Major Philosophical writings
Peter Geache & Max Black Translation (1st Edition 1951)

Scaffolding
- Frege by
Anthony Kenny

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LITERATURE ENGLISH

Jacobean to Restoration Studies (various)

Marlowe
Webster
Shakespeare
Johnson
Dryden
Rochester
Donne
Spenser

As well as workshops and a textbook to work through on versification.

_________________________

Ambitious as all fuck, YEAH, but with the peace of God I'll scale the heavens with a drain pipe, just like one of Dicken's Convicts. I am like so pumped and ready for this.