[Xmca-l] Re: Spinoza on xmca

[Henry G. Shonerd III]

Mike and David,
This is seriously getting to be a club that I, like Groucho,  won't join, if it takes me as a member. I think all of this seriously evokes Andy's contention, in his notes for the upcoming presentation at the ISCAR conference (which XMCA has gotten) that, "Adults can grasp true concepts, and can change society, and a social theory has to treat adults as adults, and this is what the projects approach allows us to do. " If "adult" means the same as "serious", you can see why I have my doubts about joining the Unserious Scholar Club. On the other hand, if I can have some fun, as in the laughing warrior (forget gender stereotypes here, and dare me to talk about Jihad), then that's what I'm talking about. Incidentally, I loved Andy's notes. I could so relate it to CG. The emergent character of project realization he talks about applies very well to discourse, as you can see in the articles by Langacker I have sent out. Discourse IS a project and its outcome is typically not entirely clear in the minds of the interactants as they negotiate its waters. XMCA, of which this email is a "turn",  is a prototypical "work in progress", as Andy puts it, since we clearly don't know where this will all end up. But I hope it can be fun along the way.
Henry




On Sep 6, 2014, at 1:51 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:

> Hi Henry-- There goes my pile of books that need to be read before bed time!
> Spinoza goes up there right next to Dead Souls.
> 
> However, David having already claimed the mantle of unserious scholar, and
> you having made the same claim, I am afraid that I have to make precisely
> the same claim on the unrefutable grounds that no one pays me any longer
> for what I do so I get to be as unserious as i can seriously be!
> mike
> 
> 
> On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 12:33 PM, Henry G. Shonerd III <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Mike,
>> All I can say now is that Spinoza is famously quoted as having said, "The
>> more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become
>> a lover of what is." This quote happens to appear in the introduction to a
>> very popular self help book, Loving What Is, by Byron Katie (2002). I
>> bought the book , obviously, because I thought I needed help. It did, but
>> it also introduced me to Spinoza. And that has been a deeper "help". So,
>> from a personal perspective, I can totally understand how Spinoza and
>> periizhvanie would be connected. For all of you ESL teachers out there, who
>> doesn't remember Krashen on the "affective filter" and I have been seeing a
>> lot on character and education lately. Oh yes, and how failing is important
>> to eventual success. Teasing out issues in the education of
>> non-mainstreamers, and recognizing how the current system is toxic for
>> everyone, I think Spinoza's analysis and the narrative of his life are
>> powerful. Vygotsky hits me the same way. Cantor, the mathematician, and
>> Pierce, the philosopher/logician/semiotician, also constantly come up for
>> me. They were ridiculed by the received cognoscenti of the time, so much so
>> that the suffered mental breakdowns. But they pushed on to develop tools in
>> math and semiotics that seem to me are complementary with Vygotsky. Again I
>> get to take the role of unserious scholar here, so think of my thoughts as
>> gaming on line and don't take the game too seriously.
>> Henry
>> 
>> On Sep 5, 2014, at 6:42 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi David and Henry--
>>> 
>>> David-- I was intrigued by your comment that Spinoza is a controversial
>>> topic on xmca. I googled Spinoza on the main web page and came up with 4K
>>> plus hits (!!). My own impression is that few on this list, me included,
>>> have engaged in serious study of Spinoza let alone the imprint of Spinoza
>>> on Vygotsky.
>>> 
>>> What is the nature of the controversy? What is at stake? The topic is of
>>> particular interest to me at present because I have been part of
>>> discussions with people who are focused on Vygotsky's use of perezhivanie
>>> in his later work, where the relation of emotion and cognition is a
>> central
>>> concern and Spinoza is clearly relevant.
>>> 
>>> Henry and anyone interested in chasing down what has been written about
>>> various topics in xmca chatter, take advantage of the nice google search
>> at
>>> lchc.ucsd.edu.
>>> 
>>> mike
>>> 
>>> (who enmeshed in the sense/meaning distinction in all of its multilingual
>>> confusifications at present)
>> 
>>