[Xmca-l] Re: Spinoza on xmca

[Henry G. Shonerd III]

Greg,
Thank you for you good words and great question. I knew about Bakhtin, but have been finding him everywhere in the articles and chat of XMCA over the last week. Seriously.
Henry

On Sep 13, 2014, at 2:26 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:

> I would hope that a certain amount of irreverence would be dear to most
> people on this list!
> But seriously Henry, have you come across Bakhtin's work at all?
> Seems like another that you might want to throw in with the crowd of
> healthy irreverents.
> -greg
> 
> 
> On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 2:48 PM, Henry G. Shonerd III <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> 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)
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 882 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson