Iain Cameron's Diary
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2005-12-22 - 8:14 a.m.

The new storage technology is a bit unpredictable - acting up - and so I am pressing on with Heidegger and Marcuse in the attempt to meet it it half way. I went to Warwick U on Monday afternoon to talk about networks to a couple of researchers there - good fun. Latour and Lancaster cropped up.

While I was there I dropped into the bookshop and bought some Christmas presents for other family members and into the supermarket there for a copy of Philosophy Now and a bottle of Baron Phlippe de Rothschild Cab Sauv 2003 which probably sounds better than it tastes. PN is devoted to Sartre.

I wondered about getting Aristotle�s Metaphysics for myself but then I went home and disinterred my copy of his Physics I and II . I thought that would do for starters. There is a paragraph in it that I need to track down. Reading through Feenberg on Heidegger on Aristotle I thought I was reasonably on top of matters. I think it started when Steve Pheasant and I were fishing in these waters when James was a baby - after we stopped doing bebop on Friday evenings.

As someone (who has the right skills) makes the artefact , the form of the artefact (which includes the benefits the artefact confers - through working well) leads the formation from without rather than simply from within the mind of the maker. Its like the sculptor uncovering the form in the stone or the surgeon acting guided by the form of health in the patient. The big difference with Plato is that the form is in the material world rather than being in the third world where the Mandlebrot set lives.

You might almost invoke this model as a definition of skill - that which can be guided by an excellence to be revealed in the future through purposeful endeavour. You can see that this line of thought is leading straight to Hegelian Marxism and the Frankfurt School - no question about that. Talking of skills, I gave the boss, the 6 part package on this subject which I think is probably OK - it has a lot of new material in it.

I am wondering about asking Andrew K for some guidance on thematic development. I have asked James to get me the Diabelli Variations for Xmas. The idea of development to fulfill some inner potentiality blurs with (mere) variation in this work, I am told. - I think by Adorno. You can see how Adorno coming out of the same background as Habermas might be attracted to the idea of development.

I am enjoying some of the Magix hip-hop music-maker especially the time/pitch-stretcher on the beats.

Last night it was the DTI drinks party at a local hotel and I bumped into some old friends. But I was also introduced to someone who I had read but not actually met before - it turns out that he knows Amin who co-wrote Architectures of Knowledge, a book I have kept going back to in the last few months after I acquired it when Laurence and I went on a book-binge in Blackwells in Oxford. Also managed to drum up some interest in my article on specialist and niche vehicles in the West Midlands.

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