information graphics, diagrams, flowcharts, mind maps etc

…which relate to #introphil how? Surely logic cannot be irrelevant (especially not to thinking, knowledge and questions, all central to Introduction to Philosophy. OK I admit it: the real reason is that this graphic reminded me of a recent comment exchange/conversation with @Gordon_L about mind maps and the Wordle image I created for my last #introphil post. This is a flow chart because of a) that reminder and b) I couldn't find one about mind maps. There may not be a mind map humor category although some can be amusing, if not intentionally so. The same could be said of some philosophical arguments. Could the model below adapt to a Gettier Case?

#introphil: Into Week 2 but still stuck in Week 1

Behind on blogging, I resort to meatball textual analysis: a Wordle of the Week 1 transcript. Note that thinking and questions rank much higher than answers or even meaning. Encouraging...

thoughts on starting #introphil

…in no particular order, counting #introphil, I am now in…four MOOCs! (not counting CM11 or POTcert):  #etmooc, EDC and #mmooc13, five counting soon to start Complexity from Santa Fe Institute. Whatever was I thinking? Nice to "see" Gordon and Jaap. A number of familiar names/avatars from Fantasy SF course (later morphing into an active post-course book club) are there too although few blog and have yet to see signs of any on my rare Forum visits.  I wonder who else I know from online will be there? Most of the usual connectivist MOOC bunch sticks to "about pedagogy and elearning" courses.  

Best #CityReads of the Week

…The Atlantic Cities' weekly roundup by Sommer Mathis of the most intriguing articles about cities and urbanism we've come across in the past seven days. Share your favorites on Twitter with #cityreads.

"In the Traffic of Cairo's DIY Highway Exit, an Urbanist Movement Grows," Joseph Dana, Next American City

City, Empire, Church, Nation

…by Pierre Manent, City Journal Summer 2012. Is modernity a condition, a place along the way, a destination ever disappearing into the horizon as we approach? Unapproachable. Aleph or illusion. Ever the city at the center...

We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where.... 

Modernity is characterized by movement, a movement that never reaches its end or comes to rest....The movement of the West began with the movement of the Greek city....To be more precise, Western movement began with internal and external movements of the Greek city—that is, with class struggle and foreign war. Cities were the ordering of human life that brought to light the domain of the common, the government of what was common, and the implementation of the common. The Greek city was the first complete implementation of human action, the ordering of the human world that made action possible and meaningful, the place where men for the first time deliberated and formulated projects of action. It was there that men discovered that they could govern themselves and that they learned to do it. The Greek city was the first form of human life to produce political energy—a deployment of human energy of a new intensity and quality. It was finally consumed by its own energy in the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War.

Subsequent Western history was, on the whole, an ever-renewed search for a political form that would recover the energies of the city while escaping the fate of the city—the city that is free but destined to internal and external enmity. 

So what would the Greek peripatetic be the original flâneur? Read the rest at City, Empire, Church, Nation by Pierre Manent, City Journal Summer 2012