Negative thoughts are of the other, but in oneself. They cannot harm what they are of, but they can pollute and disturb what they are in.
Category: Sage Advice
How to Keep your Home a ‘Safe Space’ and Issue a Reality-Based ‘Trigger Warning’
Loaded with double-aught buckshot, the instrument of home defense depicted below has the power to separate the soul from the body in a manner most definitive. Just showing this bad boy to a would-be home invader is a most effective way to issue a 'trigger warning' in a reality-based sense of that phrase.
But let Uncle Bill give you a piece of friendly advice. You really don't want to have to shoot anyone. No matter how worthless the scumbag, he is some mother's son and a bearer, somewhere deep inside under a load of corruption, of the imago Dei. Taking a human life must always be the last resort, and this for moral, legal, prudential, and psychological reasons. You should aspire to die a virgin in this regard, assuming you are still 'intact.'
So here's my advice. Secure your home so that the miscreants cannot get in. That's Job One.
And of course never, ever, vote for criminal-coddling, criminal-releasing and gun-grabbing Democrats or liberals and always speak out loudly, proudly, and publicly for your Second Amendment rights. It is the Second that is the real-world back-up of the First and the others.
New Day, Old Thoughts
It's a new day. Why begin it with the rehearsal of old thoughts, some negative, all useless?
Write it Down!
If you are blessed by a good thought, do not hesitate to write it down at once. Good thoughts are visitors from Elsewhere and like most visitors they do not like being snubbed or made to wait.
Let us say a fine aphorism flashes before your mind. There it is is fully formed. All you have to do is write it down. If you don't, you may be able to write only that an excellent thought has escaped.
"But there is more where that one came from." No doubt, but that very one may never return.
Parents
Honor them for what is or was honorable in them. As for the rest, forgive and forget, or at least forgive. Honor the honorable; forgive the rest.
Living Well and Living Large
One can live well without living large. And in most cases living large will militate against living well. Schopenhauer's exaggeration is apropos:
"Every limitation makes one happy." It is true. In many if not most cases, restrictions, limitations, reductions in options, and the like are conducive to contentment and well-being.
But only up to a point, of course.
It Pays to Publish, but Don’t Pay to Publish
This just over the transom:
Dear Colleague,
British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science (ISSN: 2278-0998) is an OPEN peer-reviewed INTERNATIONAL journal. We offer both Online publication as well as Hard copy options. Article Processing Charge is only 100 USD as per present offer. This journal is now publishing Volume 10.
Only 100 semolians? Get out of here, and take your crappy journal with you.
If you need to pay to publish, then you shouldn't be publishing. It is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets. If I can do it, so can you. Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications. My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places. When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work. But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals such as Nous and Analysis.
Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head.
1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it. Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.
2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic.
3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.
4. Advance a well-defined thesis.
5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for. Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referees.
6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal. Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.
7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof. Never protest editorial decisions. You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink. You have no right to have your paper accepted. You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys' network. In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.
Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.
Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday
Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 37 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978. But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 37 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.
Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 291st birthday. Sapere aude!
Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic
Related: Right and Wrong Order
The Additivity of Small Amounts of Money
He who is penny-foolish will also be pound-foolish.
The Useless Rehearsal of the Useful
Avoid not only useless thoughts, but also the useless rehearsing of useful thoughts.
Desiderata
To live beyond society, beyond the need for recognition and status. To live in truth, alone with nature and nature's God and the great problems and questions. There are the ancient dead ones for companionship. They speak across the centuries. With them we form a community of the like-minded in nomine scientiae.
Philosophy and Livelihood
Recently over the transom:
I'm wondering, as a 17 year old early entrant to university who's looking for a direction in his life: how do you manage to make a living from what you do?
Also, keep up the great work!
I have been asked this question many times and have written several posts in reply. Here are three of them:
Sage Advice
If only sages proffered Sage Advice, none would be.
Higher Than the Gold Standard
Think about others as you would have them think about you.
An unattainably high ideal? As things are, "If thoughts could kill, everybody would be dead." (Schopenhauer)
The Low Intellectual and Moral Level at Oxford and Other Universities
The piece ends with good advice:
. . . if you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel . . . . The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values.
The sad fact is that if you love education, revere the life of the mind, care about the pursuit of truth, think young people need to receive wisdom from their elders, and value moral clarity, the university is the last place you would want to send your 18-year-old.