Wednesday, January 8, 2003

In Vermont, I read: Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald. John Banville says it best:Yet for all its bleakness, this book, like Sebald's other books, is peculiarly invigorating and, dare one say, filled with hope, of no matter how tentative a variety. Sebald's voice is speaking out of the rubble, erecting the edifice of art. Wittgenstein's Poker by David Edmonds and John Eidinow A good yarn of Popper vs. Wittgenstein, sometimes annoyingly facile and frustratingly shallow. Too much personality, not enough exploration of ideas. Philosophy edited for BBC. Still, led me to think about what I see as the central failure of so much epistemology: "knowledge" is a fantasy, what we can measure is relative predictive power, determined by informational and computational limitations; the "problem of induction" comes from a misguided search for absolutes. 9:37:18 PM

Back last weekend from a week in Jay Peak, VT, at the friendly, informal Inglenook Lodge. Great food and bar. Typical Vermont skiing: snow, rain, ice, snow. The last day was good: more than one foot of fresh, snowed all day, the woods were again very skiable, great fun. 9:02:43 PM