Brice Cummings
@abcummings
~ notes toward an existentially aware philosophy of education ~ renaissanceanimal.com
One of the bears of Queen Wilhelmina State Park decided to allow himself to be perceived (but I didn't have my phone camera handy). The park's name, incidentally, dates back to an 1898 failed attempt by Dutch railroad investors to get the Netherlands queen to visit Arkansas
The Barnes & Noble history section can be hit-or-miss, but in this case Neil Price's _Children of Ash and Elm_ offers a thoughtful interpretation of the "Viking" phenomenon from the point of view of an anthropological archaeologist
This is Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a beautiful, unique place, home to animals and birds found nowhere in the USA outside the Rio Grande Valley, and to some of my best memories. Yet this treasure is being destroyed because of malice, hatred, and stupidity.
New book out by Thomas Zigal, potentially of interest to any number of folks who have encountered its subject's archive of video lectures out somewhere in the wilds of the Internet
"In the modern consciousness, it is the narcissistically humbling recognition of our basic finitude, dictating that being and consciousness can never fully coincide, that entails the inescapable requirement for critique." ~ Benjamin Boysen & Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen (eds.)
Utterly quotidien archaeological objects (like bags) bring you closer to past lives than do, say, statues of the conquerors you'd (hopefully) never have met even had you lived then. Here's a 6,000-year-old prairie dog bag for corn and a deerhide bag for pumpkin seeds. (Oklahoma Museum of History)
Interesting take on Foucault's Nietzsche (& more ambitiously, on what Storm takes to have been the default stance toward history in the humanities / critical theory / cultural studies - excluding history proper - since c. 1970). I'll probably write a review of The Genealogy of Genealogy next week.
North Texas gets a bad rap for not having the towering mountain peaks or lush verdant woodlands of regions further west or east, but every pocket prairie is stunning throughout April and May
Texas' newest state park, in the northernmost stretch of the Hill Country (Palo Pinto County)
"Before social media, academia was more civil and scholars didn't get into so many stupid fights." Eminent sociologists in 1912:
Interesting intellectual history or genealogy of the intertwined development of "religion" and "society" as explananda / explanantia c. 1890-1910 in the work of Tylor, Durkheim, Simmel, and Webber.
"If we thought with things instead of abstract marks, and expressed the nature of these things instead of arbitrary signs: then farewell to error and opinion, for we should find ourselves in the land of truth."
Increasingly essential reading: editions.flammarion.com/le-monde-con...
I've enjoyed 2 days of thought-provoking conversations at Furman during the joint gathering of the North Carolina Philosophical Society & the South Carolina Society for Philosophy. Research comes alive at the moment of live questioning - a vivacity that evades capture in writing.
Moundville Archaeological Park, near Tuscaloosa. This Mississippian city flourished on the banks of the Black Warrior from about the 1100s AD until about the time of DeSoto's entrada into Alabama in 1541-42.
Power went out all over campus, so I'm reduced to taking notes on the geology lecture being given by this squirrel
it's Pick Your Fighter day in Texas The U.S. is in a mess, but there are small concrete things you can do, and helping choose who will be on the ballot in November is one of them