I have been keeping a journal for most of my life. In 2017 I lost about 4 years worth of my thoughts to the tyranny of the Chinese post, as I packed them up to have them shipped back to my home as I was leaving Hangzhou, only to find the box ransacked and everything written (or of value) to be gone.
This included perhaps 6 notebooks of journals and notes, including a half-written novel.
Oh well.
It was the impetus needed for me to start putting a lot of my thoughts online. Still, I do this with a whole lot of timidity. I don’t feel comfortable speaking my mind online, and I am not sure why so many people do (although, from the amounts of people online who find themselves with a terminal case of ‘foot in mouth disease’, I am guessing a lot of people haven’t thought shit through very much). Most of us don’t have much of interest to say.
One would hope Luciano Floridi does. Floridi is a professor of information philosophy and ethics at the university of Oxford and the university of Bologna. He is highly credentialed, and works on some pretty cutting edge stuff. I stumbled upon him some time ago when he released The Fourth Revolution, a book which, like many things in philosophy made minor waves in just a few small circles and was largely unnoticed outside of those circles.
But Notes to Myself isn’t a book on philosophy. It is quite literally notes that Floridi had scribbled for himself. And in that, they remind me a bit of my own journal entries at times. However, my own notes were much, much less sophisticated.
Floridi’s book was maybe 4euro on Amazon, so gambling on a pamphlet of someone’s coffee thoughts did not seem like a huge loss if it went south. It also consisted of 30 pretty short entries, so it was easy to read one here and there and not feel bogged down by the project of doing so. And most importantly, many of the entries were interesting and thought provoking even where I disagreed (he is right that double negative have taken on a new meaning in English, but he is wrong to think it has anything to do with the law of excluded middle. Language isn’t logic, damnit!).
Failures in Polymathy 