Canterbury, Maidstone and Pembury Visits

So after seeing all those wonderful old buses in Faversham i cantered to Canterbury to do the phone shop visit, and then traveled over to Maidstone to do the Pret coffee shop visit.

I had a filter coffee with an avocado salad wrap. The barista overfilled the cup of coffee which when placed on the wobbly table spilled all over the table and my wrap. I complained. The barista then had to make a new wrap up for me , and the supervisor apologized for the problem and gave me my money back. Result!

Then i did a Costa Coffee shop over at the Tunbridge Wells hospital just outside of Pembury. This is the first i have been inside the place. I had an Americano coffee with a tasty Belgian Chocolate torte. Caught the bus back to Tonbridge and then to Maidstone where i took this picture of one of the arcades in the shopping area.



At this time of the day it was too late to catch the last bus going to Teynham so i did my usual excursion up to Chatham and  Rochester and catching the train home that way. The bus service after six in the evening is very shambolic and uncoordinated, which when you compare it with the service in the Brighton area, is a disgrace really.

This morning i had some refreshing eggs on toast and a coffee topped up with a bit of cream. Yeah, naughty but nice!

Book 44 - Firedrich Nietzsche "The Genealogy Of Morals"

Friedrich Nietzsche "The Genealogy Of Morals" (Dover Publications)




Of all the books by or about Nietzsche, I think this particular edition of the Genealogy would be the best place for the novice to start. The introduction by Clark (a very well regraded Nietzsche scholar) is excellent and provides a workable framework for interpreting a text (and an author) that can often be difficult to decipher.

The scholarly apparatus is exhaustive; the editors provide end notes that cover nearly every page in the original text and help the reader to make sense of Nietzsche's sometimes unclear allusions and provide voluminous biographic and bibliographic detail covering both Nietzsche and the interlocutors he mentions in the text (as well as a few he merely alludes to).

As for the text itself, I think it is notable primarily for the genealogical analysis of the concepts of good/right-bad/wrong and for a glimpse of Nietzsche's "perspectivalist" epistemology in the third section.

These views have been highly influential (although not among philosophers as such) over the past century and anyone that wishes to understand the course and trajectory of 20th century thought should be aware of them. Nietzsche is a master stylist, so the reading is fun as well as thought provoking.

Of course, the central question, considering Nietzsche qua philosopher, is this: Does Nietzsche get things right?

I think it's pretty clear that the answer is "no". Although his castigation of scientific atheism as an extension (perhaps the highest extension) of religious asceticism shows depth and brilliance, he doesn't ever give us any solid arguments for thinking that truth itself hinges on particular standards of evaluation. Nietzsche seems to me to be skeptical of the idea of truth as correspondence (the standard view) because it situates truth outside of life. It makes truth something that transcends individual human beings. Perhaps this is true, much like Kant's assertion of the categorical imperative, and given Nietzsche's rejection of any and all transcendent things it makes sense that he'd want to reject truth conceived of in this way. What isn't clear is that he can do this, that is, that his view is warranted. The fact that the correspondence of theory of truth has implications that Nietzsche finds repulsive is no reason for thinking that it's false.

Furthermore, without some notion of truth as correspondence, it's not clear that his earlier critique of moral concepts has any real bite. And here lies the problem, because his text is so allusive it is difficult to ascertain where he really stands in relation to those before him such as Kant or Hegel but in a way his rambling prose heads the way to existentialists such as Sartre.

In the end, i enjoyed this book of three essays, and as an introduction to his ideas it is probably a good place to start for he uninitiated.

Sunshine

Wow! What a hot day, best day yet. A good 24 degrees centigrade and i was outside in the garden in a deckchair lapping it up. Apparently it will be hotter tomorrow. Bring it on.

This should help to develop the tan a bit more. I do tan easily these days, but when i was a kid i tended to go all red and horrible when the sun came out. Strange how things change.

Sax In The City

I was listening to BBC Radio 6 earlier this day. Iggy Pop has a two hour radio show and today it was called "Sax In The City", which was mostly all jazz. I really enjoyed the programme. Here are just some of the tracks he played, all from hs own personal collection. What a cool dude -

Pharoah Sanders - Upper and Lower Egypt Part 2

Dexter Gordon - Scrapple From The Apple

Archie Shepp - Blase

That last track is so powerful, free jazz at its most eloquent.