Who Were the Sea Peoples?

You are at a boring Zoom meeting, and naturally, you are napping, or playing Word with Friends, or doing shots of tequila... anything but paying attention. And suddenly, you hear "I think [ YOUR NAME HERE ] can comment on this..." Do you panic? Do you ask, "What was the topic?" Do you pretend to have been in the bathroom? No way! Because you have prepared... by keeping a book by, say, Hegel, or Husserl, or Derrida, ready at your side, and reading this blog post. When you hear your name called, just pick up the book, flip to any page (although avoid the editor's introduction, as it might be too comprehensible), and just begin reading. For example, picking a random page from Cartesian Meditations , I would read: "The variation being meant as an evident one, accordingly as presenting in pure intuition the possibilities themselves as possibilities, its correlate is an intuitive and apodictic consciousness of something universal. The eidos itself is a ...

I am going to tell a short version of a story. The long version has lots of interesting details, many twists and turns, Numerous subplots, a myriad of secondary characters, and so on. I am going to leave all of that out in my super-condensed version. nevertheless, I think this “Cliff Notes“ edition of the story still captures its highlights successfully. In the 17th century, England was in great turmoil. The English fought two civil wars and at the end of the second, a class that might be called the “rising bourgeoisie“ emerged triumphant. And having one, then actually wanted to put in place a political system reflecting the values of well-off protestant bourgeoisie, in favoring that same sort of person. Now at the “commanding heights“ of their nation, the winners were in a position to put that system in place, but they had to solve an important problem: they were now in charge. But how were they to justify their position to those who were not in charge? Their problem arose from...

I just wanted to share another Zeno analysis I came across today, this one from Adolf Grüubaum: "According to a view that is as widespread as it is erroneous , Zeno's argument is no more than a mathematical anachronism. We are told that if he had only known, as we do today, that the arithmetic some of the suitably converging infinite series of numbers is finite rather than infinite, then he would have recognized that he had merely posed a pseudoproblem" ( Zeno's Paradoxes , editor Wesley C. Salmon, p. 172, emphasis mine).