RPQPT.
That is what it stands for.
I have taken great pleasure in blogging over the last several years. My relationship with blogging, however, has become more strained in the past few months. I don't like it as much. There are several things that bother me about blogging.
One thing is ego. By blogging I am putting myself in a public arena. I am subjecting my thoughts to some sort of outside scrutiny.
But at the same time I feel a sort of loss of freedom in my writing. Blogging allowed me to treat my writing as essaying in the proper sense of the term: as an exploration, an exercise, a journey.
I've stopped writing as a form of exploration.
I've stopped writing because I don't understand something, where as I used to use that lack of understanding as an impetus for writing. What a shame. I did so much explorative writing and it was so beneficial to me. It wasn't a shame to write for the sake of exploration.
The thing I'm working on right now is an essay on Collingwood. I'm trying to explicate his defense of historical thought in relation to the history of scientific thought. More specifically, I am focusing on the problem of methodological unity; the idea that all knowledge is to have the same form, and is to be acquired by the same methods.
Collingwood wad adamantly opposed to the idea of methodological unity. Human affairs, he believed, could not be understood in the same way as the natural world.
I've been trying to discuss this problem of methodological unity by focusing on the issue of prediction and doctrine. Natural science has been very successful in terms of prediction and doctrine formation. But history has no need for doctrine. The human world simply isn't predictable. We ought to know this intuitively, but somehow our skulls are too thick for this.
I'm not sure how to go about addressing it.
But I think the problem of methodological unity is the best way to go about it. Berlin will be an excellent segue into it.
