Salisbury

Hey, this is a nice little place. Along with the famous Cathedral and a treasury of outstanding old buildings, and stone Medieval gates with heavy wooden doors that never seem to get closed, there is also a “close to nature” feel about Salisbury… Lots of wooden bridges and plank sidewalks (they must have a technical name, but that’s what I call them) laid over marshy areas not far from the town center. There are dozens of ducks in these areas, and they seemed delighted to have human company at nightfall, even after it became clear that I had nothing to offer them but respect and attentiveness.

On the way back it was already dark. No one else was anywhere near the Cathedral, so I had the chance to stand there alone and listen to the organ player inside go through some sort of dissonance practice. He/she seemed to be going out of her/his way to do only the most ghoulish possible things on the organ, enough so that I almost laughed out loud.

Otherwise, I was thinking over the persistence of correlationism and the need for a return to myth in philosophy. The latter, I think, can be fully justified in the most rigorous fashion. Myth is not “poor man’s argument”, just as emotion is not a flawed, pre-Spock animal version of cognition, but actually a highly advanced form of cognition (provided suitable work is done to interpret it rather than accept the first interpretation that comes to mind). People will still be talking about Plato’s cave long after Russell’s and Quine’s supposedly most devastating arguments are lying in an ash heap somewhere. And that’s not because the ignorant masses are so mentally lowly that they can only handle poetry. It’s because there is something deeply wrong with viewing “arguments” as the gold standard of philosophical insight.