Tag Archives: nietzsche

The limits of responsibility

(The multi-month hiatus here on Monomorphic has been due to me working on my thesis. I am now able to, briefly, return to this and other indulgences.) Life presupposes taking responsibility. It presupposes investing people, objects and matters around you with your concern. In particular, democratic society presupposes that we all take full, in some [...]

Platonism and the dominant decomposition

I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked [...]

Objective and subjective reality; perspectivism

Nietzsche rejects the idea of an objective reality. He appears to give a generative status to the faculty of interpretation, in effect saying that the subject creates the world through her interpretations. Simultaneously, he champions the “intellectual conscience” and the value of scientific method and inquiry. How to make sense of this apparent contradiction? It [...]

Values 3: The case of Apple and Google

Last year, we started hearing about the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Google. The two companies were poaching talent from each other, and reportedly, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt got increasingly confrontational with each other on a personal level. Historically, the two companies both operated in the shadow of and against Microsoft, but with Microsoft [...]

Values 2: Human reason is reactive

Previously I wrote about Nietzsche’s assertion that philosophers must create values, and a distinction between scholars, scientists and philosophers was made. The focus now shifts to the faculty of reason and its contrast with another mode of thinking. Reason can be understood as man’s ability to think according to precise rules. Logic is one such [...]