Thursday, July 3, 2008

philosophy


gezer panoramic, originally uploaded by nathanwilliam.

the deeper you dig into one expertise or profession the more and more i feel like people tend to lose perspective. like the term joel always uses, "missing the forest in the trees." as if to say, missing the big picture because you are so focused on the details. like looking with a microscope at hairs on the side of an animal without even trying to figure out what kind of animal it is.

i think this is why i like philosophy. because philosophy gathers all the details from all the different professions and tries to explain it as a whole. i guess i say all of this because archaeology is what we have been filming so much of recently, and i've decided that archaeology is boring. as dave put it, "we film rocks all day and then come home and watch The Office." yup.

i especially realized how boring archaeology was when i saw a documentary about big wave surfing... and it was awesome! while it was pretty much meaningless, it was most definitely more exciting than archaeology. and then i realized that if we focus on archaeology than i will go crazy. archaeology is certainly important....but we should be presenting the big picture. so anyway, those are my thoughts on that.

also, if any of you were wondering or heard about the bulldozer that went careening down the main street here in jerusalem, from what i know it ran over several cars, tipped over a bus, killed 4 people and injured about 40. while the rampaging bulldozer was on the move someone shot the man through the window of the bulldozer and killed him. it happened right near where we used to live, but no one i know was harmed. people are saying it was an act of terrorism...who really knows. the man who did it was an arab man with israeli citizenship.

1 comment:

philip m said...

Ciao from Italia, Nate!

Unfortunately, I am sad to report, philosophers fall prey to the same trap. Once they get into the fine hairs a lot of time I think they forget to look at life philosophically, as a detective who is eagerly on the trail trying to figure out the mystery as a whole, but rather publish technical papers that dont really have anything to do with anything. A girl here in Italia is a philosophy major too, and she agreed that sometimes, ironically, philosophers are the people most out of touch with reality.

But I agree with you about the ideal! And I hope we can always be total in our perspective on life, so as not to get lost in the mire of confusion.

God Bless Nate!