Welcome aboard Bruce,
You are the second member of the General Semantic Community to pay a visit to Hegel's Hotel. I was equally honoured to have S.I. Hayakawa's son, Alan Hayakawa, write me a short, encouraging email when I spent an essay on my American Politics blogsite trumpeting S.I. Hayakawa's wonderful educational, community, and political work, saying that we needed more Republicans today in his spirit and essence as opposed to many of the 'Right Wing Extremist Either/Or, Us or Them' brand of Republicans that seem to be making all the noise and getting all the media attention and spotlight these days.
Incidently, my favorite Senator today is Democrat Senator Barney Frank.
Let me share with my readers your background, which they should be able to get to your various links via my side bar... Incidently, I just implemented the 'followers' gidget and so far I like it. It allows me the chance to check out other readers' and writers' blogsites who may have become interested in my work here on Hegel's Hotel...
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Bruce Kodish
About me
I've received wide acknowledgment as a leading scholar-teacher of the korzybskian discipline of applied epistemology known as 'general semantics'.
In 1998, with my wife Susan Presby Kodish, Ph.D., I received the Institute of General Semantics' prestigious J. Talbott Winchell Award. With"deep appreciation and warm thanks" the award acknowledged the Kodish's "...many contributions severally and together to the wider understanding of general semantics as authors, editors, teachers, leaders", and "their concern with the alleviation of social and individual problems, and their active interest in the on-going work in general semantics."
I'm currently writing the first full-length biography of Alfred Korzybski, author of Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Researching and writing this book have become my primary occupation for now.
I continue a lively interest in physical therapy/rehabilitation and have a part-time practice as a physical therapist, specializing in Mechanical Diagnosis & Therapy and Posture-Movement Education.
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dgb, cont'd
Speaking about my own bacground now, I was introduced to the work of Alfred Korzybski indirectly through S.I. Hayakawa's classic book: Language in Thought and Action. That was in a high school English course I took in 1972. Like Kant once said regarding a book he was reading by David Hume: 'It woke me from my slumbers.' General Semantics became a focal point of my Honours Thesis in Psychology seven years later in 1979. And in short time here, it will become more fully integrated into Hegel's Hotel.
I just have a little more preliminary work on epistemology to do here and that is basically to let my readers know where I believe Hegel went wrong in his approach to epistemology -- and that is when he basically left such Pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment Philosophers in favor of a 'evolutionary regression' to 'Platonic Rational Idealism'.
General Semantics would call this the 'intensionally-minded' person -- a person who gets caught up inside his or her head and stays there -- as opposed to the 'extensionally oriented' person who keeps 'observing the world around him or her, makes rational inferences, generalizations, and abstractions from these observations -- and more than anything, stays rationally-empirically grounded in the spirit and mold of philosophers like Aristotle (without getting caught up in the classification problems that Aristotle got himself into), Galileo, Newton, Sir Francis Bacon, John Locke, Einstein...and most of the other Enlightenment philosophers. Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein should probably be included as well.
Anyways, once again, welcome aboard Bruce. Feel free to add your contributions and feedback whenever you wish. If I have inappropriately interpreted General Semantics, let me know, although, to be sure, I will be extrapolating on General Semantics and taking ideas that I have learned from General Semantics in new and modified directions.
Cheers!
-- dgb, Nov. 23rd, 2009.
-- David Gordon Bain,
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still In Process...
