Vertigo (1958) An Alfred Hitchcock film starring Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.

Flashcards.

Keep a stack in your pocket and pull them out and flip through them whenever you’re looking for something to do (e.g., when you’re waiting on a train, sitting on the train, bored at a bar or club, whatever). You should pronounce the word when you see it, either out loud or in your head.

Eventually, it becomes systematized. When you want to add a word to your vocabulary, go home, look it up, and add it to your stack of flashcards. Words shouldn’t leave your stack of cards until they actually enter your vocabulary and you can use them and recognize them without having to think about it.

I use different colors for each part of speech (green for verbs, yellow for nouns, etc).

Note:

You can also use an online program like Anki which will make and sort your flashcards for you. I prefer having physical cards with me, but will use this program on occasion also. It is available for iphone and droid, as well.

Whenever I want to test my knowledge of a subject, I’ve started using the following thought experiment:

I imagine myself to be designing the syllabus for a course on the topic. I imagine my audience to be high school students with a similar background to my own. I run through, in my head, the way the course would go, what questions they would ask, how I would introduce the topic, how I would make it interesting for them, what homework I would assign, etc.

I first started using this thought experiment with History and Philosophy. Now that I’m learning German, I imagine how I would go about teaching a German course. It’s a really good way to get an assessment of your knowledge of a topic, and it can help you see things about a topic that you’ve never seen before.

I believe that if you can’t explain something from the ground up you don’t know it. I try to hold myself to that standard for every subject.

Great article that I’ve gone back to several times for inspiration while learning German.

And here’s the man himself making one.

Trying it out now. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Ingredients: 

Whiskey (Rye or Bourbon)

Angostura Bitters

Club Soda

Sugar Cube

Ice

Thin Lemon Peel Garnish

Update: Tastes great!

Highly recommended secondary source for understanding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Elizabeth Anscombe was Wittgenstein’s favourite student and has translated a great deal of his works from German into English (although Wittgenstein lectured at Cambridge in English, his writings were all in German, his mother-tongue). Anscombe is also a brilliant philosopher in her own right. 

Wittgenstein found it impossible to lecture to the large crowd of students his lectures initially attracted, so he would handpick a small number (five or so, I believe) of students who would sit in his office, listen to him lecture off the top of his head, and handwrite notes. The notebooks containing the lectures would then be distributed to the other students, and since the notebooks were blue and brown in colour, they have been published under the title “the blue and brown books.” Anscombe was one of these students handpicked by Wittgenstein for him to lecture to.

Her commentary addresses common misconceptions about the Tractatus stemming from the work’s close association with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. One of my current philosophical interest is working out the epistemological problem associated with Wittgenstein’s theory of objects in the Tractatus, and Anscombe’s Introduction is proving to be a valuable resource for studying this problem.

I think the Tractatus is too often dismissed as an “early” work of positivism. The work, in fact, contains beautiful insights into logic, metaphysics, mysticism, and even thoughts that border on phenomenology.

I personally think that the divide between the “early” and “later” Wittgenstein is overemphasized and that there is more coherency between the PI and Tractatus than is typically taught.

Café outside of the Frauenkirche. Dresden, Germany.

Got to love Robert Redford.

Found this in one of my notebooks—it’s a drawing of some kind of circuit mechanism I made at some point, though I don’t remember what it was for. It looks cool, though.

Rough sketch of my surroundings made in McCreary’s Irish Pub in Franklin, Tennessee. I do miss that place.

Irony. At Nathan’s house. Fairview, Tennessee.