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i have no fish to fry in this, as the saying goes---the extent that i am interested in astrology begins and ends with (a) its function as a historical artefact and (b) a vague curiousity about natal charts, which are in some accurate, though the claims generated tend to be vague enough that you can easily argue that they seem accurate because situationally you want them to seem so.
what i was interested in was seeing if there was a way to move this curious trainwreck of a thread away from its present standing as a ritual in which people simply talk past each other.
aside:
as for my style of writing--well, ustwo, like you i am a product of my training and interests---and my training and interests happen to be in philosophy and history---part of that training is familiarity with a kind of abstract shorthand for staging arguments--which i alternate between using here and trying to stay away from because it doesnt fit well within these little limiting boxes --but i dont think it's up to you to determine what is or is not affected, what is or is not "erudite-sounding"--you might consider the possibility that this is simply how i write. the fact that you do not have a parallel familiarity with the shorthand means only that you do not have a parallel familitarity witht he shorthand--you should consider not projecting your lack of familiarity with it back onto some suspicion that this is all some pretense--any more than i treat your biology background as a pretense.
i dont write as i do with any particular idea in mind about putting you or anyone else in a position that requires them to defend themselves by way of projections.
it's how i write.
i hope that is clear enough.
philo and the harder science have a kind of antagonistic relation at times because the former claims that it can questions the semantic and logical underpinnings of the latter's claims. same thing with the philosophy of mathematics. problem is that more often than not, the result is an undermining of the claims at the level of form. from there, the real problem becomes one of disciplinary competence. it doesnt have to be like this--it is not productive for folk in either field, but it is.
as for this thread--i confess that i have no idea what is really happening here any more--it seems like mostly a theater where what is actually being performed is not the arguments, but something else, which is playing out across the arguments. and it seems like the dynamic is that folk who attack astrology--often to my mind justifiably--operate in one register, with one set of assumptions about what is at hand, and those who defend astrology operate with an entirely different set of assumptions about what is at hand. it isnt even really about astrology at this point.
i dont know what is about.
most strange.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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