Sveinbjorn Thordarson's Website

Ég er búinn að henda inn á YouTube sex þátta seríu frá 1972 um heimspeki við Oxford-háskóla. Þarna má finna löng viðtöl við menn á borð við Alfred Ayer, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Strawson, Stuart Hampshire, Gilbert Ryle, Iris Murdoch og David Pears um sögu 20. aldar heimspeki, um þekkingarfræði, málspeki, stjórnspeki o.fl.

1. Logic Lane: A Philosophical Retrospective
2. "I'm going to tamper with your beliefs a little"
3. Language and Creativity
4. Appearance and Reality
5. The Idea of Freedom
6. You might just as well say 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'.

Jahá...ég á ekki orð...

Smellið á plakatið til þess að sjá trailerinn.

Ég hef lengi haft mikið dálæti á heimspekingnum og hugmyndasagnfræðingnum Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), og hef eignast og lesið flestallar bækur eftir hann. Um árið las ég The Roots of Romanticism, sem fjallar um rætur rómantísku stefnunnar í evrópsku hugmynda- og menningarlífi. Skilgreining Berlins á rómantíkinni er ein sú rosalegasta sem ég rekist á:

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley’s dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great ‘I Am’, harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one’s unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk—the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-cheeked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, ‘la terre et les morts’, as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand’s aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet’s loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle’s worship of authority, and Hugo’s hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, life étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero—the rebel, l’homme fatal, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron’s heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake’s vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and ‘the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul’. It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

Það er ekki auðvelt að heita Sveinbjörn Þórðarson í enskumælandi landi. Í gegnum tíðina hef ég verið Svienbjorn Thordarsson, Swainburn Thorderson og jafnvel Dr. Svienbjorn Thordarsson. En í dag barst eftirfarandi bréf inn um lúguna hjá mér:

Þrjú og hálft ár hérna í Bretlandi, u.þ.b. tvö í viðbót til þess að klára doktorinn. Fimm og hálft ár í háskóla hérna, þrjár gráður.

Ég hef allavega lært eina skýra lexíu (syngist við Ísbjarnarblús, í kringum 2:26):

Ég ætla aldrei, aldrei, aldrei, aldrei, aldrei aftur að búa í .... Bretlandi.

Sumum lesendum síðunnar er e.t.v. kunnugt að ég birti skilaboð til IE notenda efst á síðunni:

You are using a second-rate browser

For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser.

Um daginn áttu sér eftirfarandi samskipti:

From: Sveinbjorn Thordarson    
To: matt@**********
Subject: Re: Web Email Form: Your website

matt@***** wrote:

>   I was interested in trying out, and potentially purchasing
>   Tapir. However, your condescending approach to my use of 
>   Internet Explorer 8 has made me reconsider:
>   
>   "You are using a second-rate browser
>   For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to
>   a modern web browser."
>   
>   However, none of the options you suggest can hold a candle 
>   to IE8's CSS 2.1 support. Nor do they run in a reduced 
>   privileges mode, by default. And, unlike Gecko-based 
>   browsers, I can have simultaneous "private" and 
>   "non-private" browsing sessions.
>   
>   While I commend trying to get IE 6 off the Internet 
>   (it IS ancient, and Microsoft wants it gone, too...), targeting
>   these efforts at *all* Internet Explorer users is unfair 
>   and reeks of bigotry and anti-Microsoft fanboyism. This is 
>   cemented by your lack of information about what makes the 
>   browser "second-rate" and the fact that "closing" the div 
>   doesn't remember that it was closed, hammering in your views 
>   which lack any elaboration.
>   
>   I will spend my money elsewhere and make it a point not to
>   refer others to your site, as long as you continue to be 
>   bigoted in your views of what a "modern" browser should be,
>   especially without giving any facts.
>   
>   IP Address: **************
>   User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0;
>   WOW64; Trident/4.0; QQPinyin 689; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; 
>   Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; 
>   MS-RTC LM 8; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; 
>   .NET CLR 3.0.30729)

Hello there,

I very much doubt you were at any stage interested in purchasing 
Tapir, which is old software for Mac OS X which has not been updated 
since 2005. The only reason I didn't open-source it a long time ago 
is sheer laziness.  Feel free to spend your money elsewhere.

As for IE, it is a second-rate browser by several objective 
standards:  it is slow, it has a flawed and bloated rendering engine 
and furthermore does not have proper support for Data URIs or certain 
CSS features used on my website.  Even if that were not the case, 
Microsoft's long stranglehold on the browser market (and its 
detrimental consequences for web development)  would be reason enough 
to encourage people to switch.

I would like to add that I provide my website as it is.  I 
promulgate whatever views I care to, and I encourage the use of those
technologies I regard as superior.  I don't need you, or your money, 
or your approval.  By all means spend your surfing time elsewhere.

--Sveinbjorn Thordarson