Please bear with me as I learn this new format for my blog posts. This afternoon when I initiated one of the periodic updates for the format I’ve been using since I started this blog, it crashed my site. Luckily Website Palace provides a 24/7 helpline. In WordPress terminology these website formats are “themes.” They are provided by other vendors to be used at one’s own risk, particularly if you’re using a free one, as I was. Neither WordPress nor Website Palace maintains or debugs these “themes.” The help line did, however, get me unstuck and archived all my content in case repairing the problem caused further damage to my site . Rather than get further involved in trying to resolve the vendor’s coding error that caused my crash, I’ve just selected another “theme” for this blog. We’ll see how well it works for our purposes.
Since we’re on the topic of this blog, I thought I’d update you on what’s going on, and what’s not going on. Obviously I have not been blogging. Only one post at the beginning of June. And then the most recent post for Anne Mei’s birthday.
We have been busy, however. Anne Mei took a biology course at Mercer County Community College in June to fulfill a general education requirement at Syracuse University. She’s also been volunteering at the National Alliance on Mental Illness and returned to coaching three siblings on their violin, viola and cello practice.
I spent a good deal of June in doctors’ office and getting physical therapy. After my last report on my progress after knee surgery, the herniated disk in my back started acting up because of all the time in bed and not being able to do my back exercises in the pool. And the impingement in my right shoulder got so uncomfortable I had to do something about that, too. So PT worked on my knee, my back, and my shoulders throughout the month of June. Progress has been made, particularly since I’ve been able to exercise in the pool 2-3 times a week this past month.
Although I haven’t been blogging, I have been writing in my philosophical notebooks. Back to reading and scribbling, as Laura used to say. At the end of 2015 I had reported some frustration at the fuzzy thinking of the Buddhist philosophers, Stcherbatsky and Vasubandhu. So earlier this year I went back to studying the theme that everything happens interdependently, first in the Pali canon and then the classical commentaries. For most of June I’ve been studying a new book by Jay Garfield called Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. It’s not perfect, but arguing with Garfield in my notebooks has helped develop materials too boring for a blog, but which I hope to submit for publication eventually. He’s also helped me understand where Vasubandhu fits in. This past week I’ve been enjoying a dissertation that Garfield cites: Truth for the Rest of Us: Conventional Truth in the Work of Dharmakīrti by Laura P. Guerrero. She doesn’t talk about nouns and verbs, as I like to do, but she explains clearly how the Indian philosopher Dharmakīrti bases truth on social activity and discourse.