June 28, 2007

Today's favorite sentence is really a quote that sets up the argument for all of the empirical chapters in my dissertation - specifically the purpose of writing them the way I am. I happened to find it in my reading notes from March 2005...I guess it pays to procrastinate sometimes because if I hadn't been making an attempt to waste time productively then I wouldn't have clicked open this file.

"“We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena."

It's from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations ; now all I have to do is find the section number because I apparently didn't note it the first time round!