Iwan Iwanowitsch Schischkin, 1884 |
If a landscape is a picture—a painting, perhaps—of a bit of countryside, a portrait, as it were, of the face or aspect that a stretch or expanse or reach of land presents from a particular point of view at a particular time, then a thoughtscape is a picture, a snapshot of sorts, that captures the way a stretch or expanse or reach of thought looks from a particular point of view at a particular time.
This site is dedicated to the presentation of a number of such snapshots. The wikis you can visit here were developed to provide the students in a number of my courses at the University of Northern Colorado online spaces for thought about at least some of the topics covered by those courses. Each contains, therefore—in a way that paralells really nicely the way in which pictures contain things—a certain stretch or expanse or reach of thought. There are wikis here on a variety of subjects in philosophy, and the wikis for the Life of the Mind classes I teach open up topics both inside and outside philosophy.
But then there's this, too. Every landscape that represents an actual place points beyond itself to the place itself and, if at all inviting, suggests the possibility of really going there and exploring the countryside depicted in the picture—the real landscape in the midst of which one could get one’s bearings and begin to find one’s way about. Perhaps one would find the real place less charming than it seemed in the picture, but perhaps it would turn out to be every bit as charming or even more so.
The same things could happen here. If at all intrigued by any of the snapshots in this collection, one could if one wanted to, make one's way into the actual region depicted in it, the realm of thought one aspect of which has been captured by the picture, and once there, one could get one's bearing in that realm and begin to explore it too. Who knows? One might even decide to stay and live out the rest of one’s life there. There are far worse places to dwell than the territories of which one can get some sense from these depictions. Those of us who have spent time in them can attest that every one of them is at the very least well worth a visit.
If you have questions about any of these sites or classes, feel free to contact me at:
Tom Trelogan
Philosophy
Campus Box 126
University of Northern Colorado
Greeley, CO 80639
Telephone: (970) 351-1561
Fax: (970) 351-2311
