Grocery shopping Tuesday yesterday, which cost me about one hundred (100) $$ for twenty two (22) items, which does not include any produce. This per item figure was around one dollar, back in 1999, but that would include the produce items, which have lower prices than processed food items.

John called last night letting me know that all had returned safely from Berlin after a good time there. He told me that to tour the Bundestag you have to get ticket three (3) month in advance. I stood in line for about two hours for that tour in late August 1999 before its official September opening.

And he visited the ‘holocaust’ cum shoah museum, which was still in the planning stages when I was there.

They did do the Spree boat tour at night with the lights on and fireworks going, probably because October 3 is the 25 year anniversary of unification. And he visited the ‘holocaust’ cum shoah museum, which was still in the planning stages when I was there.

N.B: Holocaust means ‘whole burnt offering’ in the old Jerusalem temple, which is not what the Nazi meant or did. They were engaged in ‘destruction’, which the word ‘shoah’ signifies.

Ron called yesterday aft, letting me know he and Nancy are moving later this month and I’ll hear more when we have coffee next week. Later today Juliet and I meet for our Wednesday regular, on Thursday is coffee with Elisabeth and Friday lunch with Herman. Jack is off to the East again for quite some time and I have the feeling this will involve an assessment about possibly moving there!

My reading is in a small Dutch book by P. Wouters, titled ‘Thinking Tools’ about which I’ll write a bit under ‘Writings’. I bought the book back in around 2001, when Zeist, but just scanned it. Now I’m engaged, because I am looking for tools to tackle the BlueNotes content and its extract summaries, which I was busy with last week and have reported on.
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The author Wouters explains seven thinking tools in his small, but very engaging book. In his references he refers to Edward de Bono, who I read years ago, to ‘Tools for Thought’ for sciences by Waddington, 1977 and Elster’s ‘Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences‘, 1989. This to give my reader some English language references.

I read de Bono’s ‘Lateral Thinking’ back in 1960 or so and found his work quite accessible. He came from Malta and moves around in a wheel chair I discovered later. In the 1990-ties I read him again when teaching ‘Critical Thinking’ at Sait for about three years. I ended up using Minsky’s ‘Societies of Mind’ in the end, using his kite example to compose a relationship matrix.

Wouters bases each thinking tool on a well known modern philosopher except for the first tool. It is called ‘Hammer and Chisel’ and based on Plato and Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical reality’ philosophy.

Wouters bases each thinking tool on a well known modern philosopher except for the first tool. It is called ‘Hammer and Chisel’ and based on Plato and Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical reality’ philosophy. In it we accept the appearance of the object, but then try to discover its true essence. Wouters calls it ‘essence-thinking’ for the Dutch ‘wezensdenken’. The hammer and chisel are meant to chip away on the non-essentials!
Six more tools follow each with a modern philosopher as basis, enumerated as follows:

1. Kant’s tool is the carpenters square, to take the measure of things;
2. Hegel’s dialectics is assigned the crowbar, the get things moving;
3. Husserl has to use the ‘naked hand’ as he deals with appearances;
4. Wittgenstein’s language centered thought gets the ‘fretsaw’;
5. Hermeneutic interpretive method is allotted the auger or drill;
6. Deconstructionists (Derrida) are given the human itself as tool.

The German philosopher Schleiermacher developed hermeneutics at a time between Kant and Hegel.<11:00am and 9:29pm.