ericgerlach79
Gerlach is German and rhymes with bear-lock. I was born and raised in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco, moved to Berkeley for college and grad school, with an MA in History of Religion from the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley, and now teach Philosophy and the history of human thought at Berkeley City College. I have taught Intro Philosophy, Ethics, Logic, Asian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Modern European Philosophy and Social & Political Philosophy there for the past several years, and it has been a joy.
Thought Itself 
September 30, 2020 at 12:20 am
I just want to say that I’m really enjoying your lectures Eric. A few peers and I have been following your work for awhile and were very excited when we saw much longer material appear.
Cheers!
September 30, 2020 at 5:44 pm
Thank you so much for saying that! It has been quite hard lately, and there have been many setbacks, for me and those I care about in these times, but I want to share so much more, and I am getting the hours on YouTube as I can. I want each page on the site to have a video eventually.
I hope to explain my theories on Poe, on Carroll & Aristotle, and on how logic and emotions work together in Wittgensteinian ways, as words and feelings situated in space and time pragmatically. That is what ties it all together for me, in theory and practice. That is what can help the individual in simple words, regardless of culture or position.
I am convinced that the basics of logic considerably predate literacy and mathematics (6-8 thousand years old) as situational-emotional awareness and practice (200,000 years old, the brain), fully present in both illiterate hunter-gatherers and literate particle physics alike, as general human thought and culture, what children learn in their early years, as and before they use words, and before they learn to read and write. It would not be found in a verbal, logical structures alone, nor a mathematical set of structures, coherent or incoherent, but in the interweaving of words, and everything else, with or without literacy, number words, or specialized practices.
Someday that, rather than the ancient Athenians or Greeks, will serve as the basis of specialized, literate, Academic understandings, but that day is far away from all of us.
October 7, 2020 at 8:46 pm
Of course! Thank you!
I am not in on the logic scene quite yet, but one of my peers in responce to this said,
“i agree with eric, and it’s an old idea in philosophy, as i understand it. that man is a logical creature. one thing that i’m curious about is the connection of emotion and logic. i’m curious if he is an emotivist, and logic emerges therein, *or* if he sees the divide between truth and emotion as being a linguistic confusion from the very beginning.
I wonder if he has read Chalmers, because this seems really close to him”
There was more, but this seems to be the gist of his question.
Again, thanks for the great content.
October 8, 2020 at 4:33 pm
I have read some Chalmers, or of him, in the past. I will review his thinking, and add it to the site at some point.
I think that basic human emotions, in combination, shifting from one situation to another, in basic ways, are the moves of thought, AKA “logic”, or debate, which is a particular social form of thinking, also basic to humanity. I think children watch adults, and learn what to say, who to fear, and where, and when. I am not sure how much of that is Chalmers, but some of it is words, but not all of it, and to me, that is Wittgenstein, very much.