There is human readable UML. See TextUML Toolkit

Also I have done research into Domain Specific Languages for Systems Design. You can see some of this work at Kent Palmer’s Resume. There is a tutorial there based on a paper I gave at CSER 2011 called Reworking the Integral System Engineering Method Domain Specific Languages. There is also a critique of SysML and UML at A Critique of SysML from the point of view of General Schemas Theory submitted to CSER 2005

As an out of work Systems Engineer it is easy to think the profession is dying when one cannot get a job doing it.

However, normally insinuations of demise are premature, especially when something is in the process of being born. However, the question is what is being born? My research on General Schemas Theory suggests what is being born is not what everyone thinks is being born, i.e. Systems Engineering. I have been concerned for a long time about the foundations of Systems Engineering. If it is going to be an academic discipline then it must contribute to our knowledge in a fundamental way, like Software Engineering has since its inception. But Systems Engineering is content just to follow along holding on to the apron strings of Software Engineering, not really contributing anything fundamentally new to our understanding. When we look across the curricula of Systems Engineering Masters programs what we see is the same thing being taught everywhere. There is nothing new under the sun as far as these programs are concerned. For instance I do not know of any program that actually teachings Systems Science as the basis for Systems Engineering. I created a sample syllabus for a course in Systems Science for Systems Engineers but no school to whom I have presented it has shown any interest as yet. Seehttp://blog.onticity.net/2012/08/systems-science-for-systems-software.html and alsohttp://blog.onticity.net/2012/08/first-tutorial-in-systems-science.html. Until Systems Engineers actually know something about and understand and extend to their own discipline the sixty years of General Systems Science research that has happened to my mind the discipline will not really have gotten started.

However, merely understanding Systems Science as the basis of Systems Engineering is not enough. What is necessary for a genuine academic discipline is to contribute something unique to knowledge which is the basis for the education of Systems Engineers different from what is taught in other disciplines that is a genuine contribution to our knowledge. Systems Engineering just by practical application of Systems Science does not accomplish that feat. It is my belief that General Schemas Theory does make that contribution. General Schemas Theory asks what is the next higher level of abstraction beyond a System. I studied this intensely as part of my Ph.D. work in Systems Engineering {See Emergent Design (emergentdesign) on about.me) and concluded that it must be something that recognizes the difference between Schemas of different kinds like: Form, Pattern, Domain etc which are at the same level of abstraction as the System Schema but different. I discovered that no one had posited such a discipline previously because I could not find any precursors in the literature. And once I developed the S-prime hypothesis as a basis for instituting a research program in General Schemas Theory then I realized that if there were such a discipline at the next higher level of abstraction from Systems Science, called Schemas Science perhaps, then this would indeed provide a fundamental and new perspective on Science and Engineering because although they used schemas all the time they were not self conscious about that use and they had no idea of the relations between the schemas that they were using. Such a discipline that studied schemas would in effect provide the internal coherence between the disciplines of Science and Engineering, which in effect are two sides of the same coin. Science strives to discover knowledge about nature or human culture, and Engineering attempts to apply that knowledge to provide new supports to the technological infrastructure underlying culture and interfacing with nature. Schemas Theory provides a way to understand the a priori ontological projections that the work of Science and Engineering are based upon. For instance, all designs are based on the projections of schemas on nature.

Interestingly enough the schemas of nature are more complex than we as a species project as a priori syntheses and that is the basis for our feeling that our technological infrastructure is artificial. But the key point from a Systems Engineering perspective is that our discipline is actually much wider than we suspect. Our discipline is not just an overdue implementation of Systems Science in Engineering. Rather our discipline deals with all the schemas, not just systems, and thus is misnamed in a fundamental way, i.e. we should really call our discipline Schemas Engineering or something else that suggests that we deal with all the a priori schemas in their internal coherence not just the systems Schema. This is already true in practice but unrecognized because we do not have the vocabulary or concepts to recognize the true nature of our own disciplines. This bodes for a fundamental paradigm, or even episteme perhaps even an ontological change in the discipline in the future when we run up against the narrowness of our conception of it in our engineering work, and we reflect that back in the development of the fundamentals of the discipline. Recognizing that we indeed use other schemas such as facet, monad, pattern, form, (system), meta-system, domain, world, kosmos, pluriverse in our work on complex systems and meta-systems that we build is the key to a fundamental rethinking of what we are doing and to my mind that will be the actual beginning of our discipline, not as an imitation of Systems Science or Software Engineering but as a sui generis and emergent discipline that seeks to understand the inner coherence between all the schemas that we embody in designed artifacts that improve the technological infrastructure of our culture in its rich relation to nature.

The problem is not whether this new conception of Schemas Engineering is practical, but the problem is at a fundamental level Systems Engineering is impractical because of its over reliance on one schema for understanding the artificial technological infrastructures that we design and construct. Systems Science is not a broad enough foundation for the kind of Engineering we actually do. And when we actually figure that out and develop General Schemas Theory as the basis of our Schemas Engineering then we will actually be providing research into the coherence of all the schemas used by Science and Engineering in general that befits the position of Systems Engineering as an top level Engineering discipline that encompasses all other Engineering disciplines in order to build Whole systems that work and extend the technological infrastructure of culture and manages the interface with nature properly, i.e. in a way that does not degrade nature any more than necessary. There is in this vision much for us as Systems Engineers to do that is new and innovative because it opens up a whole horizon of research into the way we actually build our technological products and how we understand them. And of course this challenges the status quo in our Systems Engineering programs and in our work as Systems Engineers because it means that our discipline has really not been born yet. We are just at the beginning of a new continent that needs to be explored and settled and our obsession with the systems schema is only the beginning of a journey of intellectual discovery that we have not yet taken. So prospects in the future for this new discipline that attempts to understand and then apply all the schemas coherently are good, but it is probably going to be a long time before this is actually recognized within the discipline, and our educational programs are aligned with this need. But I am optimistic about the future due to the fact that Jack Ring and Len Troncale have initiated cooperation between INCOSE and ISSS organizations and the new framework for Graduate Education has a small section on Systems Science and Systems Thinking. This is a good beginning.

I recommend A History of Buddhist Philosophy: Continuities and Discontinuities: David J. Kalupahana: 9780824814021: Amazon.com: Books as a basis for approaching this question.

Neither, it is nondual & nonmonist with the idea of Void (Wu Ji) Wuji (philosophy) based on  無 – Wiktionary

A friend of mine Rodney H. Swearengin suggested we should call it non-cardinal and we note that zero is the only non-cardinal number.

Non-cardinal is an alternative beyond all the possible logical alternatives. So for instance zero is a non-cardinal alternative to all the numbers.

Void is normally associated with empty spacetime, and thus with the nondual aspect of nature and extensionality as such.

It is distinguished from Emptiness of Buddhism which is defined as something other than the tetralemma (A, ~A, Both, Neither) i.e. something other than the logical possibilities.

When Buddhism first came to China the Chinese scholars thought that by Emptiness the Buddhists in India mean the same thing as they meant by Void. But eventually they realized that the Buddhist Emptiness was different from the Void. Eventually they developed very sophisticated philosophies which dealt with both Emptiness and Void, i.e. internal and external non-cardinality. The best example of this is Hua Yen Buddhism of Fa Tsang, which reinterpreted emptiness as interpenetration. Fa Tsang talks about both interpenetration and interinclusion, i.e. mass-like and set-like ways of approaching other things, which should be contrast with intrapenetration and intrainclusion to cover all the possibilities.

Basically these four cover both set and mass approaches to what is external and internal. Note that emptiness which is internal is associated with inter-x and void which is external is associated with intra-x. In other words there is mirroring between emptiness and void.

We see in the poetry of Stonehouse (Shiwu) the zen taoist hermit lines of poetry where one line is empty and the next line is void and then the next line is empty etc.Thus in the Chinese tradition they become very sophisticated in balancing and distinguishing these two types of non-cardinality both internal and external both mass-like and set-like whose exhausted possibilities (inter/intra//in/exclusion) points to the possibility of a deeper nonduality beyond the difference between emptiness and void.

This is the question I have been studying for years. This is the problematic of the nature of the Western worldview in relation to other worldviews, and Western Science in relation to traditional sciences of other cultures. In other words we cannot see our own blindspots, except by reference to other traditions that have different blindspots. This pretty much has to be a cross-cultural exploration if it is really going to turn up any blindspots we don’t know about in our own tradition. Unfortunately most people don’t know their own tradition less well other traditions to compare it to. So it turns out that this kind of cross-cultural philosophical anthropology very seldom gets done by anyone. And because no one has a background in the necessary assorted subjects that are necessary, even if you do it because of some strange intellectual aberration or fascination, no one knows what is being talked about and therefore they don’t get anything out of the results of such a study. Many of my posts on quora are on associated subjects and the reception of the various things I have written is a good indication of the level of interest in these sorts of subjects.

Basically if you don’t know your own tradition, and you don’t know any other traditions, then it is pretty well impossible understand these possible blindspots of our tradition. One of these blindspots is the fact that other traditions are more sophisticated that the Western tradition. We think our tradition is the most sophisticated tradition and that blinds us to the sophistication of other colonized cultures. Just to appreciate the sophistication of other traditions in relation to our tradition one has to learn quite a bit of other traditions. The basis of this greater sophistication is that meditation drives some other traditions and they are about not just mundane everyday experience but higher order states of consciousness which changes our view of our existence. Another point is that our tradition is stuck in Set-like approaches and Syllogistic Logic while say Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese philosophy is rooted in Mass-like approaches and uses Pervasion logic. Another Blindspot is that Being is only an Indo-European idea, but we assume it is the fundamental basis for understanding everything, but other cultures have different fundamentals or ultimates different from Being. Europeans assume that everyone is talking about Being and they cannot differentiate Existentials that are the basis for approaching things in other traditions.

These are just a few points. Other points are made in different answers I have given already. And further examples are given in my various writings that are available at Academia.edu – Share research. But I would like encourage others to study different traditions in order to try to see the blindspots in our tradition. Those blindspots are your own blindspots too. We cannot separate ourselves from our tradition. Ignorance merely means not only do we have blindspots but are actually blind because we accept without thinking what ever we have picked up randomly.

Yes. There is a direct relation. Law of Non-contradiction or excluded middle is set up by Aristotle as the founding principle of Metaphysics in the West. This is in direct response to the Buddhist Tetralemma (A, ~A, both, neither) of which Aristotle offers what seems to be a devastating critique. But the tetralemma is the Buddhist way to point at Nonduality of emptiness. So excluded middle or non-contradiction is the response advocating dualism to the concept of nonduality by Aristotle who founds Western Metaphysics.

See Nondual Science Institute for more information.

My teacher Alfonso Verdu did quite a bit of work and wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the relation between phenomenology and meditation, and that is how I got my start in philosophy and its relation to nondual traditions by contemplating his work and the possibilities for extending his work. I recommend his works on Buddhism.

There are a few examples of phenomenological approaches to meditation, but not as many as one would like to see. Phenomenology is rooted more or less in the lifeworld, and in the Indo-European tradition, transitioning from that into nondual traditions is not easy for Westerners interested in Phenomenology. On the other hand Buddhist texts tend to be somewhat dogmatic and we lack phenomenological texts by practicing meditators. Each school sets its own standards and describes that as if it were the only way of apprehending the states that they experience in their meditative experiences. So it turns out that the application of Phenomenology to Meditation is not an easy problem. This in a sense is why we need to understand the Western worldview, i.e. to counter the assumptions that are inherent in the embedding of Phenomenology in a tradition that takes Being for granted. And in fact this is why understanding the meta-levels of Being is so important, because there is a natural phase transition at the fifth meta-level of Being to Existence. And it is in Existence that the other traditions that have developed sophisticated nondual traditions have thrived. So if we do not get out of the illusion of Being into existence we will never understand Taoism, Buddhism, DzogChen, Sufism and other nondual ways. This is the fundamental problem with Westerners fascinated with nondual traditions not having a philosophical understanding of the nature of Being and the relation of Being to Existence. Basically they all get lost misunderstanding in fundamental ways what is meant in the texts of these traditions. There is something crucial lost in translation and no basis for sorting out the illusion from existence proper. It is important to note that those within the tradition are also struggling with the illusion, but they are hampered by not clearly understanding existence through the haze of Being. Buddhism that started off as an Indo-European heresy is the best guide in this regard. But even Buddhism is still infected by Being to some extent and it took DzogChen to cure that infection.

And it should be noted that just because languages do not have Being, i.e. non-indo-european languages, they still have illusion. It is not as if only Being is illusion. But Being is Maya an intensification of illusion. So it is just much harder to start within the Western tradition and to make sense of the phenomenology of existence. The only way I know to do it is to triangulate from the perspectives of multiple nondual traditions and use them as the criteria for understanding the Western Tradition, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND. Western Orientialism projects itself on these Oriental Traditions and blocks our understanding of them in fundamental ways if we do not make the non-nihilistic distinction between Being and Existence. But those coming in from the outside make a similar mistake in their translation of their nondual way into terms predominant in Western Philosophy.  That is why I think the cutting edge of our tradition is to understand nonduallity within it as it exists already rather than making translations between traditions. As Nagarjuna taught us emptiness is at the core of logic as the discontinuities between the logical operators. Similarly, we can see that there are discontinuities in the Western Scientific tradition which might be called emergent events. The Western tradition is shot through with these discontinuities over which we have no control when they will occur or how. Our tradition is fundamentally fragmented. Understanding that is equivalent to doing what Nagarguna did with logic. Nonduality is there in a fundamental way within the Western tradition, we do not need to go outside our tradition to confront the nondual. That is why I wrote The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void.  The nondual discontinuities are shot through our tradition but it is especially clear when we go up the meta-levels of Being that structure our worldview and encounter existence as emptiness or void at the kernel of the worldview. We don’t have to meditate to see that but merely contemplate the tradition as it is given to us and its meaning. Meaning arises from the void or emptiness that fills the discontinuities inherent in the tradition. Everything within the tradition is like a Geode which is empty at its center and which has filled a void. Our phenomenology should be able to look at existence without being distracted by Being. Our hermeneutics should be able to handle pure meaning that arises from the empty void directly. But we have a long way to go before that is the case.

Hard to compete with the videos of Dr Gregory B. Sadler which are very interesting. He seems to go from philosopher to philosopher adopting their point of view and then growing beyond them the next phase where a new philosopher seems to solve the problems that the last one left unsolved. That is a legitimate path.

My path has been somewhat different. First of all in High School I was interested in Zen Buddhism and I never stopped thinking that this is in some way the ultimate position on existence. Rather I merely continued to refine my understanding of this position on existence over my long intellectual career. When I got to University of Kansas they had an East Asian Studies Program where I could study something related to Zen Buddhism in each department and out of 126 units 60 or so of the units for my BA where taken in East Asian Studies, while my other major was Sociology. By taking all those classes on East Asian studies including a series of Philosophy classes by Alfonso Verdu that taught me the fundamentals of Asian Philosophy culminating in graduate courses in Zen, I cam to understand as much as I could as an undergraduate the depths of Oriental Philosophy that resulted in Zen/Chan Buddhism. But Verdu also taught me Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger as his specialty was applying Phenomenology to Buddhism. And that sent me on a journey to understand Western Philosophy better based on an understanding of Eastern Philosophy (not the other way around). So when I went to England to study Sociology I ended up studying Philosophy of Science at LSE 1973-1882 with emphasis on Continental Philosophy within an academic environment saturated by Analytical Philosophy. I was the only one at LSE at the time interested in the understanding of Philosophy of Science using Continental work as the basis of my research that I know of. My dissertation was called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence. I used Russell’s Higher Logical Type Theory to understand the Kinds of Being discovered in Continental Philosophy in order to attempt to comprehend emergent discontinuous changes within the Western Tradition. However, I never stopped studying Oriental Philosophy during that time and had a great resource in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Library. I still read sutras on a regular basis, and now have gotten into reading translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts that have come out recently attempting to understand DzogChen. Essentially I use as my baseline Taoism, Zen, Hua Yen, DzogChen, Sufism as a way of understanding Nonduality and supra-rationality and then from that perspective looking to understand Western Philosophy within that context. Oriental Philosophy is much more Sophisticated than Western philosophy. However, Western Philosophy has its own depth that needs to be appreciated. The problematic is to understand the Western Worldview on the basis of Oriental views of Nonduality and Supra-rationality. Why do we want to understand the Western worldview? Because it is this Worldview which has achieved global dominance and underlies the destruction of our planet. It is not possible to solve the problems that lead to planetary destruction by the Western Worldview from outside. We must understand the Western Worldview from the inside in order to understand what has gone wrong that is leading to these disastrous consequences. But there is a measure by which to base our assessment on that comes from Oriental Philosophy in the form of the understanding of Nonduality Supra-rationally. So I have been engaged in this problematic for years and it has led to a lot of interesting results and has been an intellectual adventure of the first rank, which is still ongoing for me.

It turns out that there are a lot of interesting things that fall our when you look at Western Philosophy in its depths from the outside based on the criteria of Nonduality accessed through Supra-rationality from the point of view of Hermeneutics, Dialectics, Ontology, Phenomenology, Semiotics and Structuralism the fundamental methods that I have grown accustom to using over the years. For me the Western Tradition has at its core the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger but the kernel is Plato with an occasional nod to Aristotle. What is of most concern is to understand how Western Philosophy unfolds structurally and how it circles around positions of nonduality without for the most part recognizing them because it is lost in duality. There is something like Absolute Reason at work  underlying the structural unfolding of Western Philosophy such that Nonduality as comprehended supra-rationality is not ever far off no matter how deeply we are lost in dualities, and especially nihilistic fabricated artificial opposites in conflict that characterize the unfolding of the Western tradition. For instance, Emergence and Nihilism are themselves dualistic opposites. The Western tradition is like a train careening down a mountain out of control. The mountain face, the sheer cliff face of nonduality is always in view as it rounds bends, and plunges us all toward destruction. Of course, the passengers are so obsessed by their fate that they do not notice the serene scenery out the window of the careening train on which they are trapped. As long as we are trapped in duality and cannot find the non-nihilistic distinctions that will allow us to gain control of the train again then we remain lost in an undead state waiting for our fate to materialize as we fiddle Rome burns.

In essence the situation is very simple. The Western Worldview is fragmented and at its core is the discontinuities of non-duality that indicate the kernel of nonduality beyond the wild generation of Nihilism that is the core of the worldview. I call the recognition of this nondual kernel the Homeward path. It is the means by which we could heal our own self-inflicted wounds if we so chose to do so, and to take back control of our out of control worldview, that is not just distorting us but our planet and every sentient being on the planet through incipient greenhouse effect that has us careening toward a Venusian future. What is so fascinating is that the solution to the problem of radical active nihilism is so very close to us yet so far away from being recognized. At every unfolding of the structural unfolding of the Western worldview the unknown position of nonduality is always manifest but ignored because it lives in a blindspot of our assumption of non-contradiction and excluded middle that was set up by Aristotle in his metaphysics as the dominant assumption of this tradition.

Of course, how all this works out is extremely complicated. And it has taken many years to unravel it all. But essentially it is easy to access this perspective. All it takes is to understand the relations of nondual traditions to each other  such as those mentioned, and then use that as a criteria for understanding the dukkha, dunya, maya of the Western tradition rooted in Being as something superabundant over existence. Being is uniquely Indo-European and it is what gives us our possibility of dominating other cultures and it is also our Achilles heel which leads us on to our own destruction. Other traditions have understood illusion, but we merely have a much more potent variety of it which at once gives us technological advantage, and makes us fools falling for our own self generated emergences and nihilisms that compound in the intensification of nihilism in our tradition through the emergent events that overwhelm us. What is out of control in this train ride is what discontinuous change will occur next and when and how deep it will transform our understanding of the world. But these discontinuities themselves are examples of encounters with the cliff faces of nonduality. Nonduality is inscribed into and implied within extreme artificial fabricated dualities by which our tradition expresses itself in concrete dialectical positions that structurally unfold in history as we work out all the permutations of the possibilities of our worldview. These possibilities appear as the deeper philosophical positions that open up new vistas on our existential situation of being caught up as thrown into the situation dwelling in an out of control worldview, realizing we are falling, and projecting the outcome of where we will end up when the train finally crashes somewhere on the track down the mountain. Unlike Heidegger who thinks dasein is falling, the fact is that mitsein is also falling too as the They (One, or as Lacan calls it The Big Other). We are all falling down the rabbit hole together not just Alice. But by a series of fundamental and always deeper reversals we understand the situation much better given the work of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Each develops a philosophy in the confines of the last in the series through deep reversals of assumptions and through those we can glean something about the actual structure of the worldview and what throws it out of control through the dialectic of nihilistic and emergent events like those described by Kuhn, Foucault, and Heidegger.

I don’t have a position within the various structural positions that appear in the unfolding of the Western Worldview because that worldview does not encompass nondual non-conceptual non-experiential non-positions that are comprehended supra-rationally.  What I try to have are appreciations of deeper and deeper positions developed within the worldview by which its comprehends its own situation of falling toward its own self-generated oblivion in rare moments of self-consciousness. Non-duality is in some sense adamantine. It does not change in any way even though it is the basis for all change within experience. There are striated hierarchies of change, changing change, changing change that changes, etc But what changes can only be seen if there is a reference and nonduality is the reference point against which all the meta-levels of change are gauged. Nonduality is unstriated at its depth. It is there to be faced in every breath. But where it is is non-directional and cannot be pinned down by specific concepts or experiences because it envelops all concepts as non-conceptual underpinnings, all experiences as non-experiential references. It appears as the discontinuities in experience and between concepts. Find the most radical distinctions that can be made that are naturally given, no just dreamt up and you are confronting nonduality. And these may be between natural phenomena, or between visible and invisible phenomena, or most difficult to comprehend between invisibles. We must make non-nihilistic distinctions in order to apprehend them. We must encounter and see through entanglements and superimpositions and the distinctions between these limits of our experience. But if we can do that we see a golden thread runs through our thoughts and experiences that we can follow that gives it meaning. Meaning gushes out of the nondual. And the ultimate intellectual adventure is to follow that thread where ever it leads without preconceived ideas  of what form it should take. When you do that vast vistas are opened to the understanding and one teeters on the brink  of wisdom. But whether that wisdom can be made ones own is always an open question.

The road to understanding the deep things about our worldview in the context of other more sophisticated worldviews not barbaric enough to destroy themselves and the planet along with them. What was discovered in these other worldviews is available in our own worldview. The antidote to our deep sickness lies close at hand but unrecognized. It was always there hidden in the kernel of the worldview. It will always be there whether we take advantage of it or not. For illusion to be illusion it needs the measure of existence based in nonduality to distinguish it as illusion along with it as its constant companion. Illusion only exists to make clear what is not illusory beyond the dialectic of emergence and nihilism. Illusion always points beyond itself toward the foundational state of non-illusion. But those pointers are always subtle and take a comprehensive viewpoint to unwind into a supra-rational non-nihilistic path to follow within a world that overwhelms us in every way by overwhelming nihilism that cuts to the core of our experience and derails us at every juncture as we careen down the track together in the out of control engine of the train of our worldview. If we look at the train as a whole, and we look back to the origins of the train and the way that the track and the train itself were constructed we can make sense of it by a genealogical investigation. But the story is very complex and is difficult to concentrate on when the situation is so dire. But if we can step back and get a deeper perspective we realize that whether we get control of the train or not the cliff faces of nonduality will not change and they offer us absolute limits for our journey whether we heed them or not. The whole question revolves around whether we can take the homeward path into the depths of our own tradition and unearth the non-duality that is there which can serve as a guide and can allow us to attempt to take control of the situation again by stepping out of the train and realizing we are actually the cliff faces that define the limits of the human situation within our worldview even more than we are the creatures trapped within the train.

I was asked to answer this, but I did not attend graduate school for philosophy. I am self-taught for the most part. My degrees are in Sociology and Systems Engineering, but my dissertations were very philosophical in those disciplines and for all intents and purposes I was doing my degree in philosophy as a subject even if not in the discipline of philosophy proper. This has good and bad things about it. A good thing is that one is not bound by the strictures of the academic discipline of philosophy, the bad thing is that one is not being mentored by someone who really knows the subject. But if it is a new subject that others are not yet expert in, as Continental Philosophy was in English when I went to school, i.e. there were very few people who were interested in Continental Philosophy who were not on the continent, then mentorship is less of an issue, and you are thrown back on your own resources anyway, and by being outside the Analytically saturated philosophy discipline is then a great help since one is not bound to writing boring papers, but can explore freely the new subject matter of philosophy that is infinitely more interesting than anything that Analytically philosophers have come up with so far. That is because Continental Philosophers discovered the strange fact that there are different kinds or modalities of Being as experienced phenomenologically by human beings beneath the relified level of subject/object distinction, i.e. at the level of being-in-the-world of Dasein. This fundamental shift in the nature of philosophy is still not well appreciated.

So what was it like to be studying Continental Philosophy in an Analytically world but be outside the discipline of philosophy, and in another discipline? It was wonderful. It was an amazing intellectual adventure which has continued ever since and continues to unfold in amazing ways. We talk about inter-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity but few people ever get a chance to do it. I got a chance to do it because the English system is such that you can do work beyond your discipline if your adviser allows it, and my adviser was very tolerant in that way. But that is more possible with philosophy than other disciplines because philosophy impinges on all other disciplines being the origin of all other disciplines and being more general than all other disciplines.

However, one problem is that because most scholars are stuck in their discipline and don’t learn anything beyond that most of my work is incomprehensible to others. That is because I start out assuming that you will know many different disciplines so that we can speak about them freely in their relation to each other. If you don’t know that then you are going to get lost when you read my papers because you need to take a Hyperborean viewpoint that is trans and interdsicpinary in order to understand them. I like this term which I get from S. Rosen’s commentary The Mask of Enlightenment on Nietzsche who says that Zarathustra takes a Hypoborean viewpoint which is a perspective across all other perspectives. The Hypoboreans live in a place in the far north which cannot be gotten to either by land or see and is beyond where the winds come from. Getting to such a viewpoint can only be done if you take your education into your own hands, and you read across disciplines, and you follow your subject where ever it may lead across disciplinary boundaries, learning each discipline as much as necessary along the way. Learning as much as necessary does not lead to mastery, and so one must settle in many cases with being a jack of all trades because knowing everything about everything is impossible. But it does not mean you need to be a master of none. One only needs to master the crucial disciplines to your problematic. But there is no reason to exclude other disciplines due to arbitrary academic boundaries set up in university in order to limit scholarship. Independent scholars are truly independent and can study what they like to the depth that they like and thus come to know much more than scholars that are hemmed in by artificial disciplinary boundaries that they must respect if they are going to advance in their career.

Even with the rise of interest in Continental Philosophy in America and England it is still treated disciplinarily. Mostly it is pursued by people in English departments whose understanding of it is questionable. But fortunately there aer now some schools where you can get a good grounding in Continental Philosophy in a Philosophy department. So for instance UCI is such a school and at that school I took classes from Martin Schwab who recently retired who really helped me understand some of the fundamentals of Continental Philosophy. I wish I had been able to take more of his courses because he is someone who really knows the subject deeply and very well and from whom it is possible to learn a lot about Continental Philosophy. Finding a mentor like that is very important because there are many ways to go astray without knowing it in a discipline in which you are self-taught. But it took me years to find that kind of person who really knew the subject much more deeply than I did myself and who could give me hints as to what I might have misunderstood along the way. So just because you are outside a discipline does not mean you cannot find a mentor in that discipline.

In general we need to remember that our highest priority is to pursue a course that is going to lead to intellectual adventures of the first rank. You will sometimes find that is possible in a discipline. But for the most part what ever can be done in a discipline has probably already been done. The wide open territory is in the interstices and lacunae between disciplines, in the blindspots of our tradition, of which there are many lurking beyond the prison walls of given disciplines. There are of course guards on those walls that lead to the wilderness which is untrammeled beyond the asphalt patchwork of pavings of various disciplines. But if you can avoid being knocked off by the guards whom you fear will curtail your career, then you can venture out into those verdant pastures beyond the pale, they give way to roads less traveled, and then to tracks and paths and eventually to places where no one has trodden where new vistas open up within the mountains of thought that Nietzsche discovered and at the perennial of which he placed Zarathustra. Of course as he says there is solitude there, because very few will venture beyond the boundaries of their disciplines. But in the solitude there is also deep insights to be had along the way as one travels where few minds have gone before. And this is especially true in our time when so much has been discovered in various disciplines unexploited by other disciplines in the solution of their problems.

In order to find this untrammeled territory one must first discover a problematic that will guide beforehand your questioning. Having a problematic that is deep enough is always a difficult thing to find, but once you find it then you need only follow your own fascination as discovery gives way to discovery based on the hard work you do learning what is necessary to pursue your independent course of inquiry. Many times it will take years of fruitless work before you gain the necessary insight, and normally that comes after all the avenues you can think of have failed. But the important thing to realize is that today the new continents to explore like within no longer in the outside world as new geographies. On the map of our discipline coverage of the realms of knowledge there are still many undefined areas, places where we think we will fall off the edge of the map of knowledge if we go there, and places where monsters roam freely.

I recommend that what every your discipline you learn to navigate to those places where the map of knowledge is vague or non-existent between or across disciplines and plumb those depths, which are of course the depths of your own self.

He thought it would be his own time because his time was the time in which the ultimate philosophy, his own, had been realized. So his idea was that the end of history would be like the early 1800s.