Wikipedia

Kukkurovaca

Joined 17 March 2004

कुक्कुरोवाच

Update:Okay, consider me back-ish. I'm not going to have time to go over the changes I've missed, so hopefully nobody slipped anything by me. I know I left at least one conversation hanging, and I'll get back to that as soon as I can, and try to keep up with new events. Let me know about anything I should know about.

Mmm, orange juice

Intro

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I'm a student currently on leave from Brown University; I'm originally from Oakland, CA, and currently reside in Berkeley. My first and enduring loves are the studies of education and religion. My main educational interests are John Dewey (generally) and particularly the problems of philosophy of education which occur in democratic education. My religious interests are broad, though I have soft spots for early Christianity, existential Christianity (Søren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil), Buddhism (esp. Earliest Buddhism, Nagarjuna, and Lin-chi), and the Taoism of Zhuang zi. I've also got three years of Sanskrit and a related interest in Pali and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit.

 
My proximate home

By temperment and choice, I'm more or less a pragmatist, an empiricist, and an anti-foundationalist, though I am not uncritical in my acceptance of these tendencies; particularly, I'm conscious of the underrepresentation of the tragic in american pragmatism (cf. Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy]]) and of the difficulties that occasionally arise in integrating the religious into them. My pragmatic allegiance is thus more through James than through Dewey, despite my background in education.

My Heroes

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My necessary enemies

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My username

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"Kukkurovaca"; कुक्कुरोवाच in Devanagari; Kukkurovāca with the appropriate macron. This is usually glossed by those who were familiar with its creation as "Dog Say," the ungrammaticality of which we can get to in a second, but it can't be anything like "Dog Say" or "The Dog Says", because "kukkurovāca" is totally unresolvable with the dog as the subject: the only sandhi which will produce that "o" is a+u, and since the uvāca can't be in fine compositum (am I spelling that correctly? I don't do latin), the only possible sentence is with the dog in the vocative: "O, (you) dog, (some third party) said (something)."

But the whole thing is just a sort of self-deprecatory in-joke between myself and a classmate. What we were shooting for and missed when we invented the term was "kukkuro brute", "The dog said," which is a quote from the Hitopadesha. It was a reference to a sentence I translated as "Dog say: repetition of my business how by you doable"--which should really read something like "The dog said, 'Who are you to worry about my business.'" (Both the error and the original translation are, of course, a function of doing your Sanskrit homework exclusively in all-nighters.)

So, "kukkurovāca" defines my translation style--drastically literal. Or it was supposed to. But given that we forgot both the correct vocabulary and regular sandhi rules, "kukkurovaca" stands as both a testament to my absurd literality and a caution against error-prone laziness. I habitually use it a username because it's unique and I kind of like the sound of it. Plus, I enjoy the anecdote.


Wikiffiliations

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I am probably classifiable as an inclusionist and eventualist, and my interpretation of NPOV (coupled to some bad experiences with Dvaita fundamentalism) leads me to be a devout ::cough:: secularist as well, though this doesn't appear to be a recognized wiki-"faction".

Meaningless rankings

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Now, what does this say about the nature of my contributions to Wikipedia? ::grin::

My People

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  • Ryguasu [1], able interlocutor, co-creator of the space phone and small countries theory, and probably the best native philosopher (i.e., most naturally philosophical person) I've ever encountered.
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Quotes

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  • Simone Weil
    • Reality comes into view when we see that nature is not only an obstacle which allows us to act in an ordered way but it is also an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.-- Lectures on Philosophy, p.111 (Emphasis added)
    • The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: cf. The Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.-- in The Simone Weil Anthology, ed. George A. Panichas.
  • William James
    • In the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which the ultimate mystery of things works sadly...--"Is Life Worth Living?"
  • Zhuangzi
    • Those who dream of the banquet wake to lamentation and sorrow.
    • Those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt.--(tr. Giles)
  • Misc.
    • There's a thing that you must know concerning the jewels of laughter. They always turn again to tears a fortnight after.-- James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
  • Random
    • Elmo Crmley (7:05:16 PM): I dont' think Wikipedia has a currently in-built policy for moderating conflicts of the type, "X is a prissy bitch who's stalking me"
    • wackyslav (7:06:13 PM): No, although you'd think it would have come up.

Articles

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That I'm wholly or partly responsible for: User:Kukkurovaca/Articles

That need creation and/or improvement: User:Kukkurovaca/Kartavya

That I find amusing:

  • Pearl milk tea -- "Boba literally means the "dominatrix of balls" in the Chinese language, connoting the image of a busty woman."

Apparatus

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Buddhism Apparatus

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User:Kukkurovaca/Buddhism

Wiki Apparatus

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User:Kukkurovaca/Wiki

SandBox

Dual-license

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Dual licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License version 1.0  
I agree to dual-license my text contributions, unless otherwise stated, under Wikipedia's copyright terms and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.
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