Keith Lyons Long Biography — Lebenslauf

Long Biography — Lebenslauf

Keith Lyons was born in America in Naperville, Illinois in 1967.  Before graduating high school in 1985, he established himself as a recording artist in the Chicago punk rock music scene; playing numerous shows, some dates as early as 1979, throughout Chicago and the Illinois tristate area.  By 1985, he helped found Landmind Records, a small label that goes on to release six titles before the end of 1987.

In the two years following high school, he performed with various bands while taking classes at the College of DuPage (COD). In February of 1987, he began studies in Philosophy, Biology, and Art at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay (UWGB). And in 1988 he attended Warren Wilson College in North Carolina for one year, visiting mostly biology and literature courses. Following his year there, he returned to UWGB.

In the summer of 1990, he hopped on his bicycle and rode from Culbertson, Montana, across Montana, and over the Canadian Rockies, across British Columbia, and eventually on to Anchorage Alaska. Along the way, while traversing hundreds of miles of desolate highway, he contemplated a problem he had discovered (in a biology class at Warren Wilson College) in the logic underscoring Richard Dawkins’ terms, meme and memetic, and how the problem relates to Zeno’s arguments against motion. Partially successful, he “came to an understanding” in regards to the “illusion of motion”: Since he is not moving, all the discomforts and pains he feels from riding a bike can be the only real part of the journey.

In 1990, he went to Germany and attended the GhK (University) in Kassel where he studied German and Philosophy. In 1992 he returned to UWGB and remained there until receiving his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Humanistic Studies.

From 1992 until the end of 1993 he worked as a social worker in Green Bay, Wisconsin with mentally and physically challenged adults.

In December of 1993, he hopped on his bicycle again; this time the ride took him from San Francisco, California, to La Paz, Mexico: Along the way, the idea that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is not a valid statement intertwines with the unresolved problems found in meme and memetic.

In 1994 he went to Freiburg, Germany and began post-graduate studies at the Albert-Ludwig University. Unable to formulate the nature of his arguments regarding Cartesian philosophy and Dawkins’ terminology; three and a half years passed by and he received no assistantship offers.

Throughout the years from 1995 thru 1998, he managed, in-between university semesters and working construction building tennis courts throughout Germany, to ride his bike through Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, northern and north eastern Canada; many parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada; around the Gulf of Mexico, and around Iceland. During these rides, various problems in philosophical and scientific methods and theory were the “focus of meditation”.

After becoming a father in May of 1998, he decided to move back to the United States with his German wife and daughter. In Rochester, Minnesota, and Menominee, Wisconsin, he opened up retail skateboard shops and a skateboard park:  Board to Death Sports Inc. and Madrone Family Skatepark Inc. In addition to running these businesses he and his wife setup a Foster Care residence, whereby they managed the lives of four persons with mental and physical disabilities.

In the end of 2003, he sold his retail businesses, closed their foster care residence, and took up an offer to teach English and Business Ethics at the Dalian University of Finance and Economics in Dalian, China.

In September of 2005, while still living and working in Dalian, he lost a finger in a freak accident and, as result of poor medical treatment, got blood poisoning. This experience finally delivered the inspiration needed to clearly formulate the problems he discovered, earlier in his life, in the logic underscoring certain scientific terms and values, and in the subjective-objective relationship of “self”.

In January of 2006, with his wife having already returned to Germany a year earlier, he and his daughter left China for Dresden, Germany, where his wife was studying at the time to become a nurse. In Dresden, he decided it was time to write that book about “faulty logic” and the effects it has had and still has on the world: It is a work that is not completely unprecedented, but closely related to the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, with hues of Mikhail Bakhtin, Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and a whole lot of Aristotle.

Mr. Lyons still resides in Dresden where he continues his research in Mereology and Phenomenology, and to ride his skateboard, and, on occasion, he still manages to play music with his daughter and sons.