two book ideas

First, I decided tonight that I would love to write a systematic book called The Furniture of the World (if it hasn’t already been used). I hate how certain phrases are viewed as devastating objections by the mere fact of being used. So many different sorts of people these days, from scientific realists to pragmatists, are united in their disdain for those who supposedly claim to itemize “the furniture of the world.” (Instead, they give us the furniture of the laboratory or the mind.)

Second, people are having so much unexpected fun with this “overrated philosophers” exercise (it was really just a throwaway remark, but has sprouted up all over the place in the past 24 hours) that I think it might make a nice anthology. My anthology editing days are probably over, so I won’t be doing it myself. But if anyone wants to use that idea, feel free to do so. My only advice is that the essays should be short: no more than 10 pages.

Just think of how irresistibly readable that would be. Everyone would buy and read that book. You’d have continentals trashing Badiou, Lacan, Russell, and Rawls, and analytics trashing Heidegger and Derrida and even some among their own ranks. By the end of that volume, every significant philosopher of the 20th and 21st centuries would be left as a pile of smoking rubble. It would be a comic masterpiece, and we might even learn some important philosophy from it.