Geraldine Ferraro dies

Sorry to read the news, HERE.

She was the first woman to be nominated as VP of a major U.S. Party, and (my God) certainly the better of the two to have been thus nominated.

Mondale is still alive, of course. 1984. Feels like ages ago.

an Ennis post from March 22

I’m afraid I missed THIS POST until now. Among other things, it contains the Table of Contents for his book.

push for recognition of Libyan rebel government

“Egyptian intellectuals form a committee whose aim is to gain recognition for the Libyan Transitional National Council”

I’m not sure why this hasn’t already been done.

This is one of those rare cases when the vast majority of the world, including al-Qaeda, is hoping for the same result.

Libya

With the help of airstrikes, the rebels have RECAPTURED AJDABIYA.

I read now that the West is “considering” arming the rebels.

I’m not sure what the point is of pretending that NATO is merely there to stop attacks on civilians. There is no way that civilians will be safe as long as Qaddafi remains in power. In short, the West has chosen sides (pretty clearly the right side), and once you choose sides you might as well go all the way.

The rebels should have been armed a long time ago. Both because of Iraq and because of generally valid imperialism concerns, Western ground troops should be out of the question, and they seem to be so. That means the rebels are going to need better weapons.

There’s an obvious risk to this. The rebels won’t end up being saints either, and any weapons given to them may end up being used in ways one wishes they hadn’t been used.

But as I see it, there was a pretty simple choice here. (1) Sit by and watch Qaddafi massacre Benghazi, and feel like crap about that for the next 20 years. Or (2) intervene with everything short of ground troops, and stick to it until Qaddafi is out of power.

To stop now would be the worst of both worlds, so it now has to pushed until the rebels take over.

My only regret is that we sold out Bahrain in order to make this possible, though Bahrain was probably going to be sold out anyway, sadly enough. The Bahrainis are the big losers of the uprisings so far.

“philosophy critics”, à la literary critics

After reading all that Edmund Wilson last summer, the thought struck me that there isn’t really “philosophy criticism” in the same sense that there is “literary criticism.”

What makes great literary critics so wonderful is that they are very good at sizing up the unique strengths and weaknesses of individual authors. For instance, I just ran across another passage of Wilson in which he was saying that even though Turgenev is obviously not of the same rank as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, he’s more consistent. In the greater novelists you’ll get certain pieces of boring junk now and then, perhaps due to greater ambition. But Turgenev, he claimed, is one of the most consistently solid novelists we have. Whether or not you agree, this is the sort of thing critics (whether in literature, art, music, or wine) do well– instead of just making loud proclamations of who ranks where, they dig into the inner balance of forces in each author and show us that stars of the second rank sometimes outshine those of the first in this or that limited way.

The reason this sort of critique tends not to be a philosophy skill is that, for obvious reasons, we’re always rushing ahead to the question of whether or not the philosopher in question is right. Since there’s no such thing as “right” in literature, that temptation doesn’t exist, and critics are free to taste authors in the same way that wines are tasted: trying to detect unique overtones in each vineyard and each year, subtly finding traces of “wood” or “tobacco” in each bottle, and realizing that even the best bottles go best only with a certain kind of meal.

One of the reasons I always liked reading José Ortega y Gasset is that he seems to have that literary critic sense about him when reading philosophers. Like literary critics, he has some biases that seem obviously wrong (such as his low appreciation for Nietzsche, his visceral disgust for Kierkegaard, and his exaggerated view that Dilthey is the greatest philosopher of the second half of the 19th century– and I say this as someone who enjoys Dilthey). He’s also a bit confusing on Heidegger, but Heidegger was his contemporary and rival, and it’s rare that people fully understand their contemporaries and rivals in any field.

That said, he has a number of fascinating things to say about 19th century philosophy, in particular his notion that Lotze could have been a much greater figure if not for a certain weakness that made him run away in frustration from the triumph of positivism. That seems right to me, though Lotze’s still good enough. (Read William James on Lotze, for instance. That’ll get you interested.)

Wisconsin Badgers are the death of me

After a mediocre performance in the World Cup pool this summer, I very nearly won the NCAA tournament pool with the usual group of Cairo sports fans.

But even though eight teams remain, and even though Mike C. is only 1 point ahead of me for the lead, he’s already locked it up. He and I each have only one team still alive, and it’s the same team: Kansas. So, I can’t make up any further ground on him.

Mike C. had an Ohio State-Pitt final. I went out on a limb with Ohio State-Wisconsin (showing my Big Ten bias) and Wisconsin just didn’t get it done.

I should have trusted my gut feeling that Arizona would upset Duke, but I lost my nerve in the end and caved in to Duke’s reputation.

And probably like many people, I told myself: Butler can’t possibly do it two years in a row, can they? Well, maybe they can.

No one had Virginia Commonwealth advancing very far, unless it was a chicken pecking screens randomly after receiving electric shocks. So I won’t hold that one against myself.

Robert Jackson with a position on determinacy and OOO

In this post, HERE.

And check out Levi’s comment as well, which is the first below the post.

I’m not entirely sure where I stand on the issue of freedom either, though I’ll be testing a position on it very soon.

Also, I’ve heard Levi’s views in private as to why a topological conception of objects is needed. I’m not in agreement, but his arguments aren’t to be taken lightly here. You’ll see my response in Treatise on Objects.

new words recognized by the OED

HERE.

They include (I’m not kidding):

*FYI

*LOL

*OMG

*and “heart” as a verb, as in “I ♥ wordpress.com”

Obviously, FYI has been around a lot longer than the others. I guess the tsunami of new abbreviations retroactively convinced them that FYI merited admission after so many years of exclusion.

These OED decisions obviously do have some influence. I always feel more comfortable using deviant slang once the OED opens the door to it, so that any pedant who scolds me can now get hammered with the OED counterpunch. Most recently, the newly permitted use of “they” as a third person singular pronoun is an example of this. I still wouldn’t do it in formal writing, but it’s handy to be able to say things like: “Every philosopher tells us at some point what they think about ethics.” This is a good way of simultaneously avoiding the sexist “he,” the trying-too-hard “she,” and the unwieldy “he/she.” Unfortunately, it still doesn’t quite pass muster in formal writing. But a pedant once scolded me for doing it in an email, and the OED counterpunch came fast and heavy.

preliminary thoughts on a reread of Hegel’s Logic

I’ve been digging back into the Science of Logic for the first time in awhile. I find that it can be good to leave gaps of some years between reading books of this magnitude, because we can then see how we ourselves have changed over the years, along with the obvious point that one needs a certain mental freshness to appreciate a philosophy book fully.

For example, in 2005 I reread the whole of Sein und Zeit for the first time since graduate school. (I’d read it far too many times at that stage, and went back to it only when writing Heidegger Explained.) This exercise allowed me to notice that I’d changed my mind about one thing in particular– the analytic of Dasein’s everydayness is quite a bit better than I had found it in graduate school. The reason for my earlier view is pretty clear: I was fighting hard at that stage against rampant Dasein-centric readings of Heidegger, and this led me to be somewhat unfair toward his concrete analyses of Dasein, which do include some genuine anthropological insights. (But I still think Max Scheler may be better in that respect, as stated in Tool-Being.)

As for Hegel, I’ll reserve final judgment until I’m all the way back through the text, and that’s going to take quite a few months since there will be multiple projects demanding my attention in the meantime. But here are the things I’ve noticed so far:

*It’s a much faster read now than it was in graduate school; then it was like pulling teeth. The lesson: reading very difficult philosophy texts does become easier, as long as you keep doing it without long pauses.

*I think The Phenomenology of Spirit is probably a better book. Given how long the Logic is, and given its understandably lofty claims concerning its own mission, we may tend to assume that the book is more intricate than it actually is. In fact, it contains a fairly stripped-down argument, which is somewhat concealed by the extensive sidebars in between. I hadn’t remembered it quite that way.

*Hegel is a lot more acerbic than we remember. When we’re reading classic authors centuries later, we take it for granted that they’re classics, and thus we might not notice when they say some incredibly haughty things, because we’re used to feeling like they have the right to talk this way. But if you force yourself to remember that he was basically just a high school principal in Nuremberg when writing the Logic, some of his dismissiveness can be really jaw-dropping. I’m not saying I wish it were absent: in many ways it makes for a clearer reading experience. I’m just saying it’s remarkable that he spoke that way at that stage of his career.

*His handling of the thing-in-itself is a bit cavalier. Yes, I realize that by the time of the Logic he thought this issue was well behind him, and I know he ad some predecessors had already dealt with it at length. But there’s still a quick triumphalism about the topic that often makes it feel underdeveloped.

*He’s not a great writer on the section-by-section level, but on the level of individual turns of phrase and powerful one-line uppercuts, he’s among the very best.

the bravery of Syrians

It’s a sort of courage that most of us will probably never be called upon to show. HERE.