too hot

Everything I brought to wear on this trip is too heavy. It’s pretty warm in Maryland, all of a sudden.

small world alert/Iowa mafia

The guy who invited Tim Morton to Temple, Prof. Alan Braddock, just happened to mention he was from Iowa. Turns out he’s from Iowa City, played basketball for I.C. West, and used to eat at my parents’ hippiesh sandwich place when they opened it in the early 1970’s.

Now it turns out that the guy who has runs the ice cream place on the waterfront here in Annapolis, who’s had it since 1976 (and I was in there sometimes during my student years), is from Iowa and knows who my mother is. And that was discovered purely by the chance meanderings of random conversation as well. I wonder how many coincidences there are that we simply never hear about. Or maybe there is some minor deity who ensures that all coincidences are drawn to the attention of the relevant parties.

SEP at York: call for papers

philosophy-CFP-1

Oxford

Looks like I may be squeezing in a public talk in Oxford after all. It’s not yet confirmed, but would likely be on the afternoon of May 11. I’ll post details when and if it’s finalized.

three chunks of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

That’s what I’ll be reviewing this morning, since I’m sitting in on a Freshman Seminar tonight on these excerpts. The seminars run from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights.

Otherwise, the classes taken by all students are 4 years of mathematics (Euclid all the way up through Einstein), 4 years of language (roughly 2 of Greek and 2 of French for everyone), and the fourth and final class is laboratory though it’s replaced by music in Sophomore year.

I’m not sure how the lab program works these days, but we did the history of atomic theory when I was a Freshman, and it was a fantastic experience.

I loved the whole program, and would probably choose it 100 times if I had 100 rebirths at my disposal. Perhaps the most valuable skill you pick up from the St. John’s curriculum is that you end up not the least bit intimidated by any subject matter, since you’re always having to come to grips with materials that are initially over your head. It’s hard to get jived by someone blowing smoke in an article if you already had to figure out Einstein, Lobachevski, and Hegel on your own. To this day I refuse to read secondary sources on any author until the very last minute, after struggling abundantly with the primary sources first.

If by some chance you’re still in high school and reading this, I can say you’re making a mistake if you go anywhere else for your undergraduate studies.

What was the hardest part of the whole four years? That depends on the student. I thought it was Maxwell, personally.

Most fun? Studying Ptolemaic astronomy! And Dante was my favorite author. Heidegger was not read at the time; that was my extracurricular hobby. But I saw yesterday that they’ve added a few days on Introduction to Metaphysics.

And I did find the library’s copy of the dual-language Vom Wesen des Grundes yesterday. I loathe it when people write notes in library books, but I seem to have done it myself in that book: quite a few marginal notes and underlines are undeniably in my own hand. But I’ll forgive myself this time, because I really loved that book. The one-page 1949 preface to it (it was originally published in 1929) is one of the most interesting things Heidegger ever wrote, but it’s perpetually ignored. That’s where he says that there are two kinds of “not,” the “not” of nothingness and the “not” between being and beings (the ontological difference), which he says are the same but not identical. He also wonders aloud why no one has done anything with that topic in 20 years. I floated a theory about that in Tool-Being, but haven’t seen others talk about it.

And yes, I found that they had indeed taken my suggestion and moved Jakob Klein’s personal copy of the first edition of Vom Wesen des Grundes and moved it to the Rare Book Room. It’s nice to have materials available in the stacks, and perhaps Klein’s will required his books to go on the shelf. But I couldn’t stand the thought of someone taking that book to the coffee shop and spilling orange juice on it. It’s too valuable an item even as a first edition, let alone the personal copy of Klein (one of Heidegger’s more interesting students).

This reminds me of my weirdest used bookstore experience, in Iowa City in 1996. I was passing a recently opened used bookstore, and hesitated before going in; at the time I was writing my Ph.D. and low on funds. Finally I decided to enter, but made a mental vow to myself: “I won’t buy anything unless it’s absolutely exceptional and impossible to find elsewhere.”

I went straight to the Philosophy section, and behold– I found a first edition copy of Heidegger’s habilitation thesis on Scotus! I’m not joking.

Even weirder, I opened the front cover apprehensively to see what he price might be, and saw these words written in pencil: “First Edition, Heidegger’s Habilitation Thesis, $25”

How any used bookstore owner could both know what he had on his hands and only charge $25 for it– that was something I couldn’t understand.

I thought of just buying it and silently running before the owner realized his error, but in the end my curiosity prevailed, and I struck up a conversation with him about how he had obtained the volume. He was actually quite enthusiastic about having a customer come in who appreciated the opportunity.

It turned out that this book came from the estate of the recently deceased University of Iowa philosopher Moltke Gram, who had had Heidegger as a doctoral committee member many decades earlier.

history of this hotel

In 2006 while wandering in Paris, I accidentally ran across a plaque on the hotel where the Treaty of Paris was signed (the one recognizing American independence). The American signatories were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay.

The Treaty was ratified in Annapolis, and Adams, Franklin, and Jay came to the restaurant in this hotel to celebrate. The restaurant has been called The Treaty of Paris ever since.

However, hotel management made a questionable decision recently in putting a Starbucks in the basement.

poor Japan

“Magnitude 7.1 earthquake strikes northeastern coast of Japan, U.S. Geological Survey reports.”

Egypt articles

Disturbing eyewitness accounts of ARMY BEHAVIOR in Tahrir on Saturday morning. This is very, very bad. When Mubarak resigned on February 11, I don’t think we were expecting protestors to be killed in Tahrir on April 9.

And here’s a brief piece concerning AMR MOUSSA. He’s popular in Egypt, and I’ve seen him speak and like his backbone. But he really seems to be a shameless opportunist. During the Revolution he was calling for Mubarak to stay, up to the last possible minute. And now he’s calling for Mubarak to be prosecuted. He’s counting on people to have short memories, and he’ll probably get away with it. I say that because he’s had pretty strong poll numbers for the upcoming Presidential race all along.

Donald Trump

My God, he’s demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate. Until now that’s been a hobby for angry rednecks, not corrupt billionaires. Does Trump really think he’s going to get any Republican primary votes from the “Obama isn’t American” demographic?

Cynicism becomes comical when it’s that hopelessly inept. And Trump already made me laugh recently with his tasteless boasts about cheating Qaddafi on a real estate deal.

a few more remarks on Villanova

I’ve probably given short shrift here to the wonderfully organized conference at Villanova, mostly because I’m still on Cairo time and always in a rush to catch some sleep at precisely the moment when others are just getting revved up. (Then I’m up at 3:30 AM when no one else is.)

The last three full-blown conferences I’ve attended (Dundee, Claremont, Villanova) have been three of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. Why is that? Are people getting smarter? Maybe, but unlikely. Am I becoming more tolerant and liking everything more with age? Possible, but not probable. The best explanation is that I’m simply happier with recent trends in philosophy than I was in the 1990’s, and thus the conferences are more pleasing to me now due to their content being more interesting. There were all kinds of good papers at that Villanova conference, and the students there are really smart.

For the first time ever, I also had the chance to sit through a panel consisting of two people who were completely trashing my ideas. All in good fun.

Sorry if I already mentioned this and am repeating a story (I’m too tired to go look) but this was my first visit to Villanova since October 1990 for SPEP, the first academic conference I ever attended. It was in the building across the street from this year’s conference.

As for Philadelphia– wow. It feels kind of exciting right now, even.