most sold in U.S.

Of all books of which I am the author, in the past month, according to Amazon Author Central (a fascinating tool):

1. New York (permanent champion, never anything but #1)
2. Los Angeles
3. Boston
4. California Bay Area
5. Albuquerque

Tucson’s surprising run has ended. Chicago is limping back upwards, but slowly.

New York was more than the next three combined. New York is an intellectual juggernaut.

Marx/Spencer

They’re buried directly across from each other in Highgate Cemetery (ashes, in Spencer’s case). I was there a couple of hours ago.

Marx has a big fancy monument that you can’t possibly miss. Spencer’s is more understated, though still fairly hard to miss. We didn’t find George Eliot who is in the same basic area, someone told us.

The Spencer case is interesting. So popular in his own lifetime that he was the first philosopher to sell one million total books, his reputation has plummeted to the point where almost none of us have read any of his books, and wouldn’t even be ashamed to admit it.

But you can see traces of his former reputation in the way that Nietzsche and Bergson take the trouble to mention him seriously (even if only dismissively, in Nietzsche’s case).

I still remember reading Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche translations as a 17-year-old, and thinking that this Herbert Spencer guy must be a big-time player in philosophy, seeing how often he was mentioned by Nietzsche. But then I never heard his name mentioned by anyone again.

And then I read that dismissive line recently, referring to Spencer as “the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” Owwww…

However, he at least seems to have performed a valuable pedagogical service at the time in popularizing questions of philosophy and science for the rising Anglophone professional classes of the late 19th century.

Zero Books

They seem to have excellent distribution in London now, from what I’ve seen this morning. The stuff is in stock everywhere.

follow-up on previous post

I should have included a bit of commentary with the link to Beiser’s review of the book, but was traveling and didn’t have the time.

The review is rather critical in spirit, but I generally like the model of 19th century philosophy Beiser advocates in the review. A few points, however:

*the big (mostly) missing name in Beiser’s account is Brentano, who inaugurated an entire school of major importance in the late nineteenth century, without which there would have been no Husserl and Heidegger, and which is of the greatest inherent interest even without knowing where it eventually led.

*The only mention of Brentano in the review is rather misleading: “Trendelenburg was the teacher of Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Dilthey and the American philosopher Henry Morris; and his impact upon Kierkegaard is well-known. Among Lotze’s students were Wilhelm Windelband, Gottlob Frege and Franz Brentano.” I have no memory from the biographical sketches I’ve read of Brentano studying with Lotze (though I could easily just be forgetting), but Brentano was a major student of Trendelenburg, and it’s odd that he wouldn’t appear in that far more obvious connection in the previous sentence.

*I thought this part overshot the mark: “Behind the editors’ theme of ‘revolutionary responses to the existing order’ there lies an old myth, one that the editors have scarcely articulated yet tacitly adopted: namely, that the important philosophy of the nineteenth century came not from ‘academic philosophers’ but from the radical individual thinkers outside the university, viz., from such solitary thinkers as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This myth was very much advocated by these thinkers themselves, who declared that they, unlike their academic counterparts, were not in thrall to the governments who employed them, and who claimed that they alone were free-thinkers ready to challenge the moral, religious and social status quo.”

Obviously, Beiser wants to show us that nineteenth century academic philosophy shouldn’t be dismissed en bloc as empty pedantry. And he has a point there. But why go to the opposite extreme and claim that Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were generating some sort of empty, self-promoting myth about their outsider status? It wasn’t really a myth, after all. To varying degrees these figures did all have serious problems in being accepted by the Academy. A good history of nineteenth century philosophy would obviously have to make room for these charismatic wild dogs along with the more academic Trendelenburgs and Droysens.

And the near-total omission of Brentano from the review is a stunner, given Beiser’s radical critique of the “standard curriculum” history he claims is found in the Schrift/Conway book, and his attempt to sketch the main lines of that century’s philosophy.

Beiser writes: “If we take a broad historical perspective of this period, and if we focus especially on German philosophy, which was decisive for the century as a whole, then ‘the most influential trends and developments’ were the following: the materialism controversy, the rise of historicism, and the emergence of neo-Kantianism, especially the formation of the Southwestern and Marburg schools.”

There’s no chance you can leave the Brentano School off that list. Its omission is a complete mystery to me.

But some of the other names were refreshing to see in this context, which is why I linked to the book (not for the polemical side of it, but just because Beiser does bring up a number of important currents that are often forgotten).

Nineteenth Century Philosophy

Beiser reviews the Schrift/Conway anthology of that title, HERE.

now that’s a *proof*!

Aristotle, still in Physics 4.13, on why time should be considered primarily a source of destruction, and only incidentally as a source of creation:

“A sufficient evidence of this is that nothing comes into being without itself moving somehow and acting, but a thing can be destroyed even if it does not move at all.”

more humor, Aristotle-style

Maybe I’m the only one who laughs at these things (and literally “out loud”). But I see it as a genuine comic talent Aristotle has for stating the obvious as though it were an important technical point (as, in fact, it usually is):

“But to say that Troy has just been taken– we do not say that, because it is too far from the ‘now.'”

Physics, 4.13

An entire book called Aristotle’s Jokes is probably in order.

Amazon UK recommends

“Amazon.co.uk recommends Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy”

*lol*

Aristotle’s way with words

From Physics 4.10:

“Next for discussion after the subjects mentioned is Time… First, does it belong to the class of things that exist or to that of things that do not exist?”

the ash-sucker

It was so strange that I’m only barely sure that it wasn’t a dream. But at around 2 AM today, a very large truck pulled up directly in front of the apartment that burned the other day. For the next hour, it made what seemed to be a very loud sucking sound.

From the balcony, with bleary eyes, I couldn’t actually see a hose of any sort leading from the truck up to the 4th floor apartment. But surely it must have been some sort of attempt to suck the ash and cinders out of that apartment. I can’t think of any other reason for a big truck to be making that sort of sound directly in front of that particular building just two days after that fire.

But I’ve never heard of such a process, and am also not sure why it had to be done at 2:00 in the morning. It effectively ruined one’s sleep for the night. There was no way you could have slept through that.