Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
A Portrait of Kermit Oliver
A thoughtful biographical essay on the artist designer for Hermès, a recluse who works the nightshift as a postman. Tremendous talent tinged with terrible tragedy.
“‘What was the purpose of everything that’s happened?’ Kermit said, his voice rising. ‘Some ancient writings feel that the God of this world is not the God that created it.’ He closed his eyes and paused. ‘Let me put it this way: Do you think God created tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis and everything as a punishment for people? Or is that just coincidence?’ Kermit stopped, suddenly reticent. He sat still, but his long and weathered hands twisted and turned in his lap. He wrung them out like a dishrag. ‘Life is chaos,’ he said. He looked out the window. ‘Some of us survive it. Some of us don’t.’ ”
Structuralism's Samson
“The ghosts of ideas and people move in and out of time and mind, liable to appear in quotidian moments. Shortly after first sitting down to begin this conversation, Macksey asked his guest for a match. A shuffling through the stacks of papers and books that cover the table in his library soon followed. His guest found a match‑book and held it up. “No, they’re empty,” Macksey says, before noticing the script logo of a Swiss tobacco manufacturer on the cover. “They’re Davidoff. I haven’t had Davidoff since Jacques Derrida was here.””
Your Brain on Pseudoscience
“An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.”
How to make a book disappear
“An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There’s no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers’ websites, to expunge it from a publisher’s online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It’s ugly. For all kinds of reasons.”
The longest political pamphlet ever
“The particular furor over the dictionary—from which Skinner’s book takes its title—was partly due to a messy press release that declared “ain’t gets official recognition at last.” The press release left out that the dictionary also noted that ain’t was “disapproved of by many” and “substandard.” (“Ain’t” had also appeared in many earlier dictionaries.) Still, reviewers had a grand time with headlines such as “Ain’t Nothing Wrong With the Use of Ain’t” amidst a nationwide clutching of the pearls: gutter talk had invaded Webster’s! The New York Times called for the entire edition to be scrapped. Dwight Macdonald, seeing Webster’s Third as an incarnation of the middlebrow takeover of America’s intellectual culture, wrote a coruscating 20-page smackdown in The New Yorker.”
"The War of the Words: How to Update a Dictionary," - http://bit.ly/RKNZHr
The Truth about Lying
“It’s all about rationalisation. If we can rationalize to a higher degree, we will be able to cheat more and think of ourselves as good people. And if we can rationalize less we would be more honest... We went to UCLA in Los Angeles and we asked about five hundred students to try and recall the Ten Commandments. But after trying to recall the Ten Commandments, when we gave them the same opportunity to be dishonest nobody was dishonest. In fact, when we take self declared atheists and we ask them to swear on the bible and give them the chance to cheat they don’t cheat. So this suggests that there is something about reminders that the moment we think about morality, even if it’s not our own moral code, all of a sudden we are kind of supervising ourselves to a higher degree.”
Who Killed the Liberal Arts?
“The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.”
How to do things with books
'And how is the value of books changing in an increasingly digital culture in which, depending on how you look at it, print is becoming either less or more valuable? Price suggests that we need to better understand the print “before” against which we position the digital “after”: too often, she argues, “we use idealized printed texts as a stick with which to beat real digital ones” in ways that “flatten the range of uses to which the book was put before digital media.” But as this book shows, the meanings of the book in Victorian Britain were just as diverse as the multiple uses to which books were put. By complicating the two-way distinction of text and book, Price above all suggests that the contemporary binary of print vs. digital is a false dichotomy, one which pushes us towards asking the wrong questions and creating all-too-simple answers. As Price ventures, the most interesting question to ask may be not “what the Victorians felt about the book but why they felt so much.” The same might be said of our feelings towards books – both print and digital – today. Books matter in every sense of the word, and better understanding “how to do things with books” can both enrich our study of the Victorian period and enliven our cultural debates today.'
- "Books Before and After" by Charlotte Mathieson, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/?p=18726
Sloterdijk's Bubbles
"Sloterdijk’s contention is that, as sociologist Bruno Latour paraphrases it, “to define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, the Umwelt that makes it possible for them to breathe.” That may seem a trivial point to make: who doesn’t think context is all? But, as Sloterdijk is aware, thinking outside of the liberal-individualist paradigm at an ontological level is not without its dangers. Sloterdijk conceives of the Spheres trilogy as companion and continuation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and a corrective to what he sees as its faults. Heidegger’s wrong turn is precisely his insistence on essential loneliness, and his abandonment of “existential spaciousness.” Heidegger’s mistake, according to Sloterdijk, is to try to answer the question of ‘who’ before fully exploring the question of ‘where’. Sloterdijk contends that, by neglecting the spatial dimension of ‘being in the world’ in favor of questions of authenticity, Heidegger gave himself a blind spot that not only left his own philosophically project unbalanced, but himself vulnerable to the political blindness of radical nationalism. Bubbles attempts to remedy that neglect: to think through the implications of existence as ‘being-with’ — that is, as part of a containing sphere." - Joshua Mostafa on Bubbles," Los Angeles Review of Books, http://bit.ly/NV4CjJ
Apocalypse Not
"Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable... Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
- "Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times," Wired Magazine, http://bit.ly/OrElL0
For further reading on the theology of tipping points see also, Stefan Skrimshire's work Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination.