Comments on: Every virtue and but one small defect

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:03:19 +0000

Barthelme should work well as a postscript or rebuttal.

By: Adam Kotsko

Adam Kotsko — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 19:16:02 +0000

I’m disappointed that you didn’t complete the circle with at least a token reference to Roland Barthes. My dissertation is going to be entitled, “Barth, Barth, and Barthes: The Dialectical Circumference of God.” (I stole that last bit from a CT commenter and have used it so often since then that I think it’s officially mine under common law.)

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 15:35:11 +0000

nnyhav, I didn’t think of that. I did two posts in two days on two blogs about two writers named Barth and it didn’t cross my mind. How very odd.

By: nnyhav

nnyhav — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 15:26:02 +0000

And I had foregone commenting elsewhere on “From Barthelme to Barth and back …”—why is this not amongst your exercises?

By: jholbo

jholbo — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:55:39 +0000

I think you can’t really understand why Descartes even thinks he can claim at the end that the wax is known by pure understanding unless you realize that he thinks there is really only one physical object – an infinitely divisible, semi-fluid Euclidean solid: to wit, the physical world. Like a big blob of variably dense, malleable wax, really. Some bad arguments he makes make more sense – I mean, it’s easier to see how he made his mistakes – if you interpret him as getting ahead of himself and already making substantive physical assumptions that we would never think to make today. Because they’re fantastical drivel.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:48:10 +0000

I feel a spell of Sot-Weed blogging coming. Neal Stephenson on Quaaludes.

By: lurker

lurker — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 14:30:47 +0000

What part of Meditations II really requires Descartes’s physics to make sense? (Love the selection from Barth, though!)