As for seth, if practice is what matters, then what philosophers do matters.

But in the meantime I have learned that “Farsi” = Persian, so I’m still ahead of the game.

“… open, democratic, sometimes demagogic dialogue is what the blogosphere is about (and, for all its faults, should be about).”

Conversation, side-conversation, tangent and loop are what make the bustle of CT (and all free talk) so intriguing. In a discussion of the relative merits of blogging versus more refined academic writing, it is hardly surprising that Jonathan and I engaged in a little jawing about the relative prose merits of disciplines within academic writing.

As for “a sense of the value of the literary” and the rest of your penultimate paragraph: you hoist yerself by your own pike. And while you’re hanging there, looking every bit the angry doofus, allow me to ask whether a craftsman can be good at something if he is not also right about it—and vice-versa? It’s an old question, but eternally interesting. In wrapping up Connolly’s Enemies of Promise this evening, I was just thinking how like Socrates’ line of questioning were his judgements and cautions (and how fitting those cautions were to the question of whether or not blogging’s casual nature is or isn’t, as Socrates might have asked at Plato’s hand long before the Iranian spate over the matter, damaging).

“On one side were members of the roshanfekr class — meaning those writers and intellectuals possessing an “enlightened mind,” but also a certain degree of education, sophistication, and social prestige. The term, writes Doostdar, “has historically come to represent one who is conversant with modernist or postmodernist discourses, is a humanist, feels a certain commitment toward the well-being of his or her won society, and continually and publically [criticizes] the values, norms, and behaviors of that society.”

This has a lot more to do with the argument over whether one should write in latin than with the ins and out of the technics of academic analysis. I’d prefer eith side of the debate in iran to the crap in english. Humanism? Where is that in evidence much on the English speaking web? The web is populated by enthusiastic tech heads, futurists and geeks who do calculations and imagine they represent the world. The web in Iran and China, and frankly for Belle d. and Riverbend was and is the only way to communicate otherwise common human concerns.

None of you hsve any sense of the value of the literary, of the community of language, in English, Persian or any other language. You’re all more interested in being right than in being good at something, which is the poet’s or the craftsman’s or woman’s desire. It’s why lawyers laugh out loud at at HLA fucking Hart. Conciousness is logic to you people, and that’s absurd. It’s like saying justice is the words in a book.
You talk in schemas. Writers describe, as lawyers perform law.

And your friend Ophelia Benson argues the logic of religion with believers. Any anthropologist worth his weight in sand will laugh and walk away. I keep hoping for better. it’s not gonna happen

Also, my grandfather was an economist and not a bad writer: nor were, say, Arrow, Samuelson, Boulding… Herbert Simon when writing economics; even in Mathematics, you’ve got tremendous writers in Hardy, Kac, Wiener…

My own hunch is that, among major disciplines, the break-down for best would be:

1) Philosophy

2) History

3) Classics/Religious Studies

4) Political Science

5) Economics

6) Mathematics

7) AFSCME Janitor’s Subcommittee

8) Information/Library Science

9) Random Selection from Computer Lab Recycling Bin

10) English

As for blogging: I spent the afternoon reading Connolly’s Enemies of Promise out in the garden (bereft even of weeds, but it’s finally spring in Minneapolis) and am freshly reminded that I should not succumb so readily to the poppy of (especially asynchronous, typed) conversation…

The only reason it’s become known in English as “Farsi” is because the State Department and CIA were too damned ignorant of Iranian culture too know that we already had a perfectly good English word for the language.

Shall we call German, “Deutsch” or French “Francais” or Arabic “`Arabiyya”? And, I might add, mangle the pronunciation as well.

Kieran rightly drubs me, however. Let me rephrase:

In order to be precise and clear, it is not necessary to write complicated sentences. Nor, moreover, do complex ideas require complex grammar. This is particularly the case if one’s goal is to explicate or persuade rather than to befuddle.