Check out “Brian Leiter’s take”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000542.html on what is living (and dead) in Marx’s philosophy. I seem to remember Ernest Gellner writing of Marx somewhere, that even where Marx gives the wrong answers he often asks the right questions, chief among which is “cui bono?”
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Chris Bertram
I see that the “German internet cannibalism trial”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1098905,00.html has started. For those who don’t know, the defendant advertised for a willing victim on the internet, cut off his penis (which they consumed together) and then stabbed his victim and dismembered him. Nasty stuff, but philosophically untroubling for those of us who are sufficiently paternalistic to think the law ought to place limits on what adults may consent to have done to them. Our “libertarian friends”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/ , on the other hand, may find it more difficult to come up with principled objections.
I just acquired a Handspring Treo 600, which is a rather nice bit of kit to have and certainly beats both my old Palm m100 and Nokia 8210 combination. I used to read email with those by using the infra-red connection between the two but once spam started reaching its current extent it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Now I’d like to use the Treo to read email from time to time but I need a decent IMAP-enabled mail client to take advantage of the server-side installation of SpamAssassin on my university mailserver. Any recommendations?
The Columbia website has “”Three Concepts of Liberty”:http://www.college.columbia.edu/aboutcc/news/morestory.php?Story_ID=364&Story_Version=1 ” , the Contemporary Civilization Coursewide Lecture, Fall 2003 by Quentin Skinner, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. I’ve watched about the first 20 minutes so far and it is admirably clear and consistently interesting. When he got to Mill, Marx and Habermas I started yelling “What about Rousseau?!!” at the screen (but I often do that). (To watch you need RealPlayer installed).
UPDATE: I’m less impressed after 48 minutes than I was after the first 25 or so. He still didn’t talk about Rousseau which was all the more unforgivable because his third concept of liberty — freedom as non-dependence on the will of others — is so important for Rousseau’s own account. But I shouldn’t just snark on about my own obsessions. What I thought was absurd was his insistence at the end that it somehow followed from the alleged incommensurability of the three concepts that we have to choose amongst them. Why? Why can’t I value (in some measure) absence of constraint, self-realization and non-dependence on the will of others? He doesn’t explain and he makes some silly (and disingenuous) remarks about being a historian rather than a philosopher to absolve himself from having to. None of which should discourage people from listening to what is a characteristically elegant and interesting presentation.
Like everyone else I’m plagued by spam. Since 1930 gmt on Saturday I’ve received 17 legitimate emails and 353 spams. The good news is that using “Mozilla Thunderbird”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/ ‘s spamblocking software I’ve filtered out nearly all of it (and the latest version of “Mozilla Firebird”:http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/ is very good at stopping annoying pop-up advertising). People who use different (better?) operating systems may have better options, but for those of us condemned to Windoze, those two programs may be the best mail and browser options.
John Holbo has a “quite brilliant extended post”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/loads_of_learne.html about the whole Bad Writing debate (and I’m not just saying that because of the nice things he writes about CT). In a “follow-up post”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/sometimes_a_sna.html John has more to say about how the targets of his ire get analytical philosophy wrong: they say that it is “bobbing along in the wake of logical positivism”. This is important, because people who do “theory” in the humanities often operate with a completely false idea of what philosophers think and do – a false idea that functions for them as a lazy self-defence mechanism and comfort blanket.
Whatever the drawbacks of the Pope’s views about contraception or human sexuality, I was heartened to learn that his judgement remains sound concerning “the things that really matter”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/funny_old_game/3242602.stm . Now if he could just lay on the odd miracle or two …
It looks like a quiet day today on Crooked Timber. But I’ve noticed a couple interesting links elsewhere. “Tyler Cowen over at the Volokhs”:http://volokh.com/2003_11_23_volokh_archive.html#106994007245191210 points to “a new article in Nature”:http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v426/n6965/abs/nature02029_fs.html&dynoptions=doi1069939982 about the origins of Indo-European languages (Anatolia is where they come from according to this study). And Brian Leiter “finds something to like about Stanley Fish”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000513.html who has “a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003112601c.htm about right-wing threats to academia (some of which sound not dissimilar to New Labour threats over here in the UK).
The results of Norman Geras’s “Alternative Big Read poll”:http://normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_11_23_normangeras_archive.html#106984589089946590 are out, with _Pride and Prejudice_ in first place. The selection is pretty good except for the appearance of _Lord of the Rings_ in second place (ranked their top book by eight witless people).
I’ve been following the discussions about genre and literary fiction in the threads started by “Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000875.html and “Maria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000881.html with some interest. As I mention in a comment to Henry’s thread, I’ve always rated Ken Worpole’s writing on this topic both in his “Dockers and Detectives”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805271988/junius-20 and in another little book he produced called “Reading by Numbers: Contemporary Publishing and Popular Fiction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0906890454/junius-20 (Comedia, 1984). I picked it up of the shelf this evening to check on a passage I dimly remembered about book design:
bq. Paperback cover design in the 1940s and 1950s was often very strong and innovative, employing traditions borrowed from Expressionist and Surrealist styles of the early part of the century. Typography was often highly innovative too.
bq. Unfortunately, what displaced this bugeoning populist publishing tradition was the introduction of the “trade paperback” in the 1970s, a development of questionable value. The “trade paperback” is a larger format, more expensively produced paperback designed exclusively for bookshop sales, and carries an aura of a higher “seriousness” than the cheap, easy-to-fit-in-your-pocket book. Many publishers moved their more “serious” writers over into their new “trade” paperback lists or re-printed books with new “classical” covers … This not only raised the price of the books but literally took them out of the supermarkets and the chain-stores. The “trade” paperback was designed specifically to be sold by the book trade. Much writing was thus taken out of the arena of popular literature, as can be gauged by thumbing through the paperback sections in second-hand bookshops, where it is not unusual to find Sartre, Trocchi, Lawrence, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Nell Dunn, Mary McCarthy, Cesare Pavese, Ignazio Silone, Norman Mailer and many others being promoted as sensational fiction with garish covers – and being sold in their tens of thousands rather than thousands. It is the development of the trade paperback which further separated out “serious” literature from “popular” literature and created a vacuum in the cheap paperback field which formula writing rushed to fill. (pp. 7–8)
In “a post yesterday”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000880.html about the later age at which academics get proper jobs nowadays, I focused on how this means that academics now have fewer children later (or none at all). But there’s another consequence of the way the job market and accreditation process have changed: pensions. Academics here in the UK still have a final salary pension scheme (which is nice). The scheme assumes to that to receive a full-value pension (50 per cent of final salary) you have made 40 years worth of contributions. I’ve even met some academics — appointed at around age 23 in the 1960s — who’ve managed this. But those who have entered the profession late (and burdened with debt) from the 1990s onwards, at age 30+ will _never_ pay in their 40 years (given retirement at 65) and will therefore receive a lower income in their old age. I’ve assumed in this post that the system is the UK one, but obviously the point generalises beyond final-salary schemes. Those who earn proper salaries later (and are debt-ridden) will not contribute so much towards their pension — especially if they are trying to bring up a delayed young family! — and will suffer in their retirement.
At long last my book “Rousseau and the Social Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-20 is now available from Amazon in North America. (Readers in the UK “can order it”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21 from amazon.co.uk.)
Would this be possible in anywhere else than Britain? On last night’s Frank Skinner show former Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “Mo Mowlam”:http://www.sfb.co.uk/cgi-bin/profile.cgi?s=50 gave an interview in which she attacked Tony Blair for poor judgement. At the end of the show Mowlam (dressed as Cher) performed “I Got You Babe” in duet with veteran porn star “Ron Jeremy”:http://www.ronjeremy-themovie.com/meetron.htm (dressed as Sonny).
Kieran’s post immediately below focuses on the different pressures on men and women in academia. That difference is certainly there, but the extraordinary thing is that changes in academia over the past thirty years have exacerbated the pressures at the same time as universities have become more verbally supportive of gender equality, have implemented “family friendly” and “work–life balance” policies, and so on.
Why? It isn’t hard simply to do some sums. Here’s a typical career path in philosophy in the UK, circa 1960:
A great game — including a great try to boring boring England — and the right result . Commiserations to Brian (England had to beat Australia at something, one day).