Posts by author:
“Poor David Bowie. Barely 72 hours dead and he’s already being misremembered.”
I like the URL. “david-bowie-transgender-1970s-misappropriated?” I think probably the piece was written on a bet, and the URL reflects that.
No, seriously. The piece follows the standard template for conservative kulturkampf tu quoque. It’s by-the-numbers. But there is a purity to it.
The reason I haven’t been blogging is I’m in the depths and throes of book-making. We’re finally – finally! – bringing out a new edition of good old Reason and Persuasion (that’s Belle’s and my old Plato book. I’ve swept clean the old site to celebrate the new book. All we need to complete the celebration is: the new book.) The problem is that it’s literally impossible to proof a book. Typos. They go all the way down. No matter how many times you comb through, there are more. And then more, underneath that. I’m convinced every book manuscript contains an infinite number of – admittedly increasingly small – typographical errors. It’s Zenoesque. [click to continue…]
Life has been keeping me too busy. I’ll be back soon. But don’t forget! Tonight is the night Roy comes, to give toys to good girls and boys. Happy Incept Date!
Discuss.
I taught Science Fiction and Philosophy this semester. One thing I realized I didn’t know – but I wished I did – was the history of semi-popular trends in the philosophy of mind (for lack of a better term.) A lot of science fiction is tied up with speculations about the nature of mind, of course. It would be surprising if all that didn’t reflect trends in aspirationally non-fictional speculations (again, for lack of a better term.) Crudely, I’ll bet there is more ESP in sf in eras when lots of people think that might be a thing. [click to continue…]
I’m not going to feed all that Black Friday madness, but X-Mas is a time for giving nice illustrated books. One that just came out, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on, is Shaun Tan‘s The Singing Bones. It consists of photographs of sculptures, and some text, originally just illustrating Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but I gather he branches out from there. Like this. At this point I think you can only get it from the publisher. Anyway, looks great. And if you didn’t catch his award-winning animated short, few years back, here it is. Or watch a lo-quality version on YouTube. Of course, The Arrival is his best book. I assume you’ve read it already.
The older daughter has a Holiday TV Special thought: “Isn’t it ironic that Bill Watterson wouldn’t commercialize his stuff, but Calvin would have loved to have his face plastered on everything. Charles Schulz licensed everything about “Peanuts” to go on everything, and Charlie Brown would have hated that.”
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
My last Nietzsche post got some folks hot and bothered. [click to continue…]
Doc Dave Winiewicz is auctioning off his famous Frazetta collection. Here’s his blog. Please note that you can download a high quality 200+ page PDF of the catalog from the auction house, so click that link. You won’t see some of that stuff elsewhere. (Well, I say it’s great. So make fun of me if you like.) Looking through, I noticed something rather odd.
[click to continue…]
I was going to post some more stuff about Nietzsche’s wild political philosophy but instead I’ll declare a CT day of mourning for Paris. I see Paris comments are starting to show in some of the other threads. That’s fine, if it’s relevant to those other threads, but maybe if you have Paris-related thoughts or feelings you can leave them here. It’s a tragedy that will lead to more tragedy. That’s about all I can think to say myself.
One of my students was wondering about the following passage from The Gay Science (section 356): [click to continue…]
The real challenge is getting employers to take a more assertive and, though we dare not say so aloud, paternalistic role when it comes to non-elite employees.
Williamson is advocating that we transmute the public safety net (some portion of it) into a federally-subsidized archipelago of regimes of private power, a web of patronage relations, bonding employees to employers. Company towns are proposed as a model, but this time around their creation would be back-stopped by the central government. [click to continue…]
In addition to teaching Nietzsche, I’m teaching Science Fiction and Philosophy. (Yes, I lead a charmed life.)
One of the fun games hereabouts is digging up cases in which old philosophical texts anticipate sf tropes or terms. Plato’s Cave, Descartes’ demon, Leibniz’ thinking mill. You get the idea.
Here are two slightly less well-known examples from Mill. The first, from Chapter 3 of On Liberty: [click to continue…]
‘Politically correct’ is so unamenable to non-absurd definition that it seldom receives even the lightest semantic gloss. So this is noteworthy, from Lowry and Ponnuru:
Among the most consequential forms of political correctness — in the sense of the use of social pressure to suppress the expression of widespread and legitimate viewpoints
It is, I suppose, possible that by ‘legitimate’ they just mean conservative. But that would be rather question-begging. The alternative is that they are begging the question against conservatism, which reduces to political correctness, due to it being a not utterly un-Burkean affair. A third possibility is that our authors haven’t given the matter much thought.
So I’m reading As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, by Michael Saler. When up pops a quote from the Julian Young biography of Nietzsche, referencing a passage by Nietzsche’s sister, which reads: [click to continue…]