Archives | Philosophy
Monday, June 01, 2009
Hey Kids! Free Plato Book! And you can help me make it better!
Yes, it is true! Visit the official book site. You can view the whole thing via Issuu.com, which has a very nice Flash-based reader: minimal and elegant but full-featured. And/or download the PDF for offline reading.
Want to see a neat trick? I can embed the book, like so.
Then you just click to turn the page (illegible at this size) or click to open and read in full-screen mode. It’s a very nice viewer they’ve got. Or I could make the embed open on a particular page, so when I’m blogging about a passage while teaching, I can just point the kids to the page in question. Or open the book itself onscreen in class and zoom so it’s readable. Neat, I call it.
The full book title (some would say: over-full): Reason and Persuasion, Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic book I, with commentary and illustrations by John Holbo and translations by Belle Waring. It will be out in print by mid-August. The version that is up right now is actually the final draft - so far as I can tell. But I still have a week-and-a-bit to catch any last typos or mistakes. (I have a terrible suspicion that the Stephanus pages may have shifted a bit during the last edit. Gotta check that. How tedious, but oh-so-necessary.) I hope there aren’t any major problems with the book still, at this point. But if there are - well, I will do my best to make needed changes. So if you would like to volunteer your services as proofreader/last minute reviewer/critic, you are most welcome.
Not pre-publication peer-review. Not old-fashioned post-publication review. Perinatal peer-review. (Socrates always said he was a midwife. So I assume he would approve.)
The book is published by Pearson Asia (that’s a story in itself) and will be available in paperback by mid-August. They’ve been bringing out nice, inexpensive draft versions for my students in Singapore (that’s why I have an Asian publisher.) For this first general release I insisted on extending the deal I had insisted on for my own classroom use: I reserve the e-rights and so have a free hand to try manner of cool free e-stuff. I’m hoping one reward for my virtuous ways will be that some folks will want to adopt the book for classroom use. (Free e-availability is a big pedagogic bonus, I think.) And will then see to it that copies of the book are in school bookstores, so Pearson (and I) get paid a little. That seems fair.
OK, that’s all for now. If you want to talk Plato, please come on over to the book site. (And link! Please link! And help me edit the book, last minute, if you wouldn’t mind.) But it might be fun to chat about e-publishing in academia in this thread. If you are inclined. Doesn’t this sort of thing make a lot of sense. whatever you think of my particular book? I say it does.
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Friday, May 22, 2009
Deresiewicz on Darwinism, Literary
Writing in The Nation, William Deresiewicz looks at six books of evolutionary criticism. He observes that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers” but regards Jonathan Gottschall’s The Rape of Troy as the best of the lot, “prudent, patient, thoroughly researched and very smart.” All that’s beside the point, however:
Finally, these common-sense conclusions about beauty, love and the death of the author are noteworthy only in relation to the nonsense of Theory. That such arguments need to be made in the first place only shows what a pass we have come to. If literary Darwinism does nothing more than discredit the old paradigm, it will have done very well indeed. But it will, I fear, do a great deal more. The Darwinists have a research program, and few things in the academy are more powerful than that. Gottschall wants to put readers in MRI machines to test their responses, though he is also willing to take advantage of less expensive technologies, like “simple salivary swabs that can provide hormonal indicators of emotions experienced during reading.” Carroll lauds a study that analyzed the creative process by giving subjects a personality test “to determine their position on a scale of Machiavellianism,” then had them write short stories. Hearing of such remarkable schemes, I feel I’ve been transported, with Gulliver, to the Academy of Lagado, where one sage endeavored to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and another sought to restore ordure to the condition of food.
I must confess, I’m not so bothered by the MRI – which has been put to use in studying response to movies – or the salivary swabs, or even the personality test, though I do think Carroll has an overly reified sense of what those tests are about. To be sure, I think the work of these evolutionary critics needs amending in many ways, if not a whole reframing, but I doubt that my version will give Deresiewicz any comfort. He’ll regard it as just more pointless folderol in the Academy of Lagado.
But let’s allow him to continue:
It is not Theory that has prevented literary studies from becoming a positivistic discipline; it is the nature of literature itself. That interpretation succeeds interpretation in a seemingly endless cycle is not a weakness of criticism but its essential strength. The great works persist because they have the power, in every age, to make us ask the most important questions, which are the ones that have no answers, or rather, that have only personal answers: What are we doing here? What does it feel like to be alive? What should we do with our time on earth?
Yes, a naturalist literary study is not going to answer these questions, though it might well think about why homo sapiens sapiens poses them, about why they must be posed and, even, why the answers can never be closed. And, even if naturalist criticism cannot, in principle, provide answers to those questions, it might provide knowledge that is of general interest to those seeking such answers. Until we get there, we can’t tell.
Still, one might ask to what extent those existential questions have ever been real questions in academic criticism, for it is around those questions that Deresiewicz would have literary criticism stake its defense. Is Deresiewicz in fact indicating a substantial line of argument, or is he simply retreating into old rhetorical gestures?
* * * * *
P. S. Though his comment on adaptive explanation in evolutionary criticism is a bit smug, the punch line is rather clever:
Rather than testifying to the novelty and vigor of the field, the diversity of theories within Darwinian aesthetics--Carroll’s cognitive regulation, Dutton’s sexual selection, Boyd’s cognitive play and so forth--merely shows how feeble they all are. Choosing among them would be like trying to decide which imaginary girlfriend to sleep with.
Adaptation is a critical concept in evolutionary biology, but the attention to mechanisms in evolutionary criticism is so sketchy that it seems to function more like élan vital.
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.
Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.
Lest you think I’m mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter’s introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it? These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged?
Maybe I’m still in a foul mood, but I don’t think so.
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Cartoon Rescues Philosophy from Brooks
Some of you may have noticed that David Brooks has written a piece touting “The End of Philosophy" in which he argues that recent work in the psychology of emotion puts the kaibosh on moral philosophy:
It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.
Language Log’s Mark Lieberman will have none of this and summons both a sequential visual narrative (aka a cartoon from chaospet) and David Hume against Brooks. Brooks loses.
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Friday, February 27, 2009
Across the Disciplines, Get Happy
OnFiction’s Keith Oatley summarizes recent studies showing that reading about events seems to involve mental simulation of those events:
In a previous study, Speer, Zacks, and Reynolds (2007) found that readers divide stories up into events, and that different brain regions are activated when, in a narrative, a new event occurs. In the study that is in press, this group has found that when they were reading about actions performed by a story character, activation occurred in the region of the reader’s brain that is associated with doing that kind of action in real life. For instance, says the Science Daily report, “changes in the objects a character interacted with (e.g., “pulled a light cord") were associated with increases in a region in the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Changes in characters’ locations (e.g., “went through the front door into the kitchen") were associated with increases in regions in the temporal lobes that are selectively activate when people view pictures of spatial scenes.”
The National Humanities Center has established a website, On the Human, featuring the work “of university professors who teach courses on humans and their relations to animals and machines.” The site currently includes course materials for 3-credit undergraduate course on this general subject, news items, an explanatory video, and an essay by Geoffrey Harpham, “Science and the Theft of Humanity." The website has a blog, also entitled On the Human; sure to check out the video of a whistling orangutan. More to come.
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Catholic and Protestant Imaginations and SF
I’m preparing to teach six weeks of Philosophy and Film. I focus on science fiction, so I’m reviewing a stack of critical writings on SF. I’m taking another look at The History of Science Fiction, by one Adam Roberts, which I’ve read before ... and I suddenly realize that I don’t quite get what is supposed to be a large component of the main thesis.
Adam wants to set up an opposition between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ imaginations, and he wants to privilege the latter - not in quality terms, but for purposes of defining SF. The main SF line is ‘Protestant’ in its imaginings, with Catholic impulses providing important counterpoint. Roughly, Protestantism is all about the ‘disenchantment of the world’ and Catholicism is about magic and sacralization. So SF is Protestant and fantasy is Catholic, and the fact that SF is often hard to distinguish from fantasy just goes to show that Protestant and Catholic imaginative impulses can intertwine and do complicated stuff. “If I am asked to condense into a single sentence, my thesis is that science fiction is determined precisely by the dialectic between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ (or, if one prefers less sectarian terms, between ‘deism’ and ‘magical pantheism’) that emerges out of the seventeenth century” (p. xi-ii).
I take this binary to be vague but intuitive. (And really I’m not hoping for any non-vague theses hereabouts.) Fine. But now this:
“I am not saying, as some critics have done, that SF ‘embodies religious myth’, or secularizes religious themes. SF may, of course, do either or both of these things, but this is not my argument. My argument is that the genre as a whole still bears the imprint of the cultural crisis that gave it birth, and that this crisis happened to be a European religious one” (3). The crisis is the Reformation, obviously.
But here’s what I don’t understood. Before I noticed this sentence, I did take Adam to be arguing that SF ‘embodies religious myth’, or ‘secularizes religious themes’. I took him to be saying that this is the evidence that SF still bears the imprint of its Reformation-era origins. So now it looks to me like Adam is saying: I’m not arguing A, I’m arguing A & B. Which isn’t exactly a denial that you are arguing A.
So what does it mean to assert that SF ‘bears the imprint’ of the Reformation, while not asserting that it is a matter of secularizing religious themes. I guess I’m not getting it. Adam, what say you?
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
Darwinian Aesthetics?
Denis Dutton has just published The Art Instince: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. In his NYTimes review, Anthony Gottlieb says that “His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating, and I doubt whether much of it really depends on the ideas of evolutionary psychology.” That feels right to me. EP is a good way to toss out a certain range of older and extant ideas, but once that operation is over, it is short on new insights.
Here’s Dutton in dialog with science-writer John Horgan:
And here he is delivering a lecture at Google headquarters:
Dutton is a very engaging speaker. In both talks he advances a “cluster” concept of art: 12 features, some, but not necessarily all, of which will be characteristic of anything we would call “art.” Sounds like a descendant of Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Was Lenin A Utilitarian?
Well, the Zizek thread was invigorating, eh? Let’s talk about something related but distinct. One thing that has come up repeatedly in these threads is the allegation that it is obviously absurd for me to label Lenin a utilitarian. Or rather: to it is absurd for me to characterize the philosophy of Leninism as a species of consequentialism. (I don’t claim that Lenin personally practiced utilitarianism with much success, but he certainly preached a form of it.) As I’ve said, I find rather annoying the persistent refusal to let Leninism-as-consequentialism pass on the grounds that some things are pretty darn obvious. (It’s true that it’s a bit hard to find scholarly articles that argue specifically, that Leninism is, broadly, a consequentialist philosophy. But it’s also hard to find articles arguing, specifically, that the Pope wears a funny hat.)
Well, here goes.
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Thursday, January 15, 2009
Anticipatory Retrospective and Presentism Now: Two Papers I’ve Published Of Late
Where have I been? Why haven’t I been posting? I don’t really know!
(Whew. That awkwardness is clean out of the way.)
In the last few months I’ve gotten two pieces through the publication pipes that (I think) deserve discussion together. Unfortunately, they aren’t readily web-accessible. One is a chapter in a book, the other an essay in a subscription-only academic journal. Fortunately, I’m going to try to summarize both, by way of showing how they go together. So it should be possible to discuss. But this’ll be a long post. Just like the good old days!
My pieces are: “Dewey’s Difficult Recovery, Analytic Philosophy’s Attempted Turn” in Democracy as Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism in a Globalizing World
The first of these two pieces discusses difficulties the likes of Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam get into, trying to take inspiration from John Dewey about how to stop being analytic philosophers and start being something more useful. For post purposes I’m going to focus on Rorty. The Putnam stuff doesn’t have any strong connection with the Shakespeare ‘presentism’ stuff I’ll be turning to in the second part.
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Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Fear and Trembling and the Incarnation
Adam K. and I have been having a good old-fashioned Zizek brawl in comments. As Adam R. notes:"Ah, just like old times.”
But one of the fun things about Zizek brawls is learning stuff about Kierkegaard. So let’s reflect on Fear and Trembling. Adam K. doubts my claim that Kierkegaard’s concept of faith and the essence of true religion hinges on his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The obvious counter-argument: Fear and Trembling is about Abraham, obviously a pre-Christian figure whose story is related in the Old, rather than New, Testament. Adam K writes: “Isn’t it interesting, then, that Fear and Trembling doesn’t deal with the Incarnation at all?” But this is, I think, a misreading, albeit one that is quite understandable. In fact, Fear and Trembling is very centrally, but only implicitly, concerned with the Incarnation, and it is rather hard really to get what it is about until you see this.
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Saturday, November 29, 2008
Icons: Levi-Strauss and Zizek
Claude Lévi-Strauss is 100; France honors him:
On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”
Meanwhile, The New Republic goes after Zizek:
Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but “in a curious inversion,” he characteristically observes, “religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.” And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek’s recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. “Everything is to be endorsed here,” he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, “up to and including religious ‘fanaticism.’”
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Monday, November 03, 2008
Critique of Social Construction
Tim Burke has an interesting 4-part critique of the notion of social construction. Here’s his third point:
My third objection follows on the second. The fact that for a long time scholars spent considerable effort to demonstrate that a given identity, institution, etc., simply was a social construction, tells you something about the intent of that argument. It was designed to undercut or demolish practices being described as such. The problem is that many scholars also recognized the “reality” of such constructions–that once constructed, they were social reality, that there wasn’t any ontological, Platonic human “real” being concealed by constructions. If you said something like “modern subjectivities built around liberal individualism, around rights-bearing sovereign selves are a construction”, you also had to say, “But no less real for that”. A lot of Foucauldian work (including by Foucault himself) had this sort of coy double-gesture: madness, sexuality, criminality, etc., were “constructed”, but also “real”–and thus if you said, “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” you would hear “Oh, my no, there isn’t anything but these constructions, there is nothing outside, nothing more ‘real’ beyond them”.
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Friday, October 10, 2008
Manifesto: Literary Reading and Emotion
In mid-July of this year the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts hosted a conference of Literary Reading and Emotion. It was proposed by David S. Miall, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, with the following in attendance: Jan Auracher (Language and Literature) and Willie van Peer (Intercultural Hermeneutics) from the University of Munich, Germany; Sally Banes, Emerita Professor in Theater and Dance, and Ellen Dissanayake (Music) from the University of Washington, USA; Noël Carroll (Philosophy) from Temple University, Philadelphia and CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA; Keith Oatley (Human Development and Applied Psychology) from the University of Toronto, Canada; Reuven Tsur (Hebrew Literature and Literary Theory) from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel; along with Donald and Margaret Freeman (MICA directors) and Evelina Simanonyte (Colby-Sawyer College, New Hampshire, USA).
The group has now issued a brief manifesto (available here, with commments, and here), which includes these two (of six) declarations:
2. We discern a need to shift focus from the interpretative preoccupation of current approaches to the experience of literature and the arts, which includes the need to study their emotional aspects.
3. We propose a new interdisciplinary approach that integrates the social and biological sciences with the humanities. This proposed integration implies the readiness to become actively involved with the methodology of non-humanistic disciplines, including the development of philosophical and empirical research methodologies.
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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
What and Where is the Text?
As David Bordwell has observed in Making Meaning, much of our thinking about literary texts (& movies & graphic novels, etc.) seems to derive from the metaphor of a container. Some things are inside the text while other things are outside of it. Further, some of the things inside the text are not obvious; they’re said to be hidden. One job of the critic is to reveal and explain what’s hidden.
For casual use, this is OK. But it disintegrates if you ask too much of it. We’ve augmented it in various ways, but as far as I know we haven’t arrived at a more satisfactory set of alternatives. My purpose here is simply to lay out a crude sketch of how we’ve worked at augmenting the container notion.
The basic problem, of course, is that “the work of literary art” cannot effectively be reduced to the physical text. The physical text is just a bunch of markings which are meaningless unless taken up by a human mind. How does one work that “taking-up” into a concept of the text?
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Sunday, September 28, 2008
THEORY’s Going Down
Gene Expression has a post presenting empirical evidence on the waning of THEORY. Agnostic searched JSTOR archives for the occurance of certain key words up to 2002: 1) social construction, 2) psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic, 3) postmodern or postmodernism, 4) postcolonialism, 5) orientalist or orientalism, 6) narratolog*, 7) marxist or marxism, 8) hegemony, 9) feminist or feminism, 10) deconstruction*. Each search is graphed, and there are commonts on the exercise as a whole. Eight of the ten graphs shows a rise from left to right, a peak, and then a decline on the right-hand side of the graph. That implies that THEORY’s going down.
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