July 2009 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Jim Fixx Remembered

It was 25 years ago today, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.

The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.

See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Peter and Gordon

The Grim Reaper, the ultimate Repo Man, is certainly no slacker. In recent days he has paid a visit to Karl Malden, Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays (America's Pitchman), Walter Cronkite, and today I heard of the passing of Gordon Waller, 64, of Peter and Gordon fame. P & G were major players in the 1964 'British Invasion.' Here is a hit to remember Gordon by. From 1965.

And here's another. And another.

Death is near my friends, right around the corner. It doesn't take much to send you packing into Kingdom Come: a little food gone down the wrong way, a texting moron of a motorist, a bit of errant plaque lodged in a cerebral artery. . . . So work out your salvation with diligence while the sun shines. You're burning daylight while hanging by a thread.

Kerouac 5K

Jack Kerouac's "Springtime Mary" was Mary Carney, described in the novel Maggie Cassidy and depicted on the left; mine was a lass name of Mary Korzen from Chicago. She didn't get me into running, my old friend Marty Boren did; but she lent my impecunious and sartorially challenged self her shorts in which I stumbled in my heavy high-topped boots around the Chestnut Hill reservoir on my first run in the summer of '74. 35 years a runner, but going on 41 years a Kerouac aficionado: I read and endlessly re-read On the Road as a first semester college freshman. (And a week ago I found a copy of the original scroll version of OTR which came out in 2007 (1957 + 50) in a used bookstore; completist and fanatic that I am, I of course purchased it.) Running and Kerouac being two constants of my life, I was happily surprised to hear from a local runner that Lowell, Mass. hosts an annual Kerouac 5 kilometer road race. Kerouac was a track and football star in high school, winning scholarships to Boston College and Columbia. Had he chosen BC he would not have met Ginsberg and Burroughs the other two of the Beat triumvirate, and I wouldn't be writing this post.

Appropriately enough, given Kerouac's prodigious boozing which finally did him in at the tender age of 47 in 1969, the race starts from Hookslide Kelly's a Lowell sportsbar. Here is a shot from Kerouac's football days, and a photo of one of the covers of Maggie Cassidy:

The Seeker

What is the seeker after? He doesn't quite know, and that is part of his being a romantic. He experiences his present 'reality' as flat, stale, jejune, oppressive, substandard. He feels there must be more to life than work-a-day routines and social objectifications, the piling up of loot, getting ahead. He wants intensity of experience, abundance of life, even while being unclear as to what these are. He casts a negative eye on the status quo, the older generation, his parents and family, and their quiet desperation. He scorns security and its living death.

Christopher J. McCandless was a good example, he whose story was skillfully recounted by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild. In McCandless' case, the scorn for security, his fleeing a living death, led to a dying death. In an excess of self-reliance he crossed the Teklanika, not realizing it was his Rubicon and that its crossing would deposit him on the Far Shore. Be bold, muchachos, be bold; be not too bold.

The Sweet Waters of Lethe

It is often pleasant to remember that an unpleasant memory has not been recalled in a very long time.

If Obituaries Were Objective . . .

. . . some of them might read like this.

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Antioch College: Death by Political Correctness

I have a sentimental connection to Antioch College. An inamorata from the '70's graduated from there, as did my old friend, the philosopher Quentin Smith. During my tenure at the University of Dayton in the late '70s and '80s I would often make the pleasant drive over country roads to the sleepy little town of Yellow Springs, Ohio to take in an art film at the Little Art theater or buy incense at a '60s style 'head shop' or chase a burger with a couple of beers at Ye Olde Trail Tavern, or hike in Glen Hellen, a nature preserve behind the campus. At home, my FM tuner was set to WYSO, which emanated from the campus of Antioch College and was a rich source of out-of-the-way folk, blues, jazz, country and other music. I may be a conservative, but I am a BoCon, a bohemian conservative, or perhaps a HipCon, or maybe even a Bobo (to adopt the term if not quite the sense of a David Brooks coinage), a bourgeois bohemian.

There is also the Twilight Zone connection. Rod Serling graduated from Antioch, taught there at one point, and featured the statue of Horace Mann on campus in one of his best episodes, The Changing of the Guard.

So it is too bad that Antioch College has suffered Death by Political Correctness. This excellent piece confirms my view of contemporary liberals: they are simply incapable of arresting their slide into the looniest precincts of hard Leftism. Quentin Smith was on campus during the beginning of the end in the early '70s. I recall him telling me about the bringing onto campus of unprepared ghetto blacks who proceeded to terrorize the place with Black Panther type demands and armed thuggery.

UPDATE (21 July 2009): Relevant YouTube clips (HT: Mike V.) Antioch College 1858-2008? Antioch University Decides Womyn's Center Library is Garbage; Water Damage at Old Main

Does Zeno Affirm What He Denies?

Andrew Ushenko in a Mind article from 1946, "Zeno's Paradoxes," distinguishes five putative ways of refuting Zeno's paradoxes: logical, mathematical, mathematico-physical, physical, and philosophical. Ushenko points out that two logical refutations fail. This post examines one of them. This is of particular interest since a reader floated a similar suggestion. Ushenko states the objection and then answers it cogently:

"Zeno's statement of the conditions of the race [of Achilles and the Tortoise], for example, of the condition that A moves faster than T, is equivalent to the assumption that motion exists, and therefore contradicts his own conclusion that motion is an illusion. Hence Zeno is inconsistent with himself." The falsehood of this accusation can be easily demonstrated. Of course, we must grant that Zeno begins with the assumption that there is motion, and concludes that there is no motion. But this procedure means only that he asserts, on the basis of his "proof", that If there is motion, then there is no motion. And, of course, the underscored conditional statement is true if, and only if, there is no such thing as motion.

Ushenko's reply to the objection is correct. Propositions of the form p –> ~p (where the arrow stands for the Philonian conditional) are none of them contradictory. They are equivalent to propositions of the form ~p v ~p which in turn are equivalent to propositions of the form ~p. It follows that If there is motion, then there is no motion is equivalent to There is no motion.

Consider an analogy. Someone argues on Anselmian grounds that (1) if God exists, then God exists necessarily; but for Humean reasons (2) nothing exists necessarily; ergo (3) if God exists, then God does not exist. There is no logical contradiction here, since the arguer is not affirming the existence of God; he is reasoning from the assumption that God exists, an assumption he does not affirm. Similarly, Zeno is not affirming the existence of motion; he is reasoning from the assumption that motion exists, an assumption he does not affirm.

Morris Lazerowitz on Philosophy and Propositions

Immersed as I am these days in a metaphilosophical project, I once again pull Lazerowitz's Philosophy and Illusion (Humanities Press, 1968) from the shelf. Morris Lazerowitz (1907-1987) may not be much read these days, but his ideas remain provocative and worth considering, despite the fact that they are now taken seriously by few, if any. But if he is right in his metaphilosophy, then I am wrong in mine, and so intellectual honesty requires that I look into this in some detail.

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Overheard at the 20 Mile Mark

"Why couldn't Pheidippides have died now?"

(An interesting non-temporal use of 'now': tokening it, the speaker is obviously not referring to the time of utterance, but to a distance.)

Overheard in the High Sierra

"There are old mountaineers and there are bold mountaineeers. But there are no old bold mountaineers."

Zeno’s Regressive Dichotomy and the ‘Calculus Solution’

The Regressive Dichotomy is one of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. How can I get from point A, where I am, to point B, where I want to be? It seems I can't get started.

A_______1/8_______1/4_______________1/2_________________________________ B

To get from A to B, I must go halfway. But to travel halfway, I must first traverse half of the halfway distance, and thus 1/4 of the total distance. But to do this I must move 1/8 of the total distance. And so on. The sequence of runs I must complete in order to reach my goal has the form of an infinite regress with no first term:

. . . 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1.

Since there is no first term, I can't get started.

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On ‘Male Chauvinist’ and ‘Relative Truth’

A reader comments:

I'm confused about a claim you make. You say: "Take 'male chauvinist.' As standardly used nowadays, this refers to a male who places an excessively high valuation on his sex vis-a-vis the opposite sex. So a male chauvinist is not a chauvinist, and 'male' functions as as an alienans adjective: it does not specify, but shifts, the sense of 'chauvinist.'"

I did a quick check at Merriam-Webster Online. It seems to me that when someone is called a male chauvinist, the second of the three senses of 'chauvinism' given by Webster's is meant, viz. 'undue partiality or attachment to a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged.' But if so, it seems that a male chauvinist is a chauvinist. Male chauvinism is one type of chauvinism. It is that type of 'undue partiality' shown to members of one's own sex.

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Marx and Kierkegaard and Buddha: Comparative Notes

Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach protested that the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways, when the point is to change it. (Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.) His century-mate, Soren Kierkegaard, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, but sharing Marx’s disdain for mere theory, might have said that the point was to change oneself, to become oneself. Both thinkers were anti-contemplative and anti-speculative, but in such wildly divergent ways! The social activist Marx denied interiority by trying to merge the individual into his species-being (Gattungswesen) while the existentialist Kierkegaard fetishized interiority: “Truth is subjectivity” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript).

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