Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Autobiographical

  • Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered

    My former colleague Xavier Monasterio died last year on this date.  Curiously, January 4th was also the date of death of his philosophical hero Albert Camus.  This being a weblog, and thus an online journal of the personal and the impersonal, I didn't want the day to pass without a brief remembrance of the man.  I'll…

  • Legal’s Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

    The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied…

  • Third Anniversary of the TypePad Incarnation of Maverick Philosopher

    This weblog commenced  on 4 May 2004 and has been in operation for seven and a half years.  This, the latest incarnation, the Typepad version, began on Halloween 2008.  Here are the posts from three years ago. Typepad is not the perfect platform; I doubt if there is one.  But it is superior for my…

  • My Relation to Catholicism

    This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber': In a recent post  you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their…

  • Study Everything, Join Nothing

    Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy? Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort…

  • Three Reasons to Stay Home

    These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and the Vallicellan. The first is that travel…

  • We Romantics

    We are enticed by what is hidden, out of reach, around the corner, over the horizon. It is the lost mine lost, not the lost mine found, that inspires and focuses our energies. Our metaphysics is visionary and revisionary, not descriptive. We study the world to see what is beyond the world. We study the…

  • The Eternal Feminine

    As delightfully different as my wife is from my mother, they are both religious.  I wouldn't want a woman who wasn't. Descent into the carnal I can manage on my own.   Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan. ("The Eternal Feminine leads us upwards." Goethe, Faust)

  • Lynne Ballew

    At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask…

  • Scenes from the Superstitions

    James L., fanatical hiker, who I have been introducing to the Superstition Wilderness.  A native Arizonan, he has no problem with hiking in the summer in this rattlesnake infested inferno.  I hope not to have to make use of his nurse practitioner skills.  The knife hanging from his belt suggests he might, in a pinch,…

  • John Leslie and Hostage Chess

    I learned recently that the philosopher John Leslie is the inventor of a chess variant, Hostage Chess. Left-click on the hyperlink and scroll down. I have never played any of the chess variants, and they don't interest me. Penetrating the arcana of standard chess has me sufficiently occupied. Such a patzer am I that I…

  • Word of the Day: ‘Pot-Valiant’

    If you think I have a large vocabulary, you are right.  But despite my voracious reading I have never stumbled upon 'pot-valiant' until just now, in a piece by Mona Charen wherein I found the sentence, "And it's true that some Republicans, like Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, have fetishized their opposition to taxes…

  • Hypostatization and Plural Reference

    In Plural Reference, Franklin Mason writes that "Vallicella is often a delight, but upon occasion he annoys me to no end."  Apparently I remind him of a "philosophical pugilist," a former colleague perhaps, who is obnoxious in the manner of all-too-many analytic philosophers. (One such told me once that if one is not willing to become…

  • On Talking Philosophy With Non-Philosophers

    Talking philosophy with non-philosophers is as disagreeable to me as playing chess with the unserious or merely casual chess player.

  • Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist

    When I lived with my parents, I watched a television, theirs. But when I got out on my own, I owned no TV, first for reasons of poverty, and later, after nailing down a philosophy teaching gig, for reasons of inertia and elitism. The life of the mind is a magnificent thing, but it can…