Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Autobiographical

  • On Joy at Osama’s Demise: Dennis Prager Responds to Me on the Air

    It's been an interesting morning.  At 10:30 AM I noticed that my traffic was way up for the day.  And then at 11:12 AM I heard Dennis Prager reading on the air the first paragraph of a post of mine from yesterday in which I express my disappointment at Prager for rejoicing over Osama bin Laden's death…

  • Codex Vallicellianus

    A curious bit of lore, of interest perhaps to only one reader of this weblog, the reader who is also its writer, is that the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana in Rome houses a Vulgate version of the Bible describedhere as      V, or Cod. Vallicellianus (ninth century; at Rome, in Vallicelliana), a Bible; Alcuin's type. When I…

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Marvelettes

    In the calendrical '60s, before the '60s became the cultural '60s,* there was a lot of great music from girl groups like the Marvelettes.  I spent the summer of '69 delivering mail out of the Vermont Avenue station, Hollywood 29, California.  One day out on the route two black girls approached this U. S. male…

  • Dale Tuggy Avoids D. Z. Phillips

    In the fourth of a series posts on the evolution of his views on the Trinity, Dale Tuggy reports on his time at the Claremont Graduate School.  About D. Z. Phillips, he says the following: D.Z. Phillips I avoided. Iā€™d read real epistemology (Chisholm, Plantinga, etc.) and was always unimpressed with the later-Wittgenstein approach, especially…

  • In Defense of Eclecticism

    From an English reader: The extraordinary eclecticism of the Maverick Philosopher blog has struck me with unusual force just recently. This diversity of interest  is what keeps me reading – though sometimes I stare at your commentaries in ignorant awe. I'll never get up to speed with many of your discussions, and give up on…

  • My Grunt Jobs

    Furniture-mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles;  grave-digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California;  letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree-planter in Oregon; taxi-driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure:…

  • Is Smoking Irrational?

    To stymie the psychologizers, let me begin by saying that I do not smoke cigarettes. My enjoyment of the noble weed is restricted to the occasional cigar and load of pipe tobacco. What do I mean by  occasional? Well, so far this year I haven't touched even one of my twenty or so pipes, and I…

  • A Memorable Weekend 40 Years Ago This Weekend

    We have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living.  The same goes for the unrecorded and the unremembered life.  So I pause to remember my best pal (at the time) and my best gal (at the time) and the trip we took in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible up the…

  • A Couple of Venice Characters Met Working for Manpower

    Bill Keezer e-mails re: my recent Manpower post: I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure.…

  • Remembering an Old Man on the Skids

    I once worked odd jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Culver City, California. One day on the job old broken-down Carl Murray delivered himself of a memorable line. "Bill, there was a time I was limber all over and stiff in one place. But now it's the other around." Old Carl didn't like Levi…

  • As Beer to Bukowski

    Coffee is to me as beer to Bukowski.  And morning's to me as night to him.  He brags that he never wrote anything while sober.  Me, while drunk.

  • Why I Want to Live Long

    I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this bizarre predicament from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the…

  • Halcyon Arizona October

    Chilly nights, good for sleeping with windows open, warm dry days of lambent desert light.  October's sad paradise passes too soon but its dying light ushers in the month of Gratitude in my personal liturgy.  The 28th already. Savor each day, each moment, each sunrise and moonset, moonrise and sunset.  Drink green tea in the…

  • Rise and Shine With Manny

    For, "The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183) I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising…

  • Heidegger’s Reduction of Being to Truth

    This old article of mine (pdf format) was apparently used in a graduate course on Heidegger. Amazing what one can find while on ego surfari. There are people who say that no one reads the philosophy journals. False. If my articles get read and studied (see the underlining in the above photocopy), then a fortiori for…