Category: Autobiographical
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Books and Reality and Books
I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was…
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Why Am I So Hard on Liberals?
A reader comments by e-mail: I sometimes read your website. I'm generally impressed by (and envy) your clear-headedness and detail when it comes to technical questions, but I find myself turned off by some of the more "poetic" stuff and the political analysis (the former because I hate poetry, more on the latter below). [.…
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Silence and Wholeness
Perusing an old file of juvenilia for blog-fodder, I decided that the contents are mostly too juvenile for reproduction here. But then I came across an aphorism penned in December, 1971 when I was living in the shadow of the medieval Festung or fastness in Salzburg, Austria: Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole…
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Reasons to Blog
Different bloggers, different reasons. I see this weblog as 1. An on-line notebook: a place to preserve and organize quotations from and notes on my reading. 2. An on-line journal: a daily record of the twists and turns of my intellectual life, along with some other sides of my life. A celebration of the life of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Difference Between Me and David Lewis
David Lewis is (or rather was) living proof that being a genius is no guarantee of having sound ideas. I am living proof that having sound ideas does not require being a genius!
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My Preferred Modes of Locomotion
Ambulatory and cursory, primarily, and then in distant second and third places respectively, natatory and saltatory.
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Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing
I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying: Dolce Far Niente Sweet To…
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Not a Joiner
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. II, p. 117: He is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from his own. Another reason is that…
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Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities? Part II
On February 9th I linked to Thomas H. Benton's Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go. Today I discovered his Just Don't Go Part II. Prospective graduate students should digest it thoroughly albeit cum grano salis. I don't recommend Benton's piece in order to discourage anyone but to apprise them of what they are up against…
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Politics: Would That I Could Avoid It
Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me…
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In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct
The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow). I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy." I also took a course in logic from him. The…
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Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief?
I coined the phrase 'ego surfari' some years ago. To go on ego surfari is to type one's name into a search engine in order to see what turns up. The results are often surprising. Today I found Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief? by Sami Pihlström, Helsinki. Excerpt: One of the few recent…