Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Literary Matters

  • London Ed on Peter van Inwagen on Fiction

    Comments by BV in blue. Inwagen gives persuasive arguments that there is only one sort of existential quantifier, that we cannot quantify over ‘things’ that are in some sense ‘beyond being’, and that ‘exists’ means the same as ‘is’ or ‘has being’. No review of his work would be complete without a careful discussion of…

  • Two Pipe Quotations

    My referrers' list points me to this post whence I snagged these two delightful quotations: The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected. William Makepeace Thackeray  A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the…

  • Patrick Kurp on Philip Larkin

    A post that moves me to find Larkin's Letters to Monica.  Kurp quotes Larkin: I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself . . . . Related:…

  • Nietzsche on Prose and Poetry

    Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book II, sec. 92, tr. Kaufmann: Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.  For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry: all of its attractions depend on the way in which poetry is continually avoided and contradicted. Related articles For the New Year Nietzsche and the…

  • What Problem Does Literary Fiction Pose?

    More than one.  Here is one.  And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle.  So try on this aporetic triad for size: 1. Purely fictional objects do not exist. 2. There are true  sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes…

  • More on Ficta and Impossibilia

    As an ornery aporetician, I want ultimately to say that an equally strong case can be made both for and against the thesis that ficta are impossibilia.  But here I only make (part of) the case for thinking that ficta are impossibilia. Preliminaries Every human being is either right-handed or not right-handed.  (But if one…

  • Cat Blogging Friday: Jack and Tyke and “This Strange Scandalous Death”

    Jack Kerouac was a cat man and a mama's boy.  The following from Chapter 11 of  Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious  brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last…

  • Memory Babe, in Big Sur, Remembers the 1959 Steve Allen Session

    Sweet gone Jack really did try to be a good boy and give up the booze and dissipation and all the near occasions of sin & temptation that fame brought him once he made it in '57 with the publication of On the Road.   Here he is arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghett's (Lorenzo Monsanto's) cabin…

  • Here’s to You, Jack Kerouac, on the 44th Anniversary of Your Release . . .

    . . . from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish: "The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead."  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus). Kerouac's Mexico Review of …

  • Carolyn Cassady (1923 – 2013)

    I thought of Carolyn in September and I thought I ought to check the obituaries.  She died September 20th at age 90, her longevity as if in counterpoise to the short tenures of her main men, wildman Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, and the brooding Jack Kerouac himself. Carolyn…

  • A Misattribution Corrected

     Ryan Fitzgerald writes,  A minor quibble. Your recent post ("Forever Reading . . .") is in error, I'm afraid. After noticing the mistake on more than one occasion throughout several years following your wonderful blog, surely the time has come that I assist a fellow stickler. Schopenahuer did not author the line, "For ever reading,…

  • Recent Writing on Kerouac

    October is Kerouac month hereabouts, but aficionados will want to read the recent  Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac, a New Yorker piece that raises the question of the contribution of football-induced brain trauma to Kerouac's decline and early death. In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer lays into Kerouac's poetry with some justification: Grimly reconciled…

  • Bad Poetry

    Some selections by my freshman English professor, Seamus Cooney.  I recently corresponded with him, not that he remembers me.  But I remember him.

  • Montaigne on Chess

    The Essays of Montaigne, vol. I, tr. Trechmann, Oxford UP, no date, ch. 50, p. 295: Why shall I not judge Alexander at table, talking and drinking to excess, or when he is fingering the chess-men? What chord of his mind is not touched and kept employed by this silly and puerile game? I hate…

  • Nescio, Dutch Author

    I learned yesterday that there was a Dutch novelist (1882-1961) who rejoiced under the pen name, Nescio, which is Latin for I don't know.  His Amsterdam Stories is now available in English.  Memo to self: get a copy! Nescio would be a good title for a philosopher's weblog.  Plato's Socrates is the hero and patron…