October 2017 – Huenemanniac

October 19, 2017

Philosophy as enchantment?

[What follows is a version of an address recently given at the Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, where a good time was had by all.] In a lecture at the University of Munich in 1919 – the year before he died – Max Weber spoke to an audience of students about “Science as a Vocation”. His remarks… Continue reading

Books, Historical episodes, Items of the academy / learning, Meanings of life / death / social & moral stuff

October 8, 2017

Philosophy and its history

Philosophy and its History: aims and methods in the study of early modern philosophy, edited by Mogens Laerke, Justin E. H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser (Oxford UP, 2013). For the longest time, philosophers were interested in their own history only to the extent that nuggets from the past might help us with this or that… Continue reading

Books, Historical episodes, Items of the academy / learning

October 3, 2017

The making of the humanities

I just returned from a multidisciplinary conference on “meta” issues in the humanities: how various humanistic disciplines have shifted over time, various assumptions made or discarded by academic practitioners, and basically any of the stuff you’d come to find if you took humanists and their work as your object of study. The conference featured historians,… Continue reading

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