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Artefactual language as the enabler of Spirit
Cultural information rains down on the landscape of our genetically endowed mental capacities, mouldering the paths along which future information must travel, eroding and shaping the patterns of our thoughts and reactions (Distin 2011, 177-8) Chasing down some of Sloterdijk’s references has led me to two early-20th-century thinkers who recognize the reality of our conceptual… Continue reading
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Jordi Savall, “Celtic Universe”
For a long time I’ve longed to hear Jordi Savall play. If you haven’t heard of him, he’s probably the most famous musician you haven’t heard of. He discovers and resurrects European and Mediterranean music from the medieval to the early modern period, assembles groups of musicians who have amazing talents with old instruments, and… Continue reading
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Enlightenment now
(Reading Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now) I am totally down with this book. Its main thesis is that the core values of the Enlightenment – Reason, Science, and Humanism – have resulted in human life being better in every measurable way. And if anyone wishes to deny this, they will have a big job in front… Continue reading
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Hadot, Sloterdijk, and the Idol of Eternity
I have recently read both Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life and Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy. Both books place at their centers an ideal of the philosopher as one who is able to lift themselves from their particular circumstances and adopt a perspective from eternity, blankly reflecting how things are and perhaps… Continue reading
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Review of The Square and the Tower
Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower is a caution against seeing our new, networked world as an unalloyed blessings. Human history (and NF’s book) is filled with examples of networks and hierarchies, many worth celebrating and equally many worth decrying. NF’s central worry is that our latest networks make us vulnerable to economic and… Continue reading
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Niall Ferguson’s Hegelian aspirations
I have just started reading Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Square and the Tower. This comes after reading some of his other books, and hearing him in interviews. He’s an extraordinarily well-read, well-spoken, and intelligent fellow – and, I gather, viewed with some hostility by academics because he sells a lot of books and is… Continue reading
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“Are students snowflakes?” on Access Utah
Host Tom Williams interviewed my colleagues Erica Holberg and Harrison Kleiner and me about the alleged “snowflake” phenomenon on campuses (students who can’t bear to hear any claims that run counter to their own values). Interview here. Certainly there are episodes which sound plenty snowflakey here or there; one question is whether these episodes are… Continue reading
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Essay on philosophy and the humanities on Aeon
By the title, “Why philosophers should hang out at the humanists’ parties” – here. Continue reading
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Work in progress
I’m slowly working on a book that tries to integrate what I’m learning about history with what I know (or think I know!) about early modern philosophy, and thought I’d post an excerpt that covers, in a general way, putting the two domains together. Comments welcome! *** The interested reader is struck by the sharp… Continue reading
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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
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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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On productive criticisms
I have been in a couple of discussions recently in which someone opined that certain sorts of objections or criticisms are not “productive”. The basic idea is that a criticism should not be wholly negative; it should point out a possible correction, or a new way forward, or something constructive. It should not merely have… Continue reading
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Access Utah interview
Host Tom Williams played a game of “let’s see what we can throw at Charlie” on the radio yesterday. The recording is here. It was a very fun conversation, as always. Continue reading
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Putting history into history of philosophy
If we wish, however, to arrive at an interpretation of a text, an understanding of why its contents are as they are and not otherwise, we are still left with the further task of recovering what the author may have meant by arguing in the precise way he argued. We need, that is, to be… Continue reading
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The Cold War’s shaping of American philosophy
John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American philosophy and the McCarthy era (Northwestern UP 2001) George Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge UP 2005) Whether inclined toward socialism in the 1930s or defending itself against anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s, logical empiricism was neither apolitical in its values and ambitions… Continue reading
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Handcarts, beer, and apes
To the rest of the world, today is an ordinary Monday – people are going to work, the mail is being delivered, the media focus on the latest outrages issuing from politicians, and so on. But here in Utah, it is Pioneer Day, a holiday bigger than the Fourth of July. Pioneer Day marks when… Continue reading
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The Shed
About five years ago, we hired a great guy named Joe Smart to build a philosopher’s shed for me. (More about that story here.) I’m really glad to have this separate place for reading, thinking, and writing – as nutty as it may seem to anyone else. Anyway, just to celebrate the approach of our… Continue reading
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Philosophy: it helps you get reddit points
The blog Useful Concepts posted a set of interesting observations about why philosophy doesn’t have more of a cultural presence, particularly on the web. The author posted on reddit, and then summed up the more cogent replies. What he came up with is: (1) philosophy isn’t taught in schools; (2) when it is taught, it’s… Continue reading
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“Perfect Language” essay on Aeon
Poets, historians, scientists, philosophers – we all seek to capture the world in a net of language. Yet it is the nature of nets to capture some things while letting others slip away. Our words turn experiences into objects, qualities and actions, and we can build these into a kind of structure, a tower reaching… Continue reading
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