Flying to the southwestern US tomorrow for a friend’s wedding. On the way back, in order to arrive home in time to attend my teaching seminar, I’m flying my first red eye special: 11pm-6am. So there will be no posts, most likely for the next few hectic days. I’ll be taking the collected works of Henry James — which I just delightedly downloaded for my Kindle entire, for two dollars, which means my kindle just paid for itself several times over, because I had the collected works of H.J. in my wishlist in dead-tree form and it amounted to several hundred dollars worth of books — and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which I’m prepping for the comps exam. When I get back, you may expect the next few installments of my Kierkegaard series: the new dawn affair, the review of Anderson’s novel, and the dissertation on the concept of irony. Also, I have a picture of a cup to show you, and some thoughts on running, Joan Didion, and On Diaspora.
01/18/2012
01/17/2012
…one of the things we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy…
Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions, but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.
From: After Virture by Alasdair MacIntyre
01/15/2012
The key to productivity
The conjunction of a new semester and a new year always instigates a frenzy of productivity experimentation in me. I make lists, focus research goals, reinvigorate exercise plans, examine new recipes, rearrange furniture, discard unwanted books, print out calendars, attempt to magically reorient the earth so that a bit more sun comes in the window by my desk, and purchase new pencils. Only last year did I begin keeping a “log” instead of a journal (I’ve recommenced the journal in addition this year), to track personally important daily goals: numbers of pages written, pages read, minutes run, hours asleep, etc.
The main lesson of the log was that the most significant productivity changes involve minor but far-reaching improvements. An example: my peak hours of clear-headedness and nervous energy are from about 8:00-12:00 in the evening. But in the past I always liked to bathe for a while in the evenings. (Yeah, I’m a guy and I like to read during long baths — so sue me.) But at least 5 times out of 7 I’d end up continuing to read the same light novel or whatever late into the evening, only to wake up to my planned obligations about 20 minutes before bed, with the result that either I didn’t get things done or I stayed up much too late and therefore had trouble getting things done the next day. So just a few weeks ago, it dawned on me that I should only shower at night. Voila! Suddenly I find myself getting a whole lot done between 8:00 and 12:00. Small things can make a huge difference. Is there something about your desk that makes you reluctant to be there? An uncomfortable chair, that your desk faces a wall, the texture of its surface, lighting? Changing those things can tremendously impact your productivity over the long-term — suddenly you go eagerly to your desk and reluctantly away from it, adding those ten or fifteen minutes every day, that hour every week, those four hours every month, those two days every year. You know how weight-watchers keep little journals, to chart their progress and success at target calorie intake or whatever? I think it’s totally worth it to keep a productivity log, tracking whatever daily increments of work you are hoping to build into great opuses. As with medication, dosage in routine is a precise and powerful science.
Far too many people advise improving one’s motivations or dwelling on long-term goals, but they only occasionally examine their indefinitely repeating habits. The trouble with New Year’s resolutions, for example, is that they presuppose the main condition for achieving something is to correctly conceive and state it. True, conception and statement are important — the provide clarity and unity to one’s efforts. But relying on such things alone reminds me of one of the more hilarious parts of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Pip and his best friend, a young and impecunious nobleman, begin their independent lives together with profligate spending habits. They run up debts right and left. Occasionally the magnitude of their respective financial straits overcomes them, and they set aside a day to settle their accounts. So they spend the day listing on a sheet of paper their full financial condition, all the problems, etc. and then — they congratulate themselves and continue in the same patterns of spending. As if clearly stating a problem produced its solution. It didn’t work for them, and it doesn’t work for us.
Because, honestly, coming up with goals, resolutions, projects is the easiest part. Actually observing the shit you’ve “programmed” yourself to do, routines and habits and invisible time-wasting ticks — that’s most of the stuff you do — is much harder. Using time well is undoubtedly much harder than losing weight, and we live in a culture obsessed with the difficulty of the latter. Recognition and control of minute daily details is the key in both cases.
01/14/2012
Kierkegaard’s Early Polemical Writings: “Another Defense of Woman’s Great Abilities”
Johan Ludvig Heiberg
[The following post is part of a series on the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard.]
The very first thing Kierkegaard ever published was an attempt at satirical one-upmanship. The New Yorker (or perhaps the Paris Review) of Copenhagen, in the eyes of aspiring young writers, was the Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post. You wanted to get published there because that meant you had earned the approval of Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Heiberg was a dramatist, poet, critic, popularizer of Hegel; in short, a cultural authority. In the small, connected world of Danish letters, he was the man to impress.
So when another young man named Peter Lind — known to Kierkegaard both from his grade school and from Copenhagen University — managed to get published in the Post, with a snarky little article on the classic counter enlightenment theme of how dumb feminists are; and when Kierkegaard, presumably, read this article and realized he could do better in the same vein, he jumped at the opportunity. Lind’s article, “In Defense of Woman’s Higher Origin” came out in issue 33; Kierkegaard’s, “In Defense of Woman’s Great Abilities”, in issue 34.
Lind’s article purports to iterate and apply the fact that woman is, by nature, “only an object for veneration, and that she ought to act only to display herself in glory” (132). But this, of course, is only an ironic cover for the fact that Lind believes women are intellectually inferior to men and will only embarrass themselves when they purport to do intellectual things like attend public lectures. Lind believes women only go to those public lectures in order to show their fashion off to each other. In light of all this, Lind offers three suggestions: first, that since women are so wise, they might as well lecture each other (rather than attend public lectures, a suggestion meant to deflate any pretensions to real intellectual curiosity, since presumable if the lectures were not good opportunities for public display, by Lind’s reasonging, the women would stay away from them); second, that since they are neglecting their cooking in vain outings, they had better learn enough philosophy to console their husbands for the hunger they will inevitably experience; third, that they ought to demonstrate their more heavenly, spiritual nature by working at embroidery and beadwork which will damage their eyes and prove their disdain for merely mundane pursuits. (Of course that last suggestion is meant to imply the opposite of what it states, since embroidery and beadwork were important elements of female fashion, and for Lind’s readers the notion of being absorbed in those ‘arts’ suggested being absorbed in one’s appearance, a decidedly un-spiritual absorption.)
Lind’s unpleasant article combines two smelly themes of anti-feminism: that women are silly vain things, and that men should treat women with a coy ironic veneration. The latter is an idea by no means new, having been peddled already as early as the 17th century. As Jonathan Israel informs us in the chapter on “Women, Philosophy, and Sexuality,” in Radical Enlightenment, one traditionalist response to the interest of women in the new philosophy of Descartes and the emancipation its rationalism tended to foster, was to assert that women in their intellectual inferiority were the social mainstays of religion — a good thing, which by some obscure logic made them better than men. In this way, traditionalists could maintain their disparagement of the feminine, the association of female ignorance with true spirituality, and their necessary respect for the spiritual. Lind clearly leans more to mockery than veneration, but the woman-as-more-spiritual obviously lingers on in the tapestry of his spite.
19th Century Female Fashion
Kierkegaard thought he could do better. His article pursues essentially the same line — woman’s pretension to theoretical education is at best a cover for sillier purposes, and she might as well confine her silliness to its traditional venues and thereby preserve the male realm of serious thinking from disrespect. But his article lays the classical allusions on thicker, employs a larger number of satiric observations, does a better job of displaying K.’s own erudition, and — I think we can tell, though we are reading in translation — does all this with more elegant and vivid language using about the same number of words. — Women have always been philosophical, he tells us solemnly, look at Eve getting lectured by a snake, look at the way in Eastern countries women are confined in harems and behind veils — the better to contemplate higher things –, and moreover they have developed their own special kind of rhetoric, the nagging-while-in-bed genre. But of course it wasn’t until the French Revolution [which, note, was the most immediate impetus to the ideas of equality that gave rise to larger numbers of women attending public lectures] that woman really came into her own — when the revolutionaries hired a prostitute to act as the goddess of reason in their celebrations. But we don’t need history to demonstrate woman’s intellectual superiority — after all, she never loses an argument. [Who never loses an argument? Only someone who doesn't listen to reason but persists until they overcome by wearying their opponent, perhaps by nagging them in bed.] These days women are doing all sorts of things — and here K. alludes to various topical events and artifacts by women, including a play by Heiberg’s mother — and they are perfecting the sciences, for instance by studying the spirit of the age in fashion magazines. Soon enough, if things keep on their present course, the arena of manly argument which is presently filled with combatants of such illustrious title as Kantian, Hegelian, etc., will be transformed (as in the middle ages) into a pageant of chivalrous and meaningless jousting under the colors of the ladies. Yes, women are really coming into their own as superior in all the manly activities to man — they are rising above the earth — why, just look at that new fashion of puffed sleeves! They’re turning into birds! They’re flying away, leaving us men behind in our doldrums, destitute! And when we finally realize just how much of an improvement they were to the level of our discourse and the seriousness of our sciences, then maybe they will come back…
So, yes, as the above summary demonstrates, Kierkegaard did have a bit more variety in his satire than Lind, and he threw in a little romantic flight of fancy at the end just to show his poetical chops. This publication was an exercise and a gamble for recognition. That doesn’t excuse its dumb chauvinism, of course.
Kierkegaard had reason to consider the publication of this essay an even greater success than most because he had actually tweaked the nose of Heiberg himself in it. In addition to alluding to Heiberg’s mother in his enumeration of the cultural production of modern women, he also wrote, “it is so lovely to see that the man who especially wishes to have an effect upon the ladies does not, however, forget the men and finally extends his philanthropic enthusiasm to all.” This is a clear dig at Heiberg, who advertised some public lectures as open to all, including and especially ladies. Moreover, the whole point of both articles went against Heiberg’s professed commitment to woman’s intellectual equality with man. So it was a coup to have written so well that Heiberg published one — even though he disagreed with one’s thesis, and even though one had directly mocked him.
01/13/2012
How I propose to ‘do’ Kierkegaard
I am about to embark on writing about each and every book published in the Hongs’ Princeton translation of the works of Kierkegaard. The occasion for this enterprise is that I’m taking a class on several of K.’s books this semester and decided to make a completist project of it; also, that I’m trying to get more readers for this blog. Although I’ve read various works by Kierkegaard in the past, the vast majority of them are new to me. Moreover, I am coming to them purposefully naive: Kierkegaard is a writer who, some years ago, I decided that I would like to know intimately, and I find the best practice for initiating a productive relationship with a corpus is to read it without any initial recourse to secondary literature. So I’m going to avoid secondary literature apart from editorial notes and prefaces. (Though after the project is finished, there will be an orgy of secondary literature reading, you may be sure.)
Several things should be noted in advance about the series.
- This series will be an unedited set of notes and commentary. I’ve often struggled with what form genuinely good book-blogging should take, and I’ve been disappointed with the results of reviewing, of excerpting, of summarizing. This series will be segments of the exact document that I would keep for myself even if I had no blog, a document intended to preserve what seemed to me the important contents of the books. It occurred to me that this document would make good blog-content when I realized that it would be of interest — potentially — both to people who had never read the given texts, because of my care to restate clearly and simply what I take K. to be saying (something I do to compensate for the deficiency of my own memory), and also to those colleagues of mine who are already expert, because in my efforts to understand and internalize K. I will inevitably carry out of some systematic integration of his texts into my own conceptual universe — and one of the highlights of intellectual friendship is observing one another metabolize identical texts in different ways.
- All quotations in this series will be from the Princeton Paperbacks series of Kierkegaard’s complete works. The specific book will be specified in the title of a post, and I will provide page numbers for my quotations. I mention this here to avoid the necessity of including any bibliographic apparatus beyond em-bracketed page numbers in the course of the actual series.
- This series is not a cheat sheet for Kierkegaard’s books. That would be any easy mistake which I hope no sly googler, perhaps an undergraduate on the lookout for a good substitute to doing the actual work of reading their class assignment, will make. These are my notes, not spark notes. That means I am extracting some of what I read, only the parts that seemed important to me at the time, and recording it together with my commentary for my own future use. Obviously I can’t police the use to which my notes are put, but be warned cheaters: you’ll look like an idiot if you take my posts as outlines of the books they’re about.
The full series is listed in chronological order below:
I. Early Polemical Writings. S. Kierkegaard; J. Watkin, ed. and trans.
II. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
III. Either/Or. Part I. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
IV. Either/Or: Part II. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
V. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
VI. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
VII. Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy/Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est. (Two books in one volume). S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
VIII. Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. S. Kierkegaard; R. Thomte, ed. and trans.
IX. Prefaces: Writing Sampler. S. Kierkegaard; T.W. Nichol, ed. and trans.
X. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. S. Kierkegaard;
XI. Stages on Life’s Way. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XII. Volume I. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume I. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XII. Volume II. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume II. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XIII. The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
XIV. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age A Literary Review. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
XV. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XVI. Works of Love. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XVII. Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XVIII. Without Authority. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XIX. Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
XX. Practice in Christianity. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XXI. For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself!. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XXII. The Point of View. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XXIII. The Moment and Late Writings. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XXIV. The Book on Adler. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.
XXV. Letters and Documents. S. Kierkegaard; H. Rosenmeier, ed. and trans.
01/11/2012
Some thoughts on critique
*I once had an undergraduate professor who would respond to any criticism of anything by crying out, “the onus is on you! You have no right to say that unless you have an alternative!” That was wrong of him. Some ideas and actions deserve critique even when the critic has no immediate alternative solution.
*But there comes a time in the life of a developing scholar when critique is second nature. Ideas and actions just present themselves as problematic, always. The temptation at that point is to fall into a world-weary attitude, as if the world of concepts and motivations were a giant stalemated chessboard and nothing were original, nothing superior to anything else. This attitude is particularly contagious among philosophers. But it is wrong.
*At the point where this attitude becomes a danger, it becomes necessary to restrict one’s criticisms to those that arise from honest and impassioned commitments. Criticism at the higher levels of scholarship, to avoid mere eternal quibbling, should function as law does in the liberal utopia. Where one’s conceptual project trespasses upon another and disagreement ensues, then scholars may come before the court of reason and engage in real, dialogic debate with definite and perceptible stakes.
*While these consideration should guide one’s own practice of criticism, I think, the better part of politeness is always to assume at first that any critical interlocutor has good reasons for their criticism. Perhaps your anger at their critique would be ameliorated into a true philosophical mood of contention if you took the trouble to discover their good reasons. This is particularly good advice for random blog commenters, who may not actively be trolling when they parachute in and treat a blog author as if he were ignorant of the obvious counter-positions to his own — but in effect they are trolls, out of their own laziness.
01/09/2012
Comments on the APA’s Statement on Teaching, Pt. 1: Philosophy, What Is It Good For?
The first session of BC’s “teaching seminar” met at the beginning of last semester. A generous percentage of the entire staff of BC’s core philosophy course, for the next four or five years, sat in a circle staring at each other. We were invited, by our soft- but precise-spoken Jesuit instructor, to consider why and how we wanted to teach philosophy. He provided us, as a springboard to contemplation, with the APA’s statement on teaching.
I’ve had a semester to think about it — and will have one semester more before I actually have to teach — and I’ve finally come up with some things to say. I thought it would be interesting to catalog my opinions about teaching philosophy now, before I begin to teach, and then to do the same after a semester of teaching next year. As an easy guideline for comments, I’m simply going to go through (some) of the topics discussed in the APA’s statement and provide my own opinions on them. Today’s topic: the purpose of philosophical education.
I think the most important part of this question might be summarized as “what is the purpose of philosophical education to non-philosophers.” It hardly needs to be pointed out that would-be philosophers will find their pre-chosen discipline interesting, for a variety of personal reasons. But why should anybody else be made to study it? Should it really be part of the core of a good liberal arts college?
Yes, I think so. My reason can be broken into two parts: (1. philosophy is an essential component of the art of invention operative in innovation, critique, and improvement in any area of intellectual life; (2. philosophy, as an historical tradition, essentially is the art of invention applied to everyday life and has accordingly spun off into countless now independent and important intellectual disciplines. As you can see, this is one reason, considered under two aspects.
The reason for my breaking my answer in two is that I understand and to some degree sympathize with the student who straightforwardly admits and asserts, “I’m not here to become a scholar, I’m here because this kind of education is supposed to help me achieve a career and a modicum of self-fulfillment within it.” For that student, the first part of my answer is reason enough to study philosophy.
For the genuinely scientific student — one interested in systematically developing the art of invention discovered in the philosophic tradition — nothing will do but the full story, the history of philosophy’s gradual unfolding from the tightly bound scroll of the Greeks to its present diffusion and diversity.
Now what is this business of an “art of invention”? Well, it is both motive, method, and material assumption. It is a motive because the origin of philosophy — in wonder, as the best authorities have it — involves the search for explanations — questioning — and the development of philosophy has been driven by the invention of answers and the subsequent invention of new questions on the basis of those answers. What is the basic constituent of the universe? Air, water, fire, flux? What is justice? The advantage of the stronger, the proportionality of the city, the demands of duty? Invention is also the method of philosophy. Its most potent tools — formal and informal logics, transcendental arguments, phenomenological searches for essence, etc. — have the effect of dis-covering new categories under which to arrange and explain everyday things. Philosophy is — in the majority of its historical activity — the invention of new categories, new concepts, and their rigorous application to old problems. Finally, invention is the material assumption of philosophy because, without some idea of unity(s) of reason(s), philosophy is in practice impossible. The method of inventing new categories under which to range old problems only works on the assumption that identical objects can be considered from different angles, as it were — on the assumption that reason provides a unified field, within which a problem or object may be turned this way and that, gradually illuminated, its profiles recorded, its secrets slowly (perhaps infinitely) brought to light.
Practical application*: I am thinking of beginning and ending my core philosophy course with a simple exercise. I will bring some kind of common household item — perhaps a rubber band, or a nail, or an apple, or a candlestick — and ask my students, in class, to list as many different aspects of the item as possible. Say, in the case of an apple: its color, taste, texture, size, etc.; its origin from a seed; its aesthetic appeal or lack thereof; its symbolic resonance in their own planes of intertextuality (perhaps the forbidden fruit, the apple of the eye, the test of faith and proof of skill as in the case of William Tell, the special fixation of Thoreau, etc.); its distinction as a fruit, as a plant, as organic, etc. And so on. I hope they will all make very long interesting lists. Then, at the end of the semester, my final assignment will consist in repeating the exercise, but this time I will ask them to list as many different aspects of the item as they think would be specifically suggested by the philosophical work of certain philosophers. The philosophers, of course, will be those we’ve studied. What aspects of an apple does Plato’s work suggest? Kant’s? Husserl’s? The Idea of an apple, the apple in our mind and the thing itself, the essence of the apple… I hope it will be a fun exercise that also drives home the point that philosophy really does open up everyday objects and problems in new ways.**
*note: I’ll try to work out a practical application of each of the opinions I express in this series; next fall semester I will report on the success or failure of those applications.
**note 2: Since I have the same class for two semesters, I’m toying with focusing the first semester on those texts and ideas typically considered to be metaphysical and epistemological and the second semester on those considered to be ethical and political. In the second semester I would have them perform the exercise, but this time with respect to the job they most expect or hope to have after they graduate.
01/08/2012
and on that note
I would like to introduce yet another friend’s blog. I seem to have been doing that a lot in the last few months. This time it’s my friend Kenyon Gradert, currently studying for his PhD in literature at WashU in St. Louis, a man who knows how to relax and how to work, loves to read, has in fact shared the ecstasies of an incredible new library with me (a viking library, no less), disturbs me at times with his sympathetic attention to deplorable conservative politics, but then turns around and dazzles me with his excellent writing and philosophical earnestness. I urge you to consider, if you will, Death and Vulgarity (aka the 19th century). I read it; maybe you will too. (Especially if today’s post is any example of what we readers have in store — I hope so.)
01/07/2012
…i began to suspect i might have much to unlearn…
Hitherto [before setting himself a life-long scheme of studies in July 1833] I had had no mind, properly so called, merely a boy’s intelligence, receptive of anything I read or heard. I now awoke to the new idea of finding the reason of things; I began to suspect I might have much to unlearn as well as to learn, and that I must clear my mind of much current opinion which had lodged there. Not that I saw this with clearness, or thought of carrying it out with the thoroughness of a Descartes; but the principle of rationalism was born in me, and once born it was sure to grow, and to become the master-idea of the whole process of self-education, on which I was from this time forward embarked.
From: Memoirs of an Oxford Don, by Mark Pattison
Mark Pattison On the Failings of Higher Education
As I continue to read Memoirs of a Oxford Don, I’m struck by the similarities between the deficiencies of 19th and 21st century colleges. In early 19th century Oxford, according to Pattison, economic pressures had overmastered academic institutions’ higher aspirations. To achieve an education one essentially required the skills of an autodidact. He notes with horror that his ‘responsions’ exam, taken one year and two months after he began, could have been aced with the same level and set of skills as that with which he passed the entrance exam.
I felt the same way when I graduated from Dordt College. There was no sense of accomplishment except the ‘sense of accomplishment’ one feels after enduring something long and tedious.
I hope the way I thrill with recognition to Pattison’s autobiography doesn’t indicate that I will grow to be curmudgeonly and misanthropic like him. Regardless of the dangers, I think we should take heed to his critique.
- For Pattison, the idea of college as a venue for really beginning to delve into the secrets of scholarship still infused his childhood imagination, before he discovered college lectures to be lazy and dumbed down, taken seriously by neither teacher nor student.
- He believed this to be the fault, largely, of lax admission practices. Though a test of competence was administered, its results were taken lightly at best. Ultimately good fellows were elected to study more often than good students. This continued all the way up the line of preferment and advancement, to the point that some teachers could only barely keep ahead of their students at lessons.
- But he found that professors offered little personal direction to make up for the travesty of public lectures. So in the end the college really was mostly a building. A library — which he finally learned to take advantage of and from which, by way of Gibbons’s autobiography, he received his first real intellectual guidance — and a room away from the strictures of family. Freedom and books. Those were all that going to college really contributed to his education. Things not to be sneezed at, true. But also much less than he hoped and anticipated.
My experience couldn’t have been more similar. Freedom and books were the sole ingredients of at least 90% of the push toward real scholarship that I received. (The other 10%, as I’ve said elsewhere, was due to the personal influence of several professors.) I’d like to think this was only a characteristic of the particularly bad institution I attended, but Pattison’s autobiography shows it to be a recurring theme of higher education.
01/06/2012
…books, irrespective of their contents…
I read ten times as much as I remembered; what is more odd, I read far more than I ever took in the sense of as I read it. I think the mechanical act of perusal must have given me a sort of pleasure. Books, as books, irrespective of their contents, were my delight.
From: Memoirs of an Oxford Don, by Mark Pattison
The Social Dimension of Electronic Research
In Anthony Grafton’s last essay in Worlds Created by Words, he discusses the de-materialization of the book and one of its concomitant tragedies: the disappearance of libraries as places for interaction between scholars. This is a theme in Grafton’s historical writings as well — he frequently lauds the role that magnificent collections of books had in bringing together scholars. He remembers his own youth in libraries, the old and young scholars he would meet among the stacks. He also shares similar stories and accounts from the likes of historian of religion Peter Brown and historian of American intellectual history Alfred Kazin.
All of which made me think: hmm, that’s interesting, I didn’t know you could meet people in libraries. Because that’s never been my experience. My intellectual comrades universally derive from two sources: we’re part of the same academic program or attend the same academic conference; or, we met on the internet. It seems to me that what Grafton bemoans about the fact that we don’t have to travel to Europe to read the books we want, but can in fact do it on Google Books, is the social networking potential of libraries.
There probably was something about running into another scholar among the shelves: “what are you studying?” you’d ask. All kinds of exchange of research would occur.
A locale for such exchanges would be handy. It’s waaaay too easy to go along, even in a tight community like the Boston College grad student philosophy cubicles, for weeks and months without discussing one’s research with the people one talks to every day.
Which brings me to my newest experiment. I’m going to get a few of my currently closest colleagues to join me in using Mendeley (it’s a citation program with a built-in social networking aspect) to share current research in a facebook-y way — hopefully replete with comment back-and-forths. I’m avoiding things like academia.edu, because they’re way too broad for what I have in mind. I have no expectations — I’m just trying out something new. All inspired by Grafton’s account of sociable libraries. I’m going to try to recreate the experience for us e-scholars. And where am I going to find a more library-like e-locale than a bibliography program?
[candidate for a motto]
If you’re not tired when you get into bed at night, you’re not living hard enough.
01/04/2012
The Next Semester: A Personal Update
Starting with New Year’s day, appropriately enough, all specific obligations for my winter break were wrapped up. That leaves me until Jan. 17, to do whatever I like. Sort of. There’s still the comprehensive exams looming at the end of the semester, for which I cannot be too prepared too soon. But I’m treating them the only way I know how to treat daunting long-term projects: I worked out a while back how much I would need to do each day to be prepared by then, and now I only focus on a day’s quota. That’s very manageable.
For fun — sort of — I’m prepping myself for the semester’s courses. I’ll be taking classes on Kierkegaard, Spinoza, and Aristotle. For the first, I’m re-reading Garff’s biography, and, as you know, reading through every published text by Kierkegaard. For the second, I’m reading Nadler’s biography, all of Spinoza’s letters, and the theologico-political treatise. For the third, I’m still looking for good prepwork — how does one prepare to study the posterior analytics and the topics?
I’m also pursuing the first steps in an important and very long-term project that I decided upon last semester after studying Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms. I’m going to try to read all the major works in philosophy of law, as well as a good bit of legal history. I started easily and simply with J.M. Kelly’s Western Legal Theory, and I propose to skip around a bit, here reading about the Roman Legal Tradition, there perusing Luhmann’s Law as a Social System. The subject pains and excites me in equal measure.
Over the next year, I’m hoping to fill in some of the blank spots in my knowledge of the history of the English novel — spots like George Eliot, W.M. Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser. But, not to let the spice of my reading life disappear completely, I’m also systematically working my way through the novels of Brandon Sanderson, John Scalzi, and Daniel Abraham. Gotta keep up to date on my genre fiction.
Finally, an Anthony Grafton binge has made me fascinated by the history of scholarship. I found a trilogy on that subject on Google Books for free, which is turning out to be surprisingly good. I’m also planning to read Mark Pattison’s bio of Isaac Casaubon, which Grafton refers to on average once every three pages.
The nice thing about having both big plans and also uninhibited free time (for the next two weeks at least) is that I can follow my enthusiasms in any number of directions while remaining confident that I’m getting valuable work done. So nice.
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