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Monthly Archives: August 2011

On Reading By Candle-light

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Hurricane Irene sort of sidestepped around me, to the west, but not so far that she couldn’t fling out one grey-lacquered fingernail and flip the switch on all my lights. For two days I lurked in the gloaming of my cave-like apartment with naught to abate the murk but tree-filtered natural light and left over [...]

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On History of Philosophy as Whig History

Friday, August 26, 2011

(h/t Graham Harman.) The great historian of philosophy, Frederick Beiser, has written an extraordinarily illuminating review of the second volume of the new History of Continental Philosophy series. What’s so interesting about the review is the way Beiser sets up “the standard curriculum” against a more historiographically objective appraisal of what trends and figures were [...]

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On Abortive Systematicity

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Husserl, with whom I’ve been acquainting myself and from whom I’ve been learning the method of pure phenomenology, has taught me something else. He’s taught me that the most systematic thinking can result in really fragmented, abortive writing. This lesson, like all those that really impress one, was partially anamnetic. I’ve wanted it to be [...]

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On Higher Education Viewed As a Series Of Increasingly Useful Libraries

Monday, August 22, 2011

My education in libraries started earlier than college. It started when I was a lonely homeschooled kid, being educated according to the “great books” method. I’d get dropped off down at the local college library for a few hours once or twice a week. Terrified of the adults behind desks, I mostly just muddled my [...]

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On Nourishing One’s “X”

Saturday, August 20, 2011

The labels required in something like a research statement are really obnoxious. How can my little self-advertisement as a student of social philosophy / philosophy of mind / early modern philosophy really advertise at all my investment in specific questions like “what is the use of authenticity?” and “how can I ‘liquify’ early modern rationalism?” [...]

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Update, August 2011

Friday, August 19, 2011

A summer of very diffuse reading and very concentrated fiction writing is relaxing (if that’s the right word) into narrower concentrations as I do some preliminary reading for my first semester of graduate study. I hope to continue to write fiction this semester — though I know I will be busier with actual academic work [...]

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On Literature as the Objectification of Sentences (Pt. 1)

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Every art is basically an objectification – the exaltation of some component part of life to an object of engrossing fascination in itself.* This is obvious in the case of dancing, for example, which is an objectification of movement. Many of the controversies surrounding the arts have to do with what part of life they [...]

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