I am at work on an essay in historiography; specifically, the history of the development of historians' (and the publics) views of the Holocaust. My goal is a publishable essay on the subject, although who would publish such a thing from me I have no idea. Anyway, in the course of the research I have learned a bit about Gerald Reitlinger, who was known as an art historian in the '30s and during the war, but who in In regard to the Holocaust, came out unexpectedly with THE FINAL SOLUTION (1952). One of Reitlinger’s many contributions here was to bring the matter of the Warsaw ghetto uprising squarely into the frame. This rather markedly runs against the denial of individual agency in many accounts of the Holocaust. The historians tend to give us banal commandants and passive Jewish victims, and open rebellion by the not-so-passive victims, where it occurs, is "not my department," like where the rockets come down. Jews like Merek Edelman chose not to be passiv...
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I kid. There's no such thing as a Journal of Dried Fruit. Wouldn't it be great if there were, though? A peer reviewed place to which we could go to keep up with all the currant literature. Cymbal clash. I'll show myself out....
As I was saying ... the silliness of the Oval Office speech became obvious in stages. He didn't mean "cargo." He didn't mean to suggest that Americans abroad wouldn't be able to fly home. He didn't even mean to exclude the United Kingdom. The UK and the Republic of Ireland were both explicitly included within a couple of days. So supporting Brexit had never had anything to do with it. Or not much. It was a disaster of a speech, reminding me of an old comedy bit about a cheese shop. "Not much of a cheese shop, is it?" "It's the finest in the district, sir." "Explain the logic behind that conclusion." "It's so clean." "It's certainly uncontaminated by cheese." Anyway: through much of the speech Trump appeared to be having trouble reading the words on the teleprompter. Yet he persisted, which resulted in some odd inflections. My guess is that some of the simple looniness of the spee...
I'm still collecting my thoughts about President Trump's speech from the Oval Office on March 11 with regard to coronavirus. The whole point of speaking from the Oval Office is that a President gets a solemn backdrop -- like a captain on the bridge, or a King in his 'throne room.' The throne room is only rarely used for this purpose, and the rarity of course helps underline the importance of the pronouncements made in this way. On March 11th, though, Trump went off the rails. VOX has the full text: https://www.vox.com/2020/3/11/21176001/trump-coronavirus-speech-travel-ban-transcript The key conceit of the speech is that the US under Trump's wise leadership had shut the virus out on the western flank, by limiting immigration from China, and that it would now simply have to perform the same magic on our eastern flank, limiting immigration from Europe. Here's the key bit. "To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all t...
I have nothing heavy to say today. Just an oddity to share. That image is of the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, in Capetown, South Africa. One can find in there somewhere a restaurant known as Gibson's Gourmet Burgers and Ribs. The Guinness Book of World Records has name Gibson's the holder of the venerated title, "Most Varieties of Milkshakes Commercially Available." It sells 207. I am properly impressed.
Somewhere in his writing, I have forgotten where, William James makes a slighting reference to John Stuart Mill. It has stuck in my mind for years. James is discussing how books, plays, paintings etc. that we saw as a young person and see/experience again as an older person can offer a surprisingly novel experience, leaving us asking "how did I MISS this?". He is making broader points about the continuity (or not) of personal identity IIRC. This brings us to the shot at JSM. James says that one can come back as a mature man to Mill's writings and wonder what ever did I think was so "weighty" about them in the first place. There are several ideas of J.S. Mill's that James might at some point in his philosophic development have found enlightening. For example, Mill famously said that matter is the "permanent possibility of sensation." That comment incorporates what is valuable about George Berkeley's criticism of ideas of matter, whil...
Who was Socrates' teacher? Is there someone (historical) who bears the same relationship to him that he bears to Plato and Plato bears to Aristotle, so that we can extend the line of apostolic succession one link further back? The SYMPOSIUM, Socrates said that he was taught about Love (and, it seems, about other conceptions basic to his philosophy) by a woman named Diotima. There is room for debate about how historical this bit was. Plato may have invented her for expository purposes. One consideration though is the placename associated with her. She is called “Diotima of Mantinea,” and Mantinea was a city in the Peloponnese affiliated with Sparta. Plato, I think, would not have invented this detail. In the climate after the execution of Socrates, he would not have encouraged the notion that “perhaps he had the hemlock coming because he was consorting with the enemy.” So … maybe she is historical and the right answer to our question. (The above is the image assigned to he...
If we were going to come up with a snappy name for each of the last two decades, what might we come up with? For purposes of clarity allow me to say: I regard a "decade" as beginning with a year ending with a 1 and ending with a year ending with a 0. So the period 2001-10 was one decade and the period 2011-20 is the next. The end of the second is in sight. So: snappy names Like "The Jazz Age" for the 1920s, or "the Me Decade" for the 1970s. Do the last two lend themselves to such treatment? My own stabs -- the first was "the Fever Dream" and the second has been "the Unicorn Decade." The early years were a fever dream of every more fancy ways of dressing up financial derivatives so banks could sell them to each other at ever higher prices, a fever that broke near the decade's end. The more recent block of time has notably featured a lot of money, chasing entrepreneurs, hoping that they (the venture capitalists) can thr...
"At the end of our books about God, those of us who are not Kantians will discuss how it is that we human beings can think and speak about God. That for us is an important matter of intellectual curiosity, But it is not a matter of agony. We empathize with those who experience the Kantian agony; but we do not share it. If one believes that one's car is in good working order, one does not spend the whole day under the hood to determine whether it could possibly be in good working order, and if so how." So wrote Nicholas P. Woltenstorff, at the end of his essay "Conundrums of Kants' Rational Religion (1991). That was a contribution to an anthology -- I won't give you the title of the full book, just to give you a job to do. The metaphor of driving a car here here refers to the fact of having and discussing ideas about God, such as "God's grace is necessary for salvation." Kant had such ideas, and expressed them in some of his writings that p...
I've decided I don't believe in Descartes' presentation. In less kind language: he was a phony. He marketed as someone who went through a skeptical dark night of the soul, took seriously arguments about the malevolent demon and dreams, thought himself out to the other aside of such arguments, (by finding God), and so was able to provide us with a distinctive view of the world. The dark-night-of-the-soul stuff has so come to dominate the collective imagination that it overshadows the distinct view of the world that Descartes eventually offered. What he offered was this: 1. There are three substances: God, mind, and matter. We need God chiefly as the guarantor of our knowledge about matter: "we" are manifestation of mind. 2. How does mind interact with matter? Descartes left that as a mystery -- but he minimized the extent of the mystery a bit by telling us that other animals are mindless: the issue only arises for humans. 2. Matter is in essence the s...
I've probably said this before but ... I'll go over it again to justify this neat drawing of a medieval siege engine. it seems to me a key point in the political/military history of Europe in particular in the last several centuries that the whole issue of civilizing war by de-civilian-izing it. The whole issue of who are the permissible victims of combat has turned around. In medieval times, the idea that attacking civilians was a bad thing would have seemed very odd. Attacking civilians was pretty much the key tactic of every army. Surrounding cities and starving them out was standard practice. Indeed, in the high middle ages in Europe, attacking the other side’s army was something to be avoided if possible. You wanted to sneak around their army to get at their civilians. After all, their army was made up largely of noblemen, knights, who were worth a damned sight more than peasants and city rabble. Only very slowly has the philosophy of war moved in the direction ...
Given Sanders' repeated reference to himself as a "socialist," arguments over the definition of the word have become very vogue. I want to contribute a thought today about a wrong way to proceed. A Facebook friend of mine, who shall go nameless, wrote as follows: "I'd say Stop Signs are socialist. I'd define it very broadly." What he is saying is that any government as the term is usually understood is socialist, because such an institution collects money, at least some of it non-voluntary, and uses at least some of that money for non-controversial purposes such as putting stop signs up in places that help avoid collision and death. There are at least two purposes to which such an argument may be put: If I know that you agree that the word "socialism" names something bad, I may use something like this to push you toward anarchism. On the other hand, If I know that you believe in some sort of government or other, I may use the argument...