Water Flows in Brooklyn

Image result for litchfield villa prospect park

The March issue of Harper's includes an article by Elizabeth Royte called "The Hidden Rivers of Brooklyn," which begins with a discussion of the view from a parapet on the tower of Litchfield Villa, on the western edge of Prospect Park.

"I was barely able to make out -- over treetops and tall buildings -- a glint of Gowanus Bay, roughly two miles away. Edwin Litchfield ... would have had no trouble seeing the bay and much of his land holdings out of a second-floor window."

Thus, she has set up her themes, of development, Brooklyn's history, and water.

Two paragraphs later she introduces us to Eymund Diegel, a sort of hydrological Adrian Monk, and she follows him, carrying the reader along, as he tries to reconstruct the one-time flow of water over the area, as it would have run back before the water was corralled into pipes.

A few grafs further on, we're treated to this description, which is worth the price of the issue at a newsstand: Wandering along the presumed course of Vechte's Brook, Diegel repeatedly dropped to the ground to listen at manhole covers and drains. He blurted out contextual clues: that anomalously large tree hinted at a steady water source; a discharge pipe protruding from a school basement spoke to regular flooding. 'That's as good as a chalk line on a sidewalk,' Diegel said.

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

A Quote from Parfit

Recently I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc. Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog