Henry directed me to the following: The New Hellenism (lareviewofbooks.org) As you infer from the URL, that is an essay in the L.A. Review of Books, about a trend in philosophy since 2010, a trend toward a far less academic and more accessible style. The essay is by Crispin Sartwell, an essayist whose prose is always accessible. Here is a snippet: " In effect, every aspect of philosophy is being transformed or reimagined today, just as Epicurus produced letters or Epictetus aphorisms rather than Aristotelian treatises on logic. The basic forms are not the 20-page journal article with 123 footnotes or the bristlingly dry and difficult 400-page monograph, one-third of which is 'scholarly apparatus.' Rather, what you get from Agnes Callard or Justin Smith is a sharp, unexpected 2,500-word essay in a blog or newspaper. "One of the shaping influences on the development of public philosophy, the personal/philosophical essay, and intellectual self-help was th...
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Apparently members of the Modern Language Association have initiated a petition to remove Judith Butler as that organization's Vice President and President elect. In order to understand this petition, one has to have some answer to each of the following questions: 1) Who is Judith Butler and how important is she? 2) What is the MLA and how important is it? 3) What are the grounds/merits of this complaint? I will address the first two of those questions today and the final one tomorrow. Judith Butler is a philosophy professor at UCal Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Troubles (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993). Her writing style is notoriously difficult. Here is one sentence often quoted as an example of the impenetrability of it: " The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and reart...
"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it's based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility." The book this is from is, unsurprisingly, named THE FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS. It's subtitle is perhaps a little less predictable: LUCK AND ETHICS IN GREEK TRAGEDY AND PHILOSOPHY. Publication year, 1986.