My recent reading includes AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020), by Stephen Bates. I won't say much about it today: but I will give you some bibliographic particulars. Let's do this is question-and-answer form. Who is Stephen Bates? An associate professor at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, teaching journalism and media studies. Is this his first book? No, it's his fifth. Perhaps his best known before this was THE POISONER (2014) about a notorious Victorian-era serial killer, William Palmer. Okay. What is the new book about? Chiefly it is about the Hutchins Commission and its report. This was a Commission created by Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, at the behest of his friend Henry Luce, then a press baron with roughly the power and wealth of a Hearst or a Murdoch. Hutchins collected some renowned philosophers, theologians, and Big Thinkers to think about the issue of a free press -- what it means and how it should be nurtured. It pr...
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Regular readers will know that I often owe my material for this blog to Brian Leiter, of the University of Chicago, and more pertinently (just now) proprietor of the wonderful philosophy blog Leiter Reports. This will be another example. Here is a piece of an essay on the interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy that Leiter published back in 1992. He has recently posted it on his blog, indicating that he still believes it worth discussing (there are many things I was writing in 1992 of which I would not say the same, of which I will never be posting here.) So ... this is Leiter, controverting one important interpretation of Nietzsche: Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 book Nietzsche: Life as a Literature offers an elegant synthesis of themes from other (then au courant) readings of Nietzsche by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Paul DeMan, and Richard Rorty. He effected this synthesis primarily through the introduction of a novel interpretive rubric: what Neham...
Sort of a meta-theory of law. I like those. Jeremy K Kessler and David Pozen, both of Columbia Law School, have posted Working Themselves Impure: A Life-Cycle Theory of Legal Theorie s, which will soon be published in the University of Chicago Law Review. I learned about it in the Legal History Blog, which I believe I've mentioned here before, and which once in awhile references my work in The Federal Lawyer. The life-cycle theory is this: "Prescriptive legal theories have a tendency to cannibalize themselves. As they develop into schools of thought, they become not only increasingly complicated but also increasingly compromised, by their own normative lights. Maturation breeds adulteration. The theories work themselves impure." That's the abstract. Here's a quote from the article, about why they limit that statement to prescriptive legal theories: "All that we have said so far concerns prescriptive legal theories; what of their descriptive cou...