When I hear the name of the poet W.H. Auden, I think instantly of the poem September 1, 1939. This poem is named for the day on which Germany launched its Lightning-war on Poland. Auden understood the significance of the date, and the poem contains some of the most memorable and so the most commonly quoted verse lines of the 20th century, including his lament about the proud German culture and to what it had come. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz What huge imago made A psychopathic god.... Recognizing all of that, I am happy to report my own discovery and delight -- that Auden has other less heavily freighted sides. Here is a love poem of his that consists of an extended rif on two loves -- the love many humans have for the sight of a cloudless starry night sky, and the love we have, at our best, for one another. The More Loving One Looking up at the stars, I know quite we...
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A: I just ended a sixteen year relationship. B. Oh my God! Are you okay? A: I'm fine. It wasn't MY relationship. B: [Spits out coffee.]
Let's go back to the letter to which I linked you yesterday. The gist of it was this: Jenkins made reference in her work to a paper called "What is Romantic Love?" which she cited as his and used as a foil for her own ideas. She took it from an online forum: Soble, Alan (unpublished manuscript) What Is Romantic Love? Retrieved from http://forums.catholic.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9934&d=1300009573 Accessed March 13, 2011. In time she learned that this paper was not his. It was a paper by some anonymous undergraduate student in philosophy, and the paper itself criticizes Alan Sobel in the third person, so that might have been her first clue. Of course people do sometimes get tricky and criticize themselves in the third person. So it might have been his anyway. But in the world of might-have-beens, she also 'might have' simply checked with the purported author. Anyway ... She emailed him an apology, saying " I am so sorry for ...
Carrie Jenkins is a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia who has built a reputation in the philosophy of romance and relationships. She is a defender of polyamory, the view that the maintenance of intimate relationships with more than one partner is a moral and appropriate life style. This is always defended with the proviso that the partners are not kept secret from one another. After all, polyamorous person who allows him/herself to be thought to be a monogamous person by any of the partners is of course, a cheater and a skunk -- I don't understand Jenkins to dispute that. Anyway, there is some question as to whether Jenkins is to a sufficient extent a lover of the practice of scholarly rigor. There is, fittingly, a triangular story here. I learned of the recent dust-up about Jenkins from Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter himself holds to a philosophical position I like to think of as "Menshevik." He is an old school leftist who see social ...
Henry brought up a good point in the comment section of a post a couple of weeks ago. What do we know about the historical Socrates? Should he even be included on "greatest philosophers" lists independent of Plato? As I said in a responsive comment at the time, we know there WAS a historical Socrates, that he wasn't simply a figment of Plato's imagination serving as mouthpiece. The other sources include: Xenophon, another of Socrates' students, who wrote his own account of Socrates' trial and condemnation; Aristophanes, the playwright who wrote a comedy with Socrates as its comic butt; and Aristotle, who referenced Socrates in ways that suggest that he was writing for an audience that still remembered the guy. From all of this, scholars have tried to tease out what was S., what was merely the mouthpiece for P. of the same name. The case of the Aristophanes/Socrates/Plato triangle fascinates me. If one reads THE CLOUDS, one gets a vivid picture of wh...
Jonah Lehrer has written a book about love. In case the name of the author rings a bell, but you aren't quite sure why ... that is THIS fellow. Lehrer was a high-flying pop-science pundit over a five year period, from 2007 until 2012. He wrote a series of books with such titles as Proust Was A Neuroscientist with a lot of specific messages but with the over-arching meta-messages that Neuroscience is Wonderful and Explains Everything about Us. The link I provided you above takes you to a blog entry I posted here in August 2012, amidst Lehrer's fall from grace. The specific cause was a lot of crap he wrote about Dylan. But, as is often the case in these scandals, once some blood is in the water other sharks arrive, and other chunks of flesh are torn away from the reputational body. In this case, the "sharks" weren't doing anything more predatory than fact checking, and source checking. Which turned out to be quite predatory indeed for Lehrer. For example: W...
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring; Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing; Voices in laughter, too; and bodies' pain, Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam; That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; And washen stones, gay for an hour, the cold Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould; Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew; And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; -- All these have been my loves. From "The Great Lover," 1914.