I watched recently a DVD of a movie starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones, The Homesman. This movie in one sense echoed one of my favorites, The African Queen, with Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. In both cases a high-minded religious woman has to travel, and a low-life drifter is coaxed into joining her in her travel. In The African Queen, of course, the Hepburn character, a missionary in contested territory, [that is, African territory contested between two great Imperial Powers in 1914] has to travel because the outbreak of war, both in Europe and amongst the administrations of the contending nations' colonies in Africa, has made her situation impossible. The nearest safe place for her as a British subject is Kenya. In The Homesman by contrast, Swank's character is traveling because there are three madwomen in her small isolated town in the middle of the Nebraska territory. These women have to be taken, in what looks essentially like a horse-drawn jai...
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Aristotle, in his book on POLITICS, tells the following story about Thales, the Ionian philosopher portrayed above and best known for the theory that water is the essence of all matter. "Thales, so the story goes, because of his poverty was taunted with the uselessness of philosophy; but from his knowledge of astronomy he had observed while it was still winter that there was going to be a large crop of olives, so he raised a small sum of money and paid round deposits for the whole of the olive-presses in Miletus and Chios, which he hired at a low rent as nobody was running him up; and when the season arrived, there was a sudden demand for a number of presses at the same time, and by letting them out on what terms he liked he realised a large sum of money, so proving that it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about." Fascinating story. Someone who apparently had the reputation of being what we would call today an 'ab...
A new translation of Dostoevsky's classic novel, NOTES FROM A DEAD HOUSE, is available from Knopf. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky did the translating. This gives Christine Smallwood an opportunity to offer her observations on the novel in the March issue of HARPER'S. "The book is largely plotless, a record of institutional habits and routines, though little scenes and colorful dramas emerge....Toward the end of the book, two prisoners run off intending to escape for good, and for eight days it seems they have succeeded. They are celebrated and admired until they are found and returned, when they are mocked, humiliated."
So: what was Chesterton really saying when he wrote this? "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality: to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity: as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy: he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind." ...
Another candidate. As some of you may remember, I've been wondering aloud for some time whether there are any prominent ethical/meta-ethical philosophers active today who fit each of four labels in those fields that seem to me to go together rather naturally. Maybe Susan Haack would qualify. I recently reviewed a work of hers on the philosophy of the law of evidence, and in the process I expounded on her epistemology, "foundherentism." The idea is that learning about the world is like filling in a crossword puzzle. There is the foundational matter of satisfying the clues that come in from your senses (from outside the grid of the puzzle) and there is the coherentist matter of maintaining consistency within the grid, because of course the words cross each other. What occurred to me only after my review was published was that it is in principle possible that certain crossword puzzles will have more than one perfectly correct answer. Indeed, this is sometimes done....
Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...
The business of owning and leasing out shopping malls ain't what it used to be. I'm old enough to remember when malls themselves were the hot (and worrisome) new trend, popping up in the suburbs and decimating the business activity in the nearest city. Nobody would bother to go downtown to shop anymore, with such an inviting alternative. How unfair! I remember the sometimes heated lawyerly discussions about the first amendment implications of the way that malls had become 'functionally' public property, i.e. town squares. Of course, in the cycle of life one decade's up-and coming phenomenon becomes another decade's old and lagging loser. Shopping malls are still good hang-outs for teenagers, I imagine, but they aren't such vital places for shopping as they used to be. Many of the once-prominent bookstores, record stores, cinemas, and video retailers that once gave people a reason to go have disappeared as people buy books, music, movies, online. Ev...