I’m on my way home for the holiday. When I get back, what with the Nativity Fast, finishing classes, chairing our Search Committee, etc., etc., expect not to find much here for a while. It will likely be mid-January before I resume anything like my regular schedule. Have a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas!
And it’s hame, hame, hame,
Hame fain wad I be.
I turn 46 tomorrow and am assuming the position... (Borrowed from Sub Rosa)
Tomorrow, I’m on my way to Tampa for the ASA meeting. There’ll likely be no posts, and certainly no regular posts, for the rest of the week. If you are at the meeting, look me up!
…better than he understands himself.”
I have been thinking about Otto Bollnow’s interesting paper on this line. Bollnow’s interpretation of the line provides a picture of the different shapes of the traditons in continental philosophy and in analytical philosophy, or so I believe. I plan to write on this soon. I also plan to begin the series of posts on Emerson’s essay on Montaigne I mentioned previously. Since I am off-blog writing various papers on combinations of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Bouwsma, Ryle and Cavell, expect to see more on them soon, along with more on the other usual suspects.
But for now I am off to the beach for the Alabama Philosophical Society meeting–the beach in Pensacola, Florida. (Go figure.) As always, thanks for reading and thanks especially to those who have commented.
Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system…differs widely in spirit and pretensions from what usually goes by that name. In the first place, my system is not mine, nor new. I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles. There are convictions in the depth of his soul, beneath all his overt parrot beliefs, on which I would build our friendship. I have a great respect for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain everywhere. I think that common sense, in a rough and
dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole. I am animated by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind: they are ill expressed, but they are well grounded. What novelty my version of things may possess is meant simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form. I do not pretend to place myself at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more extensive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. I accept the same miraculous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.
I can still remember the profound jolt this passage was to me during my sophomore year of college. I had somehow embarked on a course of Santayana reading, and even found a professor to aid me (Troy Organ, blessed man!). I promptly memorized the passage, and although I have forgotten much of it over the years, its brilliant pastiche of Luther’s “Here I stand. I can do no other”—“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise”–I have never forgotten. (Indeed, one of the singular moments of my recent life is connected with it. I was standing outside the Harvard Faculty Club, talking with Sean Kelly, and I quoted the line. It struck my ear strangely, I guess because I realized I was likely standing where Santayana himself had sometimes stood.) I still don’t know what I make of the contents of the book this passage prefaces–Scepticism and Animal Faith–but I have tried to think in creative fidelity to the passage. Anyway, the passage bore itself in on me as a compendium of some recent themes on the blog.
My new classes are making serious demands on my time, so the slow down I anticipated is coming to pass. I thought I would take a moment and look backwards and forwards, on where I have been and where I plan to go.
I still have a few more posts for the Reading “Reading Montaigne” series. After I finish with it, I intend to move on to a similar project, this time reading Emerson’s Representative Men essay on Montaigne. So Montaigne will continue to be at or near the center of my efforts. I also have more to say about Church-Man’s skepticism, about Availability, and about–of course–Wittgenstein. Look also for some posts on philosophical logic/theory of judgment. I am beginning to work again on Frege.
As always, thanks to those who have been following the blog and especially to those who have commented. I am sure the comments are doing me more good than my posts could be doing anyone else; I am clearly coming out ahead here.
I face two new preps this Fall and it is time to begin to give them more attention. So expect slower posting for the foreseeable future. In the next couple of weeks I intend to finish the “Reading ‘Reading Montaigne'” series and to round out the discussion of Church-Man’s skepticisim (to some extent that is one project, not two). I also hope to continue with other topics too–Availability, Problem/Mystery, Marcel, Kierkegaard, etc. I am thankful for those of you who have been reading the blog and especially to those who have commented.
I say a little about this, generally, under AIM, above. But I should mention that a goal of the blog is for the (sometimes slow and quite zigzagging) development of themes that interest me. So far, I have been trying to follow out what I have called “Church-Man’s Skepticism” and “Disposability”. About any post title with a number in it, or the words “More on…” or “…Again”, etc., indicate such followings-out. Often I will supply quotations that will be unexplained but that will, for me, become part of the critical language I want to develop for discussing a theme. You’ll have to decide if you can bear with me as I do this. It’s asking quite a bit.
I apologize for all the fidgeting with the look of the blog. I have been trying to get something that is both clean (Reporter: “What is it you like about the desert?” T. E. Lawrence: “The desert is clean.”) and allows me to have the various add-ons I like. I believe I have now settled on the current look. Sorry if the changes have given anyone a case of mal de mer.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 