Lewis Carroll’s private journal, 7 January 1856:
Am I a deep philosopher or a great genius? I think neither. What talents I have I desire to devote to His Service and may he purify me and take away my pride and selfishness. Oh that I might hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
John Wesley:
To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment.
I know too many folks who think that only saints can teach them. (Of course, saints can teach, but not only saints can teach.)
No, that ain’t scary. No. Not one bit. No.
From near the end of “Sentences and Paragraphs”:
I did not expect to be interested but I am. Now the whole question of questions and not answer is very interesting. The whole thing about all day is not at all when they were owned. What is a question. To thank for a question is no mistake.
A focal text for my current Plato seminar:
To anyone who has followed Plato’s critique of the phenomenon of sophistry, it is evident that psychologism is not merely a dubious hypothesis to be corrected by distinguishing between logic and psychology. It is a basic deformation of the understanding itself, which penetrates into every branch of philosophical endeavor, distorting both the elaborate procedures of academic philosophizing, as well as those less articulate, but more primordial, modes of apprehension by which man, as such, always, to some degree, understands the word and his station in it.
I love Jane Austen’s novels. Gilbert Ryle so loved her novels that whenever anyone asked him if he read novels, he responded: “Yes. I read all six, every year.” Ditto that.
Last night, my wife and I headed to Atlanta to see BOY, a pop duo of women, one Swiss, one German. I like their album, Mutual Friends. At some point during the show, I realized that what I like about them is this: they write songs of the sort Austen would write, were she living now and writing pop songs. Their songs are miniatures, comedies of manners, carefully and cleverly crafted, gently ironic. More is happening in the lyrics than might seem so on first listen. The show was fun.
Anyone who would like to hear the talk, follow the link. Both the talk and the discussion session are recorded.
From a 3AM interview of Gillian Russell:
You know, I think philosophy could make more progress than it does. Progress needs more than just a few brilliant people, and a few great, original texts. If all you have are a few brilliant manuscripts coming out of a generation of philosophers, they’re going to be forgotten, or only read by a few specialists, who only write stuff that is read by even fewer specialists, and then all it takes is one politically expedient budget cut, or the end of a grant, or just for someone to get sick, and it is all lost again. Once you get beyond the very beginning stages, progress requires the ability to build on what has come before and that means we have to do a great job of training our students. I think one of the things that drives progress in mathematics and the sciences is the existence of good textbooks.
It really doesn’t matter, in physics say, if few working scientists, engineers or mathematicians ever read Newton’s Principia Mathematica, or Einstein’s original papers, because the key lessons have been distilled into really clear, excellent textbooks that are used to train thousands of students each year. In philosophy we have a tendency to privilege the original texts. And it’s good to read original texts, it’s part of getting a general education. But good ideas and arguments rarely appear in their clearest form first time around. So I think one thing that would really help philosophy make more progress would be the presence of more really excellent textbooks. It’s clearly something that helps in logic. Certainly my own teaching and understanding in logic has been massively helped and speeded up by the existence of great textbooks. And that means that all my students are at a better standard than they might have been otherwise.
The website of the very gifted writer, Rachel Cohen.
“What is your aim in philosophy?–To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI 309)
My icon of Philosophical Investigations is an antique, green glass fly bottle that hangs on my back porch. Morning and evening most days, as I sit outside with my dogs, I eventually find myself staring at it and thinking yet again about philosophical problems, self-entrapment and freedom. The last few days, my thinking as been preoccupied by Paul Horwich’s preoccupation with the fly bottle in his Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. I am now at work on a new paper on Wittgenstein (for a collection on metaphilosophy) and in that paper I spend some time on Horwich’s book. Having more or less sorted what I want to say about it, I began at last to look to see what others had said, and found a nice NDPR review of the book by a philosopher I much respect, Arthur Collins. In the review is the following sober and sobering passage,
Like any other fan I enjoy this fly-in-a-bottle image. It is valid if it is itself not over-generalized. It says what happens to some philosophical problems according to some passages. It is not presented by Wittgenstein as the overall story for philosophy. Wittgenstein does not think that philosophy is an activity that always has the same formulaic structure, or that philosophy might close up shop one day. We should bear in mind that, the fly-bottle boast notwithstanding, Wittgenstein returns again and again to the same philosophical problems providing ever-new comparisons, examples, and insights. For instance, he had a life-long desire to deliver us from the idea of inner mental processes or entities that we can describe and report and that are somehow constitutive of our perceptual experience, sensation, remembering, believing, meaning, understanding, intending, and so on; constitutive, that is, of our conscious mental life. His work is full of brilliant passages that offer help in this project, but no completion of it is suggested. He did his brilliant and profound best. No one has matched his success. He did not think he had done anything like enough, and he was right.
And so is Collins.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 