those 7 words,

by which I mean the 7 I wrote yesterday. To whit:

Why read the Library of Living Philosophers?

Not a real inspiring question, but the answer (ideas and personalities) will be useful to me. See the Library of Living Philosoophers is a series of heavy (though not necessarily dense) volumes, each dedicated to an important living philosopher (hence the name).

The most obvious reasons to read these volumes are that they provide a summary of the philosopher’s important ideas. Even if you can’t get too far into a philosopher’s arguments by looking at one of these books, you cant get a good idea of the important places to start. For readers who are already familiar with at least part of a philosopher’s work, the LLP promises to provide access to the philosopher as a complete thinker, even as an intellectual personality.

On a more difficult level, reading multiple volumes gives some important insights into how different ideas work in different contexts.

Finally, the distinction actually gets at an important, and neglected, difference in how philosophy is done. On the one hand we have philosophy as a problem oriented enterprise devoted to discovering and testing ideas. On the otherhand, there’s been a position, going back to Plato at least, that argues philosophy is not about building theories or expanding knowledge, its about forming philosophers. Plato called it preparation for death. Since not everyone receives a proper education and not everyone is capable of getting the same things out of an education when it it provided, this notion seems distasteful to modern democratic sensibilities.

Both tendencies are represented in the LLP, so watching them compete provides a reason to read the LLP. Indeed, taken as a whole, the LLP provides a ‘how-to’ volume for contemporary philosophy.

In particular, I’m finding the volume on Seyyed Hossein Nasr most fascinating. In addition to propunding an esoteric position, he’s also an observant shiite muslim and anti-modernist. From my perspective, he’s a truly alien thinker, and thus worth a serious read.

What I’m Reading 4: Library of Living Philosophers

Jaakko and I

Originally uploaded by pbroderi.

I don’t seriously expect that anyone is reading my writing journal entries. The idea behind the journal is just to record

Nonetheless, I have some responsibilities to my imagined audience. Most entries have included the abbreviation LLP which stands for Library of Living Philosophers.

The most recent volume of this prestigious series is dedicated to Jaakko Hintikka who was my dissertation advisor and mentor. (That’s us in the picture.) At his suggestion, I have been working on a review essay which compares his volume to the first in the series, which was dedicated to John Dewey.

Until today, this has been a frustrating exercise to say the least. I’ve read the entire Dewey volume. I do not recommend this exercise to anyone. If you’ve got an interest in specific issues of Dewey scholarship then selective reading might be interesting. Russell’s essay in particular, deserves to be read, albeit not very often.

According to the founder of this series, the Library of Living Philsophers has been to put interpretative questions to great philosophers before they die in hope of eliminating some of the more obvious debates over what the philosopher meant. This means that truly difficult interpretative debates can begin upon the philosopher’s demise.

Today I started working through Jaakko’s autobiographical essay. For the first time since I started can I claim to enjoy this project. Dewey’s essay was assembled by his daughter and lacks the immediacy that can be found in other volumes in this series. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I’ve known JH for over a decade and I was a witness to some of the episodes that he chronicles.

Both volumes illustrate the connection between the intellectual life of a philosopher and their philosophical projects. I don’t mean just in the simple fashion that Dewey’s rural boyhood influenced his practical theories of education, but by illustrating great minds engaged in serious issues. The LLPs volumes chronicle great philosophers wrestling with their central problems by providing both commentary on that philosopher but unpolished examples of the philosopher actually engaged in that work.
There aren’t many opportunities to really get at the fire that drives analytic philosophy. JH provides a model of what a philosopher is supposed to be or, at least, supposed to do. Sio does John Dewey. I’m working through this project at a moment when it seems very
likely that I’ll be leaving philosophy.
* This picture was an important motivator in my recent return to regular exercise.

What I’m reading 3: Responses to Natural Born Cyborgs.

I’m not directly reading or responding to Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs (NBC), I did that rather awkwardly in a review to be published in Minds & Machines. Instead I’m taking a closer look at other folks who have taken the risk of commenting on this surprisingly slippering book in print. There’s certainly no lack of comment, the reviewers at Metascience weren’t satisfied by providing a single review. Their “review symposium” included 4 reviews and a response by Clark.

In the most recent issue of Janus Head, (Special Issue on “The Situated Body”, Evan Selinger and Timothy Engström respond to Clark’s book from a phenomenological position and Clark responds (I don’t expect Clark to respond to or even finish reading my own review when it appears, I can’t remember much about what I wrote except that it was pretty shallow.).

The Metascience and Janus Head approaches are on either end of possible responses to NBC. The Metascience reviewers are very taken with Clark’s optimistic techno-futurism and share his general belief in the great possibilities for the emerging cognitive technologies. They will not only increase our power over the natural world, but they will deepen our understanding of ourselves. The `active externalism’ presented by Clark contrasts with the position that we’re are spirits trapped in a cage of bone, rather we are collections of relatively processes centered in our skulls but also inextricably integrated with our environment. Building machines to enhance these processes requires a greater understanding, even if the machines become invisible in day to day practice. Selinger and Engström also focus on Clark’s futurism, but they’re more disturbed than excited by Clark’s optimistic approach. Clark’s arguments can be considered at least semi-phenomenological since he is both aware of the literature of the phenomenological tradition and focussed on the details of the lived environment. For a hardcore phenomenologist however, changes in the lived environment are not necessarily good. A change in horizons is bound to obscure as much as it reveals and the grounds for making an evaluation of the relative worth of the new horizon and the older horizons. Not only are things lost in the new horizon, but we may not be able to recall why they were valuable to begin with. Once the river has been put into the standing reserve, a Heideggerean might observe, it will seem as if that is the only natural way to consider the river.

One reason that my review was as uninteresting as it turned out is that I don’t think that NBC, or really any of Clark’s books, are technical treatises on ontology or such things. He writes in a vibrant tradition of popular scientific writing and thus has more in common with Carl Sagan than with Don Ihde.

The key to Clark is that his books (as opposed to papers and reports of research) have a strong element popularization. Wetware didn’t pretend to be anything else, and it was very successful in making complex material accessible to a non-specialist audience. (I used that particular book as a supplementary text in an undergraduate seminar on philosophy and cognitive science.) These books do not provide final answers so much as they synthesize and present more detailed, and thus more accurate work, written in journals for specialists.

What I’m reading 2: Lolita

I like reading the classics and I like reading the tough books, I like slow reading and puzzling things out. What I don’t like about reading celebrated books is the sneaking suspicion that I am supposed to be entertained when I’m not. It’s like being the only one who isn’t in on the joke. The celebrated books often don’t pull me along much when I’m scanning what appears to be so much dull text looking for the next little nugget. I’m bothered that the passage which seems so blank to me might be brilliant but that I’m just not sharp enough to enjoy it. Which brings me to Lolita, I’ve read descriptions of this book that made me laugh out-loud. The book itself didn’t, I suppose I’m a little too obtuse to pick up on the humor that inspired the commentators who did entertain me.

Clearly, Nabokov is engage in a love affair with the English language and like any great lover he is blinded, no charmed, by the short comings of his beloved. The prose is lush but I rarely encounter any profound insights in this foliage. Lush is a good word in this case, the deep forest is free of grand vistas.

There were the occasional passages that brought me to stop. Most noticeably HH’s epiphany on seeing the no-longer nymphish Lolita is sadly beautiful life.

I many ways, I get the joke, the self-justification of a child-molester who finds that, in the end, his desire for Lolita does not transcend time. She’s still doomed to be the semi-literate pregnant wife of a one-armed semi-employed man. It makes me thing about the meditations on transcendence and the erotic in Plato and, frankly, at least at this moment, Plato bores me.

What I’m reading 1: The Fortress of Solitude

I’ve only really read As She Crawled Across the Table, but I’ve always wanted to read more Jonathan Lethem, I found a copy of The Fortress of Solitude for cheap at Kent’s used bookstore, I had the perfect excuse to add one more thing to the pile of stuff we’ll have to package up when we move. The guilt has lead me to read it.

I’ve always enjoyed a book that grabbed me and pulled it through its plot, unwillingly, with a palpable sense of speed. The Fortress of Solitude shares some elements with the books that have done that in the past, but it pulls in the opposite direction. Instead of being forced along to see what happens, next, I’m drawn backwards to reappreciate some two page meditation on a terrible pop song or bit of childhood vernacular. It will a miracle if I ever finish it, reading this book may contain an infinite loop.

I can also see some of my own history here in this book, or at least the history I lived through. Lethem and the books protagonist are both five years older than I, and have a deeper understanding of racial complexity than I do. (Whitman MA only needs one well placed ‘e’ to properly represent the sort of people who live there.) But from the Son of Sam killings to black out, events are referenced from the perspective of a child that I remember from the perspective of a child. More importantly than all the large historical events, there are micro-historical events that fix coincendental moments in my life and in the narrative. Two points of space time define a space-like slice and that slice is defined by Marvel’s publication of Logan’s Run, and confusions about Steve Ditko (He can’t draw but still he’s compelling.) and Mad’s mass market paperbacks by AL Jaffe and company (as Lethem observes: “Sarcasm is something you practiced like Karate. Later concealing your mute fury when nobody fed you the opening lines”). I’ve spoken about Steve Ditko. My writing to blogs has been driven as much by the comic books and cheap science-fiction that inhabits my dreams as by anything, and it seems to be the same comic books and pulpy novels that drive Lethem’s novels.

I may have something more interesting to say about The Fortress of Solitude, but of course I have to finish reading it first and I may fall into a sef-referential loop in the meantime.

Addendum:  The most obvious comparison to this book is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. The authors are of roughly the same generation and the source material has significant overlap. Though Chabon draws on an earlier generation of comics, Stan Lee appears as a minor character at one point. Chabon’s book is also a good contrast to Lethem’s in that it had a strong forward draw. Reading that book was like body surfing, I gave myself over to the wave and had no more perceived volition about where to go until my belly was on sand.