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.

writing journal #7

Yeah, this entry is post dated, but I really tried to write yesterday, and even though I accomplished exactly nothing, it was interesting to see the method of my procrastination. It’s that time of semester when the grading starts to pile up. I promised myself that I would write before I graded anything. Instead, I found myself moving around piles of paper. The cycle seemed to go like this:

1. Ask: What should I work on?
2. Decide that I needed to organize my various projects before I could start working on any of them
3. Move around stacks of paper trying to get some order
4. Instead of working to organize writing projects, I would find myself moving around class materials, especially piles of homework
5. Realize that I’m not writing, return to step 1

Tomorrow, that is today, I am going to just catch up with homework grading and see how that works. It should go quickly since it’s all so well organized at this point.

Minutes Worked	0
Words/paragraphs Written	0
Type of Writing	non-existent
Reflections on this writing	see below
Project	n/a
Goals for next time

It’s week 8, about half way through the semester, and I’m keeping true to form. Any resolutions I made at the beginning of the semester have been defeated, any research I did over the break has composted into so much more office litter.

A clarification

The writing group I joined over the holidays was sponsored by Academic Ladder. They draw pretty heavily on Robert Boice’s work on successful academic writing. His most prominent book is Advice for New Faculty Members, but he’s written plenty of other interesting things on topics like procrastination and writer’s block. Boice’s method depends on writing small amounts in a consistent fashion, about 20 minutes of writing a day, but 20 minutes of writing everyday. Academic Ladder is a specialized service, but I would recommend it for anyone in need of that particular service. I did learn a lot about disciplined writing. They suggest keeping a journal similar to the training journal kept by weight lifters and other athletes. Record how much time you spend writing, reflect on how it can be done better and don’t over do.

This description gives away the dirty little secret that I left unspoken in my last post; I am an academic.

As a younger person, I had a serious interest in becoming a writer of fiction, but that was put aside when I caught the philosophy bug. Of course, fiction and philosophy are by no means incompatible, but I decided to ride that philosophy wave as far as it would take me and it took me pretty far, all the way to a tenure track position at a major American University. About two years ago, my colleagues made it clear to me that I was not going to be tenured. This of course meant that I would need to find employment elsewhere. Two solid years of job search have been fruitless. It looks as if my philosophy wave has run out of forward motion. My lack of productivity, that is publishable writing, my teaching seems to have been well received. Put bluntly, not writing has cost me my dream job.

There are two paths open either I can pursue writing with an eye toward resuscitating my career as a philosopher, or I can just pursue my interest as a more general purpose writer. Of course, the second option poses some questions about how my family and I should go about eating …

Crooked Timber: Specialization and Status in Philosophy

For those of you interested in the current status of philosophy as a profession, there’s an interesting discussion afoot at Crooked Timber, Crooked Timber: Specialization and Status in Philosophy.

One might think that this discussion would be of serious interest to a 20th Century Philosophy class, especially considering that most of the philosophers being discussed were active back in the wild days of the 20th Century. And indeed you may find it very interesting.

Two warnings however, 1. This is a sociological discussion, that is its a discussion of results derived using sociological methods. 2. You’ll see that some of the divisions that we’ve discussed in class (philosophers should work with scientists vs. Philosophy is a pure humanity for instance) are still very much alive while others have become somewhat less active with a consensus opinion accepted by most philosophers constrasted with a pretty significant number of dissenting voices. What you read here will reflect the consensus opinion, not that there’s anything wrong with that.