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To make it right is a royal PITA. First I make a killer sauce from scratch, a Bolognese or something pork-based. That's plenty of work right there. Then I cut an eggplant lengthwise, run the slices through egg wash, bread 'em and fry 'em in olive oil. Extra virgin, of course. Why monkey with anything else? Then I make a casserole with the cooked eggplant slices, intercalating plenty of sauce and mozarella and other cheeses between the slices. Then into the oven, covered, at 350 for 35-40 minutes until bubbly hot.
To make the one-pan quick version, crosscut the eggplant (so that it fits better in a large skillet) and fry with olive oil at moderate-high to high heat. Eggplant sucks up oil something fierce, so keep adding the stuff. Don't worry, it's a good fat. After all the pieces are cooked to the point of tenderness, set them aside to 'rest.' Now, in the same pan, add more oil and saute a blend of chopped onion, garlic, green peppers, and sliced mushrooms. When that mixture is tender, layer on the eggplant slices with mozarella and a store-bought sauce. There is no need to grate the mozarella, just slice it with a sharp knife. It melts readily. Dump in the usual spices: fresh-ground pepper, oregano, basil. Cover, and let simmer at low heat until you have a nice molten mess of vegetarian chow:
Serve with pasta, but you must absolutely avoid the Seven Deadly Sins of Pasta. Otherwise, I kill you. I prefer capellini, but it's all good. The true aficionado avoids oversaucing his pasta, and he doesn't mix pasta and sauce together a priori as it were. Do that, and I kick you, a posteriori. A trencherman true throws some sauce on top of the pasta and adds a little more or a lot more extra virgin olive oil. Freshly grate some Romano or Parmesan cheese on top of that. No crap out of a cardboard cylinder. Then add a green garnish to set it off such as Italian or American parsley, or, as I did last night, cilantro for a Southwestern accent. Fresh from the garden. Yes, you can actually grow stuff in Arizona in late December, which is another reason why Arizona is a terminus ad quem of Continental migration as oppose to a terminus a quo such as Minnesota. Some places are for leavin' as some are for arrivin.' You should get something that looks like this. Serve on a big white plate. Enjoy with a glass of Dago red. Not as good as the real thing, but good enough, especially on the second day, reheated.
I am regularly solicited by Open Journal of Philosophy for article submissions. The e-mails never reveal the dirty little secret behind publishing scams ventures like this, namely, the charges levied against authors. Poke around a bit, however, and you will find this page:
Article Processing Charges
Open Journal of Philosophy is an Open Access journal accessible for free on the Internet. At Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), we guarantee that no university library or individual reader will ever have to buy a subscription or pay any pay-per-view fees to access articles in the electronic version of journal. There is hence no income at SCIRP that comes from selling any forms of subscriptions to this electronic version of journal or from pay-per-view fees. In order to cover the costs induced by editorial procedures, routine operation of the journals, processing of manuscripts through peer-reviews, and the provision and maintenance of a publication infrastructure, the journal charges article processing fee that can normally be defrayed by the author's institution or research funds.
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Manuscript Page (as per the typeset proof) |
Article Processing Charges |
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So it would cost you a grand to publish an 18 page paper, and a minumum of $600 to publish anything. And who reads this journal anyway? If you need to publish for tenure or promotion, then you need to publish in a decent journal. And if you publish to be read by people worth interacting with, ditto.
Besides, it is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets. If I can do it, so can you. Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications. My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places. When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work. But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals.
Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head.
1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it. Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.
2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic.
3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.
4. Advance a well-defined thesis.
5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for. Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referrees.
6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal. Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.
7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof. Never protest editorial decisions. You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink. You have no right to have your paper accepted. You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys network. In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.
Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.
Consider this argument:
1. Tom believes that the man at the podium is the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
3. Tom believes that the man at the podium is Argentinian.
The argument is plainly invalid. For Tom may not believe that the Pope is an Argentinian. Now consider this argument:
4. Tom sees the Pope
2. The Pope is an Argentinian
Therefore
5. Tom sees an Argentinian.
Valid or invalid? That depends. 'Sees' is often taken to be a so-called verb of success: if S sees x, then it follows that x exists. On this understanding of 'sees' one cannot see what doesn't exist. Call this the existentially loaded sense of 'sees' and contrast it with the existentially neutral sense according to which 'S sees x' does not entail 'X exists.'
If 'sees' is understood in the existentially loaded way, then the second argument is valid, whether or not Tom knows that the Pope is Argentinian. For if Tom sees the Pope, then the object seen exists. But nothing can exist without properties, properties most of which are had independently of our mental states. If the object has the property F-ness, then the perceiver sees an F-thing, even if he doesn't see it as an F-thing. So Tom sees an Argentinian despite not seeing him as an Argentinian.
Now seeing in the existentially loaded sense might seem to be a perfectly good example of an intentional or object-directed state since one cannot see without seeing something. One cannot just see. Seeing takes an object.
But whether existentially loaded seeing is an intentional state depends on what all enters into the definition of an intentional state. Now one mark of intentionality is aspectuality. What I am calling aspectuality is what John Searle calls "aspectual shape":
I have been using the term of art, "aspectual shape," to mark a universal feature of intentionality. It can be explained as follows: Whenever we perceive anything or think about anything, we always do so under some aspects and not others. These aspectual features are essential to the intentional state; they are part of what makes it the mental state that it is. (The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 156-157)
The phrase I bolded implies that no intentional state is such that every aspect of the object is before the mind of the person in the state. Suppose you see my car. You won't help being able to see it is as bright yellowish-green sport-utility vehicle. But you could easily see it without seeing it as a 2013 Jeep Wrangler. I take this to imply that the set of perceived aspects of any object of perception not only can be but must be incomplete. This should be obvious from the fact that, as Husserl liked to point out, outer perception is essentially perspectival. For example, all sides of the car are perceivable, but one cannot see the car from the front and from the rear simultaneously.
This aspectuality holds for intentional states generally. To coin an example, one can believe that a certain celestial body is the Evening Star without believing that it is the Morning Star. One can want to drink a Manhattan without wanting to drink a mixture of bourbon, sweet vermouth, and Angostura bitters. As Searle says, "Every belief and every desire, and indeed every intentional phenomenon, has an aspectual shape." (157)
Intentional states are therefore not only necessarily of something; they are necessarily of something as something. And given the finitude of the human mind, I want to underscore the fact that even if every F is a G, one can be aware of x as F without being aware of x as G. Indeed, this is so even if necessarily (whether metaphysically or nomologically) every F is a G. Thus I can be aware of a moving object as a cat, without being aware of it as spatially extended, as an animal, as a mammal, as an animal that cools itself by panting as opposed to sweating, as my cat, as the same cat I saw an hour ago, etc.
But now it seems we have a problem. If that which is (phenomenlogically, not spatially) before my mind is necessarily property-incomplete, then either seeing is not existentially loaded, or existentially loaded seeing is not an intentional state. To put the problem as an aporetic tetrad:
1. If S sees x, then x exists
2. Seeing is an intentional state
3. Every intentional state has an aspectual shape: its object is incomplete
4. Nothing that exists is incomplete.
The limbs of the tetrad are collectively logically inconsistent. Any three of them, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first three limbs entails the negation of the fourth.
But while the limbs are collectively inconsistent, they are individually very plausible. So we have a nice puzzle on our hands. At least one of the limbs is false, but which one? I don't think that (3) or (4) are good candidates for rejection. That leaves (1) or (2).
I incline toward the rejection of (1). Seeing is an intentional state but it is not existence-entailing. My seeng of x does not entail the existence of x. What one sees (logically) may or may not exist. There is nothing in or about the visual object that certifies that it exists apart from my seeing it. Existence is not an observable feature. The greenness of the tree is empirically accessible; its existence is not.
It is of course built into the intentionality of outer perception that what is intended is intended as existing whether or not the act or intentio exists. To put it paradoxically (and I owe this formulation to Wolfgang Cramer), the object intended is intended as non-object. That is, objects of outer perception are intended as existing independently of the mental acts that 'target' them, and thus not as merely intentional objects. But there is nothing like an 'ontological argument' in the vicinity. I cannot validly infer that the tree I see exists because it is intended as existing apart from my seeing. This is is an invalid 'ontological' inference:
A. X is intended as existing independently of any and all mental acts
ergo
B. X exists.
If the above is right, then seeing is an intentional state that shares the aspectuality common to all such states. A consequence of this is a rejection of 'externalism' about outer perception: the content of the mental state I am in when I see a tree does not depend on the existence of any tree. The object-directedness of the mental state is intrinsic to it and not dependent on any extrinsic relation to a mind-independent item. To turn Putnam on his head: the meaning is precisely 'in the head.'
Are there problems with this? We shall see. Externalism is a fascinating option. But I am highly annoyed that that typical analytic philosopher, Ted Honderich, who defends a version of externalism in his book On Consciousness, makes no mention of the externalist theories of Heidegger, Sartre or Butchvarov. How typical of the analytic ignoramus, not that all 'analysts' are ignorant of the history of philosophy.
"We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us." This is the motto Hector-Neri Castañeda chose to place on the masthead of the philosophical journal he founded in 1967, Noûs. When Hector died too young a death at age 66 in the fall of '91, the editorship passed to others who removed the Latin phrase. There are people who find classical allusions pretentious. I understand their sentiment while not sharing it.
Perhaps I should import Hector's motto into my own masthead. For it certainly expresses my attitude and would be a nice, if inadequate, way of honoring the man. He was a man of tremendous philosophical energy and also very generous with comments and professional assistance. He was also unpretentious. His humble origins served him well in this regard. He interacted with undergraduates with the same intensity and animation as with senior colleagues. I was privileged to know this unforgettable character. What I missed in him, though, was spiritual depth. The religion of his Guatemalan upbringing didn't rub off on him. Like so many analytic philosophers he saw philosophy as a merely theoretical enterprise. A noble enterprise, that, but not enough for some of us.
How many read Hector's work these days? I don't know. But I do know that there is plenty there to feast on. I recently re-read his "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) an article rich in insight and required reading for anyone interested in the logic and ontology of fictional discourse.
Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.
Addendum
Horace Jeffery Hodges writes,
I appreciated your blog post on December 28 for your remark about the origin of the the Latin motto:Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.Dostoevsky offers a variant (a conflation of Terentius's motto and the motto that Hector knew):
"Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is alien to me.) - Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
I borrowed Dostoesky's variant for the motto to my novella:
It's visible on the book cover (just click on expanded view or the click to look inside). The original motto is thus a rather malleable expression, useful in various contexts.By the way, is "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) a work on literary fiction, as in novels, novellas, short stories, and the like? If so, I might benefit from reading it.
Mike V. writes,
I am hosting the first meeting of The Dead Smokers Society on Monday, January 13th, from 10 a.m. to noon at the stoplight at Scottsdale Community College. I have invited all of my friends to smoke and vape with me on the street on the first day of school. This could be REALLY fun. I am inviting you if you can come.
The only rule is: Membership in the DSS requires use of cigarettes, cigars, pipes, or vapor devices.
I can only applaud this bit of commonsensical, liberty-affirming activism and I hope to be able to attend despite my quietism. I shall sport an Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head,' a cheap smoke, but a good smoke. Here is some background information and argument and polemic from an old post of mine dated 26 June 2012:
Peter and Mike teach in the Maricopa County Community College system. One teaches at Scottsdale CC, the other at Glendale CC. Over Sunday breakfast they reported that, starting 1 July (if I got the story straight), no smoking of tobacco products will be allowed anywhere on any CC campus in Maricopa County, Arizona. And that includes parking lots and closed cars in parking lots.
Now I would like to believe that our liberal brethren possess a modicum of rationality. But with every passing day I am further disembarrassed of this conceit of mine. The evidence is mounting that liberals really are as stupid and lacking in common sense as many on the Right say they are.
What does common sense suggest in a case like this? Well, that no smoking be allowed in classrooms, libraries, laboratories, restrooms, administrative offices, hallways, etc., and perhaps not even in individual faculty offices during consulation hours or if the smoke will make its way into occuppied public passageways.
This is a common sense position easily buttressed with various aesthetic, safety, and health-related arguments. The underlying principle is that we ought to be considerate of our fellow mortals and their physical and psychological well-being. It is debatable just how harmful are the effects of sidestream smoke. What is not debatable is that many are offended by it. So out of consideration for them, it is reasonable to ban smoking in the places I listed above. But to ban it everywhere on campus is extreme and irrational. For no one but Tom is affected by Tom's smoking in his car and while striding across the wind-blown campus.
You say you caught a whiff of his cigaratte as he passed by? Well, he heard you use the 'F' word while blasting some rap 'music' from your boom box. If Tom is involved in air pollution, then you are involved in cultural and noise pollution. You tolerate him and he'll tolerate you.
You say you smell the residual ciggy smoke on Peter's vest? That's too bad. He has to put up with your overpowering perfume/cologne or look at your tackle-box face and tattoo-defaced skin. Or maybe you are a dumb no-nothing punk wearing a T-shirt depicting Che Guevara and you think that's cool. We who are not dumb no-nothing punks have to put up with that affront to our sensibilities.
But there really is little point in being reasonable with people as unreasonable as liberty-bashing tobacco-wackos. So I think Peter and Mike ought to think about organizing a smoke-in. In the 'sixties we had love-ins and sit-ins, and they proved efficacious. Why not smoke-ins to protest blatantly extreme and irrational policies?
There must be plenty of faculty and staff and students on these campuses -- and maybe even a few not-yet-brain-dead liberals -- who would participate. Hell, I'll even drive all the way from my hideout in the Superstitions to take part. We'll gather in some well-ventilated place way out in the open to manifest our solidarity, enjoy the noble weed, and reason -- if such a thing is possible -- with the Pee-Cee boneheads who oppose us.
By the way, that is a joint old Ben Franklin is smoking in the graphic. In this post I take no position on the marijuana question.
Companion post: Is Smoking Irrational? Other such posts are collected in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Here is a Commonweal obituary.
The obit contains a couple of minor inaccuracies.
1. "Under his father's tutelage, one of Geach's earliest philosophical influences was the metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart, who infamously argues in his 1908 book The Unreality of Time for, well, the unreality of time." This title is not a book but an article that appeared in the journal Mind (17.68: 457–474), in 1908.
McTaggart presents a full dress version of the famous argument in his 1927 magnum opus, The Nature of Existence, in Chapter XXXIII, located in volume II.
McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time is one of the great arguments in the history of metaphysics, an argument as important and influential as the Eleatic Zeno's arguments against motion, St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and F. H. Bradley's argument against relations in his 1893 Appearance and Reality, Book I, Chapter III. All four arguments have the interesting property of being rejected as unsound by almost all philosophers, philosophers who nonetheless differ wildly among themselves as to where the arguments go wrong. Careful study of these arguments is an excellent introduction to the problems of metaphysics. In particular, the analytic philosophy of time in the 20th century would not be unfairly described as a very long and very detailed series of footnotes to McTaggart's great argument.
2. "Along with Aquinas and McTaggart (whose system he presents in his 1982 book Truth, Love, and Immortality), Geach's main philosophical heroes were Aristotle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege." My copy of Truth, Love and Immortality shows the University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles) as the publisher and the publication year as 1979. The frontispiece features an unsourced quotation from McTaggart:
The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the reality of three things -- truth, love and immortality.
Ed Farrell sent me the above. Check out his fine photography here.
A few days ago I was blissfully unaware of Duck Diversity Dynasty, the reality show on the Arts and Entertainment channel. I still haven't watched even one episode, nor am I particularly inclined to; the antics of rednecks are not my thing. I have gathered, however, that the series falls more on the entertainment end of the Arts and Entertainment spectrum. One of the characters whose reality is depicted, Phil Robertson, shown on the left, has made comments on homosexuality that have drawn attention, to put it mildly. I won't rehearse the details of a brouhaha about which my astute readers can be expected to be familiar. I will simply make a few comments bearing upon the contretemps that strike me as important.
1. To have the homosexual disposition or inclination or proclivity is one thing; to exercise it in homosexual sex acts such as anal intercourse is quite another. You may be born with the proclivity, and stuck with it, but you are free to exercise it or not. The proclivity may be part of 'who you are,' ingredient in your very identity, but the practices are freely engaged in. Acts done or left undone are contingent and thus no part of anyone's identity. Moral criticism of homosexual practices is not criticism of anyone for who he is.
2. It follows that rejection of homosexual sex acts as immoral is consistent with acceptance of homosexuals as people. In a trite phrase, one can hate the sin but love the sinner. The sinful and the immoral, however, are not quite the same, though I cannot expatiate on the distinction at the moment.
It is therefore very bad journalism to describe Robertson's comments as 'anti-gay' for that elides the distinction I just drew. Opposition to homosexual practices is not opposition to homosexuals.
And of course there is nothing 'homophobic' about Robertson's comments. I don't reckon that the good old boy pictured above has any irrational fear of homosexuals. 'Homophobic' is a coinage of leftists to prevent one of those famous 'conversations' that they otherwise call for. It is a question-begging epithet and semantic bludgeon meant to close down debate by the branding of their opponents as suffering from a mental defect. This is why only a foolish conservative acquiesces in the use of this made-up word. Language matters. One of the first rules for successful prosecution of the Kulturkampf is to never let the enemy distort the terms of the debate. Insist on standard English, and always slap them down when they engage in their notorious 'framing.' As for 'gay,' that too is a word we ought not surrender. Use the neutral 'homosexual.' Same with 'queer.' 'Queer' is a good old word. Nominalists think abstracta are queer entities. There is no implication that the analysis of such is in any way proctological.
3. Whether or not Phil Robertson and people like him can cogently defend their opposition to homosexual practices, they have a right to hold and express their opinions in public fora, and a right to be tolerated by those who oppose their views. To tolerate is not approve of, let alone endorse; it is to put up with, to allow, to refrain from interfering with the promulgation of distasteful ideas. Without widespread toleration it is hard to see how a nation as diverse and pluralistic as the USA can remain even minimally united.
4. There are solid arguments based in theology and philosophy for rejecting as immoral homosexual practices. And they are available to Robertson and Co. should they decide to lay down their shotguns long enough to swot them up. These arguments won't convince those on the the other side, but then no argument, no matter how well-articulated and reasonable, no matter how consistent with known empirical fact and free of logical error, convinces those on the other side of any 'hot button' issue.
5. As a corollary to (4), note that arguments against homosexuality needn't presupose the truth of any religion. They can be purely philosophical. The same goes for abortion. If I argue against late-term abortion on the the ground that it is sufficiently like infanticide to inherit the moral wrongness of infanticide, then I argue in a way that makes no use of any religious premise.
6. The A & E Network has every right to fire Robertson and Co. By the same token, a baker or a florist has every right to refuse service to a same-sex couple planning a same -sex 'marriage' and it is simply wrong for government at any level to force the baker or the florist to violate his conscience.
7. In the interests of comity, homosexuals and their practices ought to be tolerated. Whether or not the practices are immoral, they ought to be legally permissible as long as they are between consenting adults. But this right to be tolerated does not translate into a right to be approved or applauded or celebrated or a right to impose their views on others, or a right to change the culture to their liking. In particular, it does not translate into a right to have their 'marriages' legally recognized.
8. Given the obvious distinction made in (1) above, the following sort of argument is invalid. "Tom didn't choose to be homosexual; he was born that way, so his practice of homosexuality via anal intercourse is morally acceptable." That sort of argument obviously proves too much. Pedophiles, sadomasochists, necrophiliacs, and so on down the list of sexual perversions are most of them born with their proclivity, but that fact does not justify their engaging in the corresponding practices.
For more on this delightful topic, see Jim Goad, When Ducks Cry.
Pope Francis recently spoke, quite foolishly, of "unfettered capitalism," as if there is any such thing in the world. A more worthy cynosure of disapprobation is the slide toward unfettered regulation and omni-invasive government spearheaded by presumably well-meaning liberal-fascist nanny-staters.
You know things are getting bad when they come after your hot sauce. An Asian restaurant without Sriracha is like, what? A house without a fireplace? Coffee without caffeine? A man without balls?
You see, if these food fascists can go after Sriracha on the ground that it is a raw food, then Tabasco sauce, that marvellous Louisiana condiment from Avery Island, that undisputed king of the hot sauces, recognized as such by true connoisseurs all across this great land, that sine qua non of fine dining, and the criterion that separates, in point of the prandial, the men from the candy-mouthed girly-men, and which is also a raw food -- then, I say, Tabasco sauce is in danger, a state of affairs the only appropriate remedy to which which would be of the Second Amendment variety, if I may be permitted a bit of holiday hyperbole.
David Tran, founder of Huy Fong Foods, fled communist Viet Nam to come to our shores for freedom and a chance at self-reliance and economic self-determination . Unfortunately, the successors of commies, the leftists of the Democrat Party, may drive Tran out of California into a friendlier environment.
When they came for the soda, you did nothing because you don't drink the stuff. When they came for the Sriracha, you did nothing because you didn't know what the hell it was. But if they come after Tabasco sauce and you do nothing, then you deserve to be shot -- figuratively speaking of course.
Story here.
The totalitarian Left aims to inject its political poison into everything. Not even chess can claim neutrality. Emphasis added.
To Scottsdale this drizzly dreary dark December morning to see the Coen Bros. latest on its opening hereabouts, Inside Llewyn Davis. A tale of two kitties is a sub-motif that symbolizes the self-destructive folksinger's troubles, but it would take a couple more viewings for me to figure it out.
The film gripped me and held me its entire running length, but then I lived through that era and I know the music and its major and minor players. Figuring out the the cinematic references and allusions is part of the fun. Tom Paxton, Albert Grossmann, Jim and Jean, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan . . . they are all there -- or are they?
A distinction is made between purely fictional objects (native objects) and immigrant objects: historical individuals that have been imported into fiction from reality. Many of the characters in the Coen Bros. film seem to belong to a third category. They are not wholly unreal like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or lightly fictionalized individuals like many of the characters in Kerouac's novels, but fictional surrogates of real-life individuals. For example, there is a character who suggests Tom Paxton, but could not be said unambiguously to represent him, pace Dave van Ronk's ex-wife who writes, in a critical review, "The character who represents Tom Paxton has a pasted-on smile and is a smug person who doesn't at all resemble the smart, funny, witty Tom Paxton who was our best man when we married."
Ann Hornaday's Washington Post review ends brilliantly:
In many ways, “Inside Llewyn Davis” plays like a waking nightmare of creeping anxiety and dread, as the era’s grandmaster of brazen self-invention arrives unseen in New York while Llewyn’s self-defeating near-misses pile up like so much street-sullied snow. But this soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.
The era's grandmaster of brazen self-invention is of course Bob Dylan, who blew into town that bitter winter of '61 and who in a few short years brought about a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung of the folk era: its simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transmogrification into the heart of the '60s as represented by the trilogy of Dylan at his most incandescent: Bringing it It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde.
It's all Over Now, Baby Blue from the the first-mentioned album perhaps sounds the theme of cultural shift.
I am reading Ted Honderich, On Consciousness (Edinburgh UP, 2004) and trying to get a handle on just what his theory of consciousness as existence amounts to. An awkward and quirky writer, he doesn't make things easy on the reader, and doesn't seem to realize that in this very fast brave new world of ours the writer must get to the point without unnecessary circumlocution if he wants to keep his reader glued to the page. Here is an example of Honderich's style, from p. 206:
The other option from spiritualism now deserves the name of being devout physicalism. You can say and write, in a career that keeps an eye on some of science, maybe two, and is forgetful of reflective experience, that being conscious or aware of something is only having certain physical properties in the head. Usually this cranialism is a matter of only neural properties as we know them -- thought of computationally or with microtubules to the fore or in any other way you like.
[Note the awkward placement of "Maybe two." It belongs right after "eye."]
Nobody not on the philosophical job of trying to approximate more to some of science or horse sense believes this either. We all know, to make use of a pefectly proper and enlightening parody, that consciousness, isn't just cells, however fancily or fancifully conceived. Everybody on the job tries to give a place to or register what they know when they're not on the job. But they can't do it if they have it that consciousness has only neural properties or conceivably silicon or otherwise physical properties, no matter how they are conceived additionally.
Honderich's thought is not so much expressed as buried in the above mess of verbiage. Here is the thought which is correct as far as it goes expressed in three sentences.
Devout physicalism is the main alternative to spiritualism, or substance dualism. But only someone who fails to reflect on his actual experience could suppose that being conscious of something is a matter of the instantiation of neural properties in the brain. Both philosopher and layman know that consciousness is not brain cells, but the philosopher trying to be scientific is apt to forget it.
Here is Colin McGinn's savage review of Honderich's book. Be aware that there is personal animus between the two men.
You have heard it said, "Celebrate diversity." But I say unto you: Celebrate unity, or better yet, celebrate the dialectical unity-in-diversity of unity and diversity. In all seriousness: avoid the diversity fetish, or, if you must celebrate diversity, celebrate hoplo-diversity:
Obama is this dude's main mama:
It is amazing how shamelessly blunt the Obaminators are in promoting ObamaYomamaCare. They leave no doubt that pussification and wussification are high on their agenda.
There is also something incoherent about a law that allows these pajama-clad mama's basement dwellers to remain on their parents' health care plans until age 26, when suddenly they are supposed to man up and sign up and pay high premiums for services they don't need (and in some cases cannot need, e.g., maternity care for men) so that old people, who have had an entire lifetime to pile up loot and make provision for old age, and are not saddled with outrageous college loan debt, can get free or subsidized health care.
It doesn't make any bloody sense. On the one hand, young people are given yet another incentive to prolong their adolescence and dependence on parents and not take responsibility for themselves, while on the other hand, they, who are healthy and relatively poor, are expected to bear the lion's share of the health care burden for the old and illness-prone.
My advice to the young: don't allow yourself to be screwed. I know you think Obama is one cool dude, but so is Ron Paul, and he talks sense.
Am I committed to an uneconomical multiplication of modes of existence? I said that the following set of propositions is logically consistent:
a. Tom is thinking of a unicorn
b. Unicorns do not exist in reality
c. Tom's mental state is object-directed; it is an intentional state.
d. The object of Tom's mental state does not exist in reality.
e. The merely intentional object is not nothing.
f. The merely intentional object enjoys intentional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from existence in reality.
David Brightly in a comment constructs a similar set:
By analogy with your (a)--(f) can we not also consistently assert the following?
a. This tapestry, rather beautifully, depicts a unicorn.
b. Unicorns do not exist in the (C1)-sense.
c. The tapestry is object-directed; it is a depictional entity.
d. The object of the tapestry does not (C1)-exist.
e. The merely depicted object is not nothing.
f. The merely depicted object enjoys depictional existence, a distinct mode of existence different from (C1)-existence.
Likewise,
Whereas my view is that when Tom thinks of a unicorn, he is thinking of something, an item that exists merely as the object of Tom's act of thinking, but does not exist mind-independently,
has the analogy,
When the tapestry depicts a unicorn, it is depicting something, an item that exists merely as the object of the tapestry's depicting, but does not exist tapestry-independently.
Three points.
First, the intentionality of Tom's thinking is original while the intentionality of the tapestry is derivative. The tapestry is not intrinsically intentional, but derives its intentionality from a mind's taking of the merely physical object as a picture or image of something else. By itself, the tapestry depicts nothing. It is just a piece of cloth.
Given the first point, my second is that there are not two kinds of intentionality or object-directedness, but only one, the intentionality of the viewer of the tapestry who takes it as representing something, a unicorn. 'Derivative' in 'derivative intentionality' is an alienans adjective.
Third, if there are not two kinds of intentionality, then there is no call to distinguish, in addition to (C1)-existence (real existence) and intentional existence, depictional existence.
In this way I think I can avoid multiplying modes of existence by the multiplicity of types of physical things (scribbles on paper, trail markers, grooves in vinyl, etc.) that can be taken to represent something.
. . . and in the process kicks the candy ass of Maureen Dowd for whom "men have played so recklessly with the globe 'they nearly broke it.' " You can break your finger nail, sweetie, but not the globe. Girly-girl talk! While C. P. is a good antidote to P. C., she cannot be awarded a plenary MavPhil endorsement because of the silly things she has said about philosophy and women in philosophy.
But Camille, the one on the right, well deserves a partial endorsement. Here is a delightful Pagliaism: ”Leaving sex to feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.”
The image above suggests that the the ideal woman might well be a trinity: Maureen in bed; the mannish Camille in the parlor for serious dialectic of the non-physical sort; the Virgin Mary (not depicted) on a pedestal.
Note the dialectic (in the Continental sense this time) of revelation and concealment displayed by the coquettish Maureen: one eye invisible, the low-cut top inviting the eye downward, while the gals to her left are bundled up like Muslims.
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