Maverick Philosopher

Stupor Bowl LIX

Two reasons to watch:  Trump will be there; DOGE will run commercials. For twelve reasons not to watch see here.

You may enjoy a thoughtful rant of mine from 2016, Stupor Bowl or Super Bore?

Elon Musk on DOGE.

Travel and the Indifference of Places

Malcolm Pollack writing from Ha Long Bay, near Hanoi, Vietnam:

. . . mainly I’m writing just now to note how little enthusiasm I have for travel these days. I’ve been all over the place in my lengthening life (I’ll be 69 in April), and more and more it seems to me that every place is, well, just some other place, and that gallivanting around is increasingly just exhausting and distracting. The world outside seems increasingly finite in comparison to what can (and should) be explored within — and once you’ve scratched the youthful itch of restlessness the trick, I think, is just to find someplace you like well enough, and to make yourself at home.

I could not agree more.  

You may enjoy Three Reasons to Stay Home.

Of travel I've had my share, man. I've been everywhere.

Melania and Donald

She supplies the class that he lacks. As witness her coy reserve re: the Trump dance.

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm

Languishing in the archives of one of the early versions of this weblog is a post bearing the above title. I shall have to resurrect, refurbish, and re-post it.  An excellent recent example of misplaced moral enthusiasm is well-described in Spring the Felon, Kill the Squirrel.

This short article may help you leftists understand why you lost big yesterday.  Some forms of leftism are border-line respectable, but the wokeassery of Kamalism is not one of them.

Related:  From Gunman to Squirrel Man: Bernie Goetz Thirty Years Later

You do remember Bernie Goetz, don't you?

William James had a squirrel problem. You are aware of it, are you not?

If you like to think, you'll like my blog. If you don't like to think, you need my blog.

Stripes Urgent Care

On the wall: "By his stripes you shall be made whole." Isaiah 53:5

Curious. I had the good sense not to query the sweet young receptionist about the inscription: Is bloodletting practiced here?

Why Do Men Arise So Early?

I am the king of the early risers. No one beats me out of the sack. I get up so early I can't decide whether I'm an early bird or a night owl.  But I'm avis rara for sure.

InsideHook

You may also enjoy my latest Substack upload, Rise and Shine with Manny.

'Liberal' Signage

I happened across the following professionally-made sign the other morning:

NO ILLEGAL DUMPING

I kid you not. 

The Ever-Increasing Frenzy, Tension, and Explosiveness of this Country

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

 

Try to guess when the following was written, and by whom.  Answer below the fold:

Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving.  So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U. S. Catholic about the war article. -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is a really mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates?  Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence.  It is preferable to the uncertainty of 'waiting.' 

 

A Platonist at Breakfast

Amazing what one can unearth with the WayBack Machine. This one first saw daylight on 3 March 2005. 

..............................

I head out early one morning with the wife in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon dripping with 1950's Americana. We belly up to the counter and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons for Floyd Cramer’s Last Date on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?" "Over medium, please."

The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:

"If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?"

With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.

Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?

My First Substack Humor Upload

Check it out.

I'm as serious as cancer, but not 24/7/365.

Curiously Apropos of Current Developments

Time to wake up, kiddies. It's going on 5:30 local time.  Me, I've been up since 1:58, filled two notebook pages with hand-scribble, and did my time on the black mat with a black cat in my lap. 

Linkage

Sohrab Ahmari, Can Trump be Stopped?

Paul Gottfried, Why Lenin is No Longer Relevant

Samuel Gregg, Knowledge's Limits and a Nobel Economist's Humility

Victor Davis Hanson, The Hysterical Style in American Politics

D. Parker, Can the Left Peacefully Coexist with Us? My answer: No. Investment tip: buy Au and Pb.

 

You Know You Love Her . . .

. . .  when you find charming in her what would be annoying in others.  

Linkage

The Unhinged Among Us (VDH)

Flannery O'Connor: A Life

The Destruction of the Middle Class

The Human Costs of Pornography

Attack on Elon Musk is About Freedom of Thought

Roots of Hamas Lie in Hitler's 'Final Solution'

HEINRICH HOFFMANN COLLECTION

Adolf Hitler met Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, Nov. 28, 1941, in Berlin. Al-Husseini collaborated with Nazis in planning ‘final solution’ in the Middle East. He was ally of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, reactionary Islamist group that gave birth to Hamas in 1987.

Happy Thanksgiving?

The last four horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free," let alone "the home of the brave." We are in steep decline. You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful, fact-based, and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you run the risk of being destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion.  Here is one of an increasing many.

Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty."  Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.

"Here I (under)stand, I cannot do otherwise."

I found the above witticism in an essay by Kelly James Clark. It works in German as well:

Hier (ver)stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders.

In German the allusion to what I allude to is transparent to my class of readers.

I'll book this quickie under Varia.

Cat Blogging Lives! Tuxies at the Door

The tuxedo cat is the most 'iconic' of cats; so it is  only fitting that Max Black and his brother Manny K. Black should guard the entrance to the inner sanctum.

Felix was a tuxie as was Sylvester. And who can forget Socks the presidential pussy when the Clintons occupied the White House? 

Like all cats the tuxie has nine lives; what distinguishes him is that he is always dressed to the nines. All dressed up with nowhere to go.

How to Write a Good Comment

I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment:

Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.

(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.

And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."

As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.

PROVISIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS

 

Time, Death, and Existence

 

Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”

 

 

JUNE 27, 2023

 

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So what makes my comment good?

 

1. I interact directly with what the  author has written.

2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.

3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.

4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.

5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.

6. I try to be helpful.

7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.

More on the Dumbassery of 'Smart Homes'

Here:

Amazon locked a Microsoft engineer out of his smart home devices for nearly a week after a delivery driver accused him of uttering a racial slur.

Via Malcolm Pollack, who is always worth reading.

Those Useless Masks Now Have a Use

Did you throw away your useless made-in-China COVID face masks? Yes? Too bad. They now have a use in places like New York City.

If someone is firing a shotgun at you it would be futile to take cover behind a chain link fence. But if you are being pelted by baseballs, the fence would prove barrier enough.

Smoky places unsought are the problem; those sought not so much.

Best Amazon Comment I've Read So Far This Year

While poking around for a reliable, powerful, bicycle tire pump to keep my mid-sized mountain bike tires up to around 65 psi, I found the following. Comments enabled for anyone who has a pump to recommend. The reviewer is recommending this device.

Andy's Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars This pumps me up more than DJ Khalid

Reviewed in Canada on July 15, 2019

Color: Navy Blue Style: Air Center Plus 

 

My bike has tires. Yes, surprising, I know. Not even the most pessimistic person in 1903 thought we would still be using rubber tires. But here we are, the year is 2019, and we still need to have air filled butyl tyres. This pump works great - filled my 27.5x2.4 tires in like 7 pumps. If you asked my wife she would say something like "that's not the only thing that works in 7 pumps" or "maybe I should be sharing my bed with this pump instead". But this is why we ride bikes -- to avoid the wife, and try to forget the continuous string of affairs she has with her yoga instructors.

 

How to Leave a Call Back Number on the Eve of WWIII

Don't make me re-play the message a dozen times. Pronounce the string slowly, clearly, and distinctly, numeral by numeral. You are not in a competition to see how fast you can spout it. And then repeat the string.  Don't say 'o' if you mean 'zero' (0). 'o' is a letter, '0' is a numeral. Confusing the two is a mark of a linguistically slovenly 'liberal.' 

And now you see the fix the Democrats have landed us in, on this, the Eve of Destruction.  (The accompanying video is the best I have seen attached to this song.) Joey B in his infinite incompetence, mendacity, and stupidity-cum-dementia has brought people together alright, but the wrong people, the Chi-Coms and the Russkis.  Way to go, Joe.  And all you useful idiots who voted for him, what were you thinking? You weren't, you were emoting, like good 'liberals.'  And now:

Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced in a nearly two-hour speech on Tuesday the unilateral suspension of the longstanding New START agreement that limits American and Russian nuclear development, describing Western support for Ukraine amid an ongoing Russian invasion as an existential threat to Russia.

An exciting, and possibly an exiting development.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Putin bemoaned the “spiritual catastrophe” of the West.

“They distort historical facts and constantly attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church, and other traditional religions of our country,” Putin claimed. “Look at what they do with their own peoples: the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, and the abuse of children are declared the norm. And priests are forced to bless same-sex marriages.”

This is how Putin sees us, and with some justice. We are in grave danger. We would not be had Trump been re-elected. 

Tulsi Gabbard talks sense on this issue.

UPDATE (2/23):  Russia deploys nuclear-armed ships for first-time in 30 years.  Let's go Brandon!

UPDATE (2/23): A U-2 eye's view of the ChiCom spy balloon's massive payload. Let's go Brandon!

1984 Bumpersticker

It read: 1984 is not an instruction manual.

True, but it may be that some of the novel's dystopian ideas can be turned against the Left.

Albert Camus: He's a Rebel!

You'll enjoy it. If you don't,  you are not MavPhil material.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The last three horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free." You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you will be destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion.  Here is one of an increasing many.

Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty."  Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.

MaverickPhilo@Twitter

Here I am. Pay me a visit. I don't quite know the ropes yet.

Who will be Facebook's Elon Musk? Hats off to the latter. Middle finger to the former. Without free speech, republics collapse. Our republic is collapsing and there may be no stopping the slide into the abyss; but as the saying goes, 'it ain't over 'til it's over.' We fight on.

Why Colin McGinn is the Best Philosopher Ever

It takes one to know one.  (Via Dmitri Dain)

John Pepple's Last Post and a Look Back

I stopped by John Pepple's place this evening and found not his latest, but his last, post. A twinge of nostalgia tinged with sadness ensued. We bloggers form a loose fellowship and when one of us moves on, whether by quitting the blogosphere, or, more drastically, by quitting the sublunary, certain emotions arise.  So long, John, it's been good to know you.  What follows is my first mention of his weblog, dated 13 July 2010:

JOHN PEPPLE WANTS A NEW LEFT

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepple, aims to develop a self-critical leftism.  Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike:  why does Pepple hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important.  What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepple.  In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  Sounds very familiar!  The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring."  I started out in Electrical Engineering at the same time but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us '60s types end up in philosophy?  Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic.  I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded.  She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.

Portland Leftist Deplaned

Here

University of Dayton Philosophy Department Circa 1980

Amazing what one can dredge up from the vasty deeps of cyberspace!

I Kill a Bug

And when I do, I apologize to him: "Sorry, man, nothing personal; but just one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life."

But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvellous and mysterious and deserving of respect. 

But not just sentience elicits my awe. I took my rest on a rock atop Miner's Saddle in the Western Superstitions. It had been a hard climb. Endorphins released, contemplative repose supervened. A fly landed on my arm. The lambent light of the desert Southwest illuminated its intricacy. What a piece of engineering! What a beautiful specimen of designedness!    

The above is a nice introduction to The Concept of Design.

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Vito Caiati writes,

“But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvelous and mysterious and deserving of respect.”

Good for you, Bill! I faced a similar situation recently, one which involved a more evolved form of sentient life, a little mouse that had come in from my garden as the weather turned colder. He had been trapped at the bottom of my kitchen garbage bin, under the removal container, by my two cats. Removing them from the room, I lifted up the container and discovered him there, looking up at me. He, like your insect, was “dispatched” to the garden, rather than killed. These are small acts of mercy, but to arrive at them requires a good deal of humility and wisdom. I recall Henry Beston’s observation regarding animals, in The Outermost House, with which you may partially agree: “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

It is always a pleasure to hear from you, Vito. And as I think of you now, a pun occurs to me, In Vito veritas!

I begin with a linguistic bagatelle. I see that when you quoted me you replaced my 'marvellous' with the more usual 'marvelous.' Why do I write 'marvellous' and 'tranquillity'? Being a linguistic conservative, I try to keep etymology in mind as far as I can given my limited erudition; the Latin is tranquillitas, and so to honor that origin I write the English counterpart with the double 'l.' Similarly with 'marvellous,' which is from Middle English merveillous, borrowed from Anglo-French, from merveille MARVEL entry 1 + -ous (Merriam-Webster).  You may call me an idiosyncratic pedant, but I am not, at least in these cases, aping the British spelling, although I am in conformity with it.

I enjoyed the mouse story. A mouse, of course, is 'more human' in the sense of more anthropo-morphic than a fly or spider, and I would not have killed the little guy especially after his having been terrorized by your cats. And then I thought of the 'mouse passage' near the beginning of Jack Kerouac's Visions of Gerard which I re-read back in October. 

One day he [Gerard] found a mouse caught in Scoop's mousetrap outside the fish market on West Sixth Street -- faces more bleak than envenomed spiders, those who invented mousetraps [. . .] The hungjawed dull faces of grown adults had no words to praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to save the mouse from the trap [. . .] the little mouse, thrashing in the concrete, was released by Gerard [. . .] Took it home and nursed it, actually bandaged it, held it, stroked it, prepared a little basket for it, as Ma watched amazed . . . . 

The beautiful quotation from Henry Beston resonates with me, especially when he writes that animals "move finished and complete."  I had a similar thought recently: "Cats are perfect as they are, or rather, a healthy non-defective cat is perfect as it is: it does not seek, or need to seek, wholeness or integration." That is part of a longer meditation which I am tempted to write up and post.  I suspect you will like it.

Who is Caius?

Robert Paul Wolff here replies with wit and lefty snark to a charming request by one Pamela N., a personal assistant, who wants to know who Immanuel Kant is referring to when he writes, "Caius is a man; man is mortal; therefore, Caius is mortal."  Pamela confesses,

I will admit, I have not read Kant's works. I have, however, spent the last couple of hours combing through post after post after post about this particular quote from the book and cannot find a single soul who would say who they think Caius is.

In reading these many posts, I have come to the conclusion that Kant is probably referring to Pope Caius as he has been venerated by the Catholic Church as a Saint. Given that title, and the fact that Saint's [sic] are given to [sic] a quasi-immortal status [sic], I have ascertained that this is who Kant is most likely referring to. My question for you is, do you think that my assumption is correct? or do you have a deeper insight into who he is referring to?

My Ideal Reader

A lover of language, precise in its use, respectful of its mothership* of our thoughts, analytic but not conceptually myopic, out for the Sellarsian big picture, non-dogmatic and therefore skeptical in the best sense, which is to say, an inquirer, but not a worldling mesmerized by the sublunary, and therefore spiritually oriented. And his attitude toward academic or professional philosophy? At once both respectful and critical.  And similarly with respect to every institution and everything institutionalized:  respectful but critical.

Where would we be without institutions? And yet they are like the houses around here: they either have termites or will get them.  The right attitude: we fumigate, not demolish, edifices infested with termites.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, and the universities. And others as well. 

_____________

*A neologism, apparently, one that just occurred to me, crafted in parallel to 'fathership,' a word recognized by Merriam-Webster.  And you call me a sexist? And you think conservatives are stick-in-the-muds opposed to everything new?

A Meditation on Four Senses of 'Light'

Substack latest

The Philosophy of Furniture

By Edgar Allan Poe. Enjoy!

Logically, We are Poles Apart

What Lukasiewicz might have said to Lesniewski.

Another 'Too Late' Story: Elizabeth Wolgast

Long-time reader Dave Bagwill wrote to tell me that he tried to contact  his old professor at Cal State, Hayward, Elizabeth Wolgast, but was too late. "She was  a very fine woman with a penetrating intellect and a warm heart," Dave recalls.  From Wolgast's obituary:

Elizabeth H. Wolgast
Feb 27, 1929 - Oct 13, 2020
Elizabeth Wolgast, died October 13 from complications following a stroke on October 1: she was 91. Elizabeth was born in Dunellen, NJ in February 1929. In 1936 her family moved to a farm outside Philadelphia run by her mother (a degreed nutritionist) while her father worked in business. She studied water-color painting as a young woman which became a life-long passion for her. She met her husband, Richard, at a drawing class at Cornell University and they married in 1949. Elizabeth went on to earn a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington and had a long, distinguished career teaching at the Cal State University at Hayward. She was a trailblazer in her profession being the first tenured female professor in that department. She was still the only one there when she retired. She enjoyed visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, Cambridge (England), West Point, and Abo (Finland). She authored four philosophy texts and numerous journal articles.

Read the rest. Here is her PhilPapers page.

I just now ordered a used copy of  Wolgast's Paradoxes of Knowledge for a paltry $8.34.  You may wish to spring for a new copy for a mere 529 semolians.  

We best honor a philosopher by reading his work and thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically.

As a general rule, you should never buy a book you haven't read. (That sounds like a bit of a paradox itself.) But the Wolgast volume appeared under the Cornell imprint, so it is probably worth reading in part if not in toto. I sense that it will be heavily Wittgensteinian. But a little Wittgenstein never hurt anybody.

Time was, when I had space for books but no money. Now it is the other way around.  I may have to buy a bigger house. Without books would life be worth living?

In these trying times, we who value high culture need to build vast private libraries that cannot be easily marauded by the totalitarian agents of leftist destruction. We also need to lay in righteous supplies of Pb to protect them. 

Theme music: It's Too Late, She's Gone

 

My PhilPapers and PhilPeople Pages

I have been hard at work sprucing up these pages, adding content and links for the download of some of my papers, and correcting errors.  I still have a lot of work to do.  Take a gander if you care to. Most of my reviews are substantial review articles, not book reports. There are a lot of new bells and whistles to play with.  

Do not go maskless . . .

. . . into that open air.

Or leave your house at night.

But rage, rage against the pusillanimity of your fright.

Your soul's a pussy that cannot take a dare.

So rage, rage against those who masklessly enjoy the open air.

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Addendum (3/7). Is there an etymological connection between 'pussy and 'pusillanimous'? Here is the answer.

My Latest at Substack

Enjoy!

Substack

I opened an account yesterday. Only one entry so far, and less than ten subscribers. It's free.  Go here and do a search on my name.

If you are a good writer and impecunious, you can turn a buck on this site.  On second thought, you can do so whether or not you are impecunious.  The quality of the writing on Substack and the standing of many of the authors suggests to me that the latter-day book burners will probably keep their hands off of it.  

New Year's Eve at the Oldies: 'Last' Songs for the Last Night of the Year

Happy New Year, everybody.  

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Happy New Year, everybody.  

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Merry Christmas to All Readers, Old and New . . .

. . . and best wishes for the New Year.  This from a liberal reader:

I've read your blog daily for six years now because I want a rational conservative voice in my life to challenge my own (very opposite) beliefs. You've provided that in spades, and I'm grateful for it.

Would that all liberals were as good-natured and open to challenge. We might then be able to hope for a lessening of tensions in the coming year. But I am no pollyanna: 2021, I predict, will be a year of acrimony to rival the worst years of the '60s.

Some Posts and Ghosts of Christmas Past

'Merry Xmas'

Egyptian Muslims Serve as Human Shields at Coptic Christmas Mass

Socializing as Self-Denial

Merry Scroogemas!

Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Limits of Doxastic Voluntarism

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

Of Christograms and Political Correctness

Puts Me in Mind of Chris McCandless

Here's another for the category, Questers and Other Oddballs.

BLEG: An Impecunious Reader Needs a Copy of Husserl's The Paris Lectures

Got one to give away or sell for a few bucks? Let me know in the ComBox below.

Facebook

That's where the MavPhil political punch-back is these days until such time as I am de-platformed for my quotidian violation of 'community standards.' I will consider your 'friend' request if I can see from your page that you have the Right stuff.

A Facebook Post

Here

I was misinformed. I was told that individual FB posts could be read by people without FB accounts if they were provided with the URL of the post.  Well, click on the link and see what happens. You will see the post for a second or two, sans comments, and then you will be directed to a page that has a fabulous picture of some handsome dude taking a selfie before the Coliseum in Rome.

I fully understand why people hate FB and refuse to sign up, and also why many are leaving for other social media sites.

The assault on free speech by the Left and their party here in the USA, the Democrats, is becoming intolerable. 

A writer at Crisis Magazine opined that conservatives should boycott FB. That makes no sense to me. Better to speak the truth on FB in public posts until we get de-platformed.

..................................

UPDATE 7:25 PM.  I tried it again. Click on the link above. If you are quick on the trigger, you will be able to click on 'Comments.'  They will appear.  You will then be sent to the dude on Roman holiday. You should be able to close that window. Now you can read the whole post with the comments.  So I wasn't misinformed  after all. My mistake.  You can read FB posts even if you are not on FB if you have been provided with the URL.  What you can't do is read the whole site.

Alles klar?

 

The Pleasures of the Mountain Bike

What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits.

.....................

Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, you name it. So I took up the bike, and eventually the mountain bike. Now I run just once a week, on Sunday mornings, for about 75 minutes. The other days I either hike or ride the mountain bike, mostly the latter. I like to be on the road before sunrise, and catch old Sol as he rises over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition Mountains. There is nothing like greeting the sun as he greets the mountains, bathing them in the serene light of daybreak. It is an appropriate moment for gratitude, gratitude for another day on which to bang my head against the riddle of existence. Riding into the rising sun, I sometimes recall Nietzsche’s words from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O you overrich star, what would you be except for those for whom you shine?”

The beauty of the mountain bike is that you can get off the roads, away from cars and people, and onto trails and jeep tracks. I’d rather dodge rattlesnakes than cars any day. I have even been known to strike out cross-country across open desert. I’ve got kevlar-reinforced tires, with thick tubes, and a strip of plastic betwixt tube and tire as prophylaxis against cactus spines and other impregnators. No need for slime, and no flats for going on two years. My bike is an old Trek 930, a modest mid-range hard-tail – having been called a hard-ass, I suppose this is appropriate – with front-end suspension. As every Thoreauvian knows, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun and live well.

Still, nothing in my experience beats running for the endorphin kick. ‘Endorphin’ is a contraction of ‘endogenous morphine.’ The adjective means originating from within, in this case, from within the brain. You know what morphine is. The brain of a body under athletic stress seems to produce these endorphins the existence of which, I understand, is more scientific postulation than verified fact. Endorphins manifest themselves at the level of consciousness in rather delightful sensations. When conditions are auspicious, and I am about 45-50 minutes into a run, I enter a phase wherein I apperceive myself as merely riding in my body as a pure spectator of a pure spectacle. I become a transcendental onlooker, and the world becomes George Santayana’s realm of essence.

“I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”)

 

Just a Number?

Some say that age is just a number. Well, is temperature just a number too? In Phoenix in July, say? Or is it a number that measures something?

"It's 115!"

"That's just a number; you are only as hot as you feel."

Some say that age is just a number. Well, is temperature just a number too? In Phoenix in July, say? Or is it a number that measures something?

"It's 115!"

"That's just a number; you are only as hot as you feel."

Linkage!

• Leftists devouring themselves and proving that diversity is not their strength: a delightful social justice  shit show.  By the way, Trump (or his writers) came up with a great line last night during his powerful speech under Mount Rushmore. Quoting from memory: Social justice is neither just nor good for society.
• Rod Serling could not have predicted the Twilight Zone of our current predicament.

• The GOP is a disgusting pseudo-con joke:

This week, Senate Republicans continue to beclown themselves. During a June 30 appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) fumbled his way through a heated interview about his bill to make it easier to sue police officers and his support for Black Lives Matter. Just as statues of Christopher Columbus started to fall across the country, Senators James Lankford (R-Ok.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) introduced a bill to scrap Columbus Day and instead declare a national holiday for Juneteenth.

• The awesome destructive power of concupiscence unchecked: Jeffrey Epstein and his pimp and paramour Ghislaine Maxwell.
  

• Was President Trump's Mt. Rushmore speech last night "dark and divisive"?