My Stuff

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





Total Pageviews

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

BACK HOME

I flew in to Raleigh Durham airport last night after a lovely weekend visit to San Francisco to see my son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren.  They are all fine, I am happy to report.  Samuel, now seven, has become a fanatic baseball enthusiast, totally wrapped up in the fate of the SF Giants.  When I was a boy, I was a Dodgers fan and the Giants were our rivals [nobody liked the Yankees, who wore pinstripes and were essentially corporate executives.]  But my duties as a grandfather take precedence over boyhood loyalties, so I am now rooting for the Giants as well.  On Sunday, we watched an "old time baseball game" played by two amateur teams in a league that plays in San Francisco all Spring.  It turns out that Old Time Baseball has a number of rules that differ from the modern version.  The players do not wear baseball mitts.  Instead they wear simple leather gloves.  The batter gets seven balls, not four, for a walk, and if hit, does not take First Base.  Batters get to tell the umpire whether they want a low or a high strike zone.  Samuel was in seventh heaven, and even got to run down and return several foul balls hit over the backstop fence.

I spent a good deal of time organizing my published and unpublished papers into subject groupings, preparatory to developing three or four volumes of them for publication as e-books on Amazon.com. 

The thoughts I posted under the title "I've been thinking" have generated some very suggestive comments, and in the next day or so I shall try to respond to at least some of them.  Coincidentally, I spent time on the plane reading an interesting new book by Gar Alperovitz entitled "What Then Must We Do?" which speaks directly to the themes I sketched in my post.  As soon as I have finished it, I shall write about it to let everyone know what he has to say.  He is a great deal more optimistic than I am about possibilities for the future, and as an incurable optimist, I am always pleased to be told that all is not lost.

5 comments:

Michael said...

Glad to hear you're back, and I look forward to reading your comments on Alperovitz's book. This might not be in the same vein, but I was wondering if you'd heard about this story (here's a nice summary:http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/reinhart-rogoff-week-later-why-does-matter)where a UMass Economics grad student debunked a renowned paper advocating austerity by two Harvard economists. Particulars aside, I thought you might enjoy it.

Alias said...

Hi Prof. Wolff,

Forgive me if someone has already asked you this, but: if I am not mistaken, it is a feature of the epub format that Amazon uses that it does not preserve pagination. That is, the number of words to a "page" varies with changes in font size or display area (e.g.). That might be fine for recreational reading, but makes citations, or even just finding a passage one recalls having read, something of a nightmare. Do you have a way around that problem for the volumes of your work you're compiling? (Or am I behind the times, and is this no longer a problem?)

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Lord, I do not know. I will check with the chap who is handling all of this. Thanks for the heads up.

[I mean, not everything is Winnie the Pooh, right?]

Robert Paul Wolff said...

Alias, I asked Michael Hemmingsen about this, and here is what he said: No, there are definitely pages. They're not automatically displayed, but at
any point the reader can bring up the page number information. Of course,
the page numbers are different from the physical editions of the book, but
you'd expect that with a new edition, anyway.

There are also "Locations" in the book that can serve as references (more
precise ones, in fact, than page numbers). They're not commonly used as
references at the moment, but I expect they will be once the academic use
of ebooks grows

Michael Llenos said...

Dr. Wolff,

I just figured out why you think the first Rambo movie is the best: because you are an anarchist at heart. I am very slow to finally get that now. Ofcourse, you may just like the better plot in First Blood.

By the way, I hope Disney puts a third Death Star in Star Wars 7. I'm no anarchist, but I love it everytime the Rebel Alliance blows one up.