In six weeks, Susie and I are going on a Massachusetts Audubon bird-watching safari to the Serengetti Plain in Kenya. In preparation, I have just bought, on line, a Bushnell combination camera and binoculars that allows me to take pictures [and videos] of what I see, enlarged, through the binoculars. So, some time in late November, I shall post pictures from the Serengetti. There are some technological innovations that I think are really neat!
I was thinking of your remark that short works, like "In Defense of Anarchism," make reputations in philosophy, and I realized that many of the books in the canon are short. Consider a few examples from political philosophy: Mill's "On Liberty," Kant's "Perpetual Peace," Hume's "Of the Original Contract," and Rousseau's discourses were essays. The "Social Contract," Locke's "Second Treatise," and Machiavelli's "The Prince" are brief, fewer than 150 pages or so each. The major exceptions in political philosophy seem to be Hobbes and Rawls, but most students only read the first two books of the Leviathan, and I've noticed a trend in teaching to assign the shorter "Justice as Fairness" instead of Theory.
ReplyDeleteIf you are interested in publishing your memoirs, it might be welcome news that there is a market for the memoirs of philosophers. Stanley Cavell is publishing his autobiography next month from Stanford University Press: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=18053
I heard that Stanley is doing that. I am having lunch with him on Friday in Cambridge, but I suspect he will not have any useful suggestions. I tried, and couldn't find any interest. Oh well, it is out there, and some thousands of people have read at least a part of it, which is better than some of my books.
ReplyDeleteThe weird thing is that it is on the web forever, and people will continue to stumble on it when they are googling this or that.