Saturday, October 29, 2016

THERE AND HOME AGAIN [COURTESY OF BILBO]

After a long, exhausting, but uneventful flight, we are again in Chapel Hill.   The latest twist on the email matter is the last straw.  I shall canvas for Clinton this coming week and vote early, but I cannot any longer watch television or read the news on the web.  I am beyond stressed out.

I spent some time during the flight re-reading much of the Analogies of Experience of the Critique.  There is so much there that I cannot hope to cover it all in my penultimate lecture Monday.

Should Clinton win, and be re-elected, I will be ninety before I dare hope again.

Oh, by the way, I watched The Force Awakens on the flight.  I freely admit that I teared up when an aging Han Solo and a timeless Chewbaka appeared to reclaim the Millennium Falcon.

11 comments:

  1. Beyond stressed out is a good way to put it. I practically need a morphine drip at this point. Right now my feelings toward Comey border on outright hatred, though hopefully he'll now feel pressured to come out and explain himself, revealing it all to be a big nothing-burger, as they say. And where are those bombshell hot-mic tapes from Trump we've been promised? I fear I may be placing my hopes on chimeras.

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  2. Concentrate on 'The Force Awakens' it really is surprisingly good, so much better than those ghastly prequels. I watched it on the big screen and am going to watch it again tonight on Soho.

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  3. Why do you continue to willingly subject yourself to such torture? I'd be incredibly surprised of North Carolina votes democratic based off statistics. The deciding states will be Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

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  4. Because I live in North Carolina, and one does what one can with what one has.

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  5. The polls I saw on the web this morning have Clinton ahead in NC--47-41 (NBC/WSJ) and 48-45 (CBS).

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  6. Since this thread already mixes Star Wars and the election, might as well throw in a third topic pertinent at this site, namely Kant.

    In the first volume of Sheldon Novick's biography of Henry James (Henry James: The Young Master, 1996, paperback 2007), there is a long endnote (n.30, p.469) discussing the Kantian sense of "imagination" and how it figures in James's "theoretical writings." Novick: "Imagination [as Kant meant the word] was the faculty that made possible realism in art, in H[enry] J[ames's] Victorian sense: moral realism as opposed to mere naturalism or imitation of sense data."

    Though I recognize that James was a genius at what he did, I really have no impulse to re-read, e.g., The Wings of the Dove, which I read some years ago. Nor, for that matter, am I inclined to try to read The Critique of Pure Reason. But since Kant obviously has been on the agenda here and since I happened to run across this in browsing through the Novick book, I thought I'd mention it.

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    Btw, Novick's biography of O.W. Holmes (the Sup Ct Justice, not his father who was famous in his own right) is very good.

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  7. Yes -- and yet Novick makes it sound (if one reads the full note and accompanying text) as if the Kantian notion of imagination was in pretty common currency in the intellectual circles in which James was moving in the 1860s, and in Victorian intellectual circles more generally. So maybe it's not so unexpected to scholars of the intellectual history of that period...

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  8. p.s. using "Victorian" broadly to encompass the Anglophone world, since James was still in the U.S. at the particular time the passage refers to.

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  9. By the way, I would bet that it is the third critique that was so influential in the late 19th century. It had an enormous impact on European thought.

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