Trouble in Paradise

We are here but my computer is misbehaving. I may not be able to blog until I get home.   How will the world survive?

LAST MINUITE SNARKING AS I GO OUT THE DOOR

In the old days, American philosophy subsisted on European imports -- first Locke's New Way of Ideas, then Kantian rationalism, then Absolute Idealism, then Logical Positivism, then Analytic Philosophy, then Ordinary Language Philosophy, then Existentialism, then Phenomenology.  The only native American philosophical school was Pragmatism.  Because of the structure and timing of tenure, American Philosophy Departments resembled the alluvial deposits of river beds.  Young men [it was almost always men] would take up the latest European import, and just about when they got tenure and were sedimented for life, a new wave of Philosophy would wash up and a new batch of junior men would get tenure doing it.  If you cut a trough through a Philosophy Department, you could read off the successive European imports like a paleontologist.

Back when I was a lad, some Oxford philosophers with too much time on their hands spent a good deal of energy drawing subtle distinctions among a variety of English words that, to a casual observer, might seem to mean more or less the same thing.  This so-called "Ordinary Language Philosophy" was all the rage on the East Coast for a brief time.  J. L. Austin, among others, made much of the fact, for example, that there was a subtle difference of meaning between calling something an "accident" and calling it a "mistake." 

Josh Marshall runs a blog called Talking Points Memo that I click on several times each day.  This morning, after I put the sheets in the washing machine as part of the wrap-up before departing for Europe, I checked TPM.com and came across the following story:

"A San Tan Valley, Ariz. woman, Melisah Havens, on Friday accidentally shot her husband outside their residence because she thought he was an intruder trying to burglarize her vehicle, police told KTVK Phoenix."

I should explain that Marshall, in the fine old tradition immortalized by Lincoln Stephens in his Autobiography, has taken to listing every police report of gun lovers shooting themselves, each other, or their children because they have not learned the first thing about gun safety [in this respect following the lesson of their spiritual leader, former Vice President Dick Cheney.]

Look at that story again.  As soon as I read it, I heard the plumy voice of an Oxford Don saying, ever so superciliously, "My dear fellow.  You don't mean that she shot her husband accidentally.  Nor do you mean that she shot him unintentionally.  You mean that she shot him by mistake."

I guess Oxford Ordinary Language Philosophy was good for something after all.

ASTONISHING

Google tells me that there have been more than 6500 comments posted to this blog.  That is a staggering number in little more than five years.  When I was teaching, was there ever a like period of time during which I had six thousand five hundred questions or comments in my classes?  I doubt it [and certainly not of the quality of the blog comments].  Thank you all for staying with me.

I am off to Paris tomorrow, arriving on Tuesday, so there will be a hiatus of several days before I am up and running in the Paris apartment.  I trust the world will manage to survive without me for that period of time.  I am looking forward to my urban walks in the early Paris mornings.

By the way, my idea for playing the trill passages did not work out, but I think I am managing them nonetheless.  The real problem is the last movement of K424 -- andante con variazione -- which Mozart, lord bless him, wrote as maddeningly tricky for the viola.  I think he got bored and just amused himself with weird stuff by about the third variation.  I shall practice it in my head while I am in Paris and see whether I can master it.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

Susie and I are in the last stages of preparation for our trip to Paris on Monday, so I am even less inclined to deep thoughts than usual.  This morning, a good deal of my brain during my walk was devoted simply to surviving the cold -- 19 degrees when I started at six a.m.   I spent some of the walk working out in my head how to play a troublingly difficult little passage in the first movement of K424, the second Mozart violin/viola duet that I am now studying -- a pair of very quick little trill runs that make my brain freeze up.  I decided that if I simply treat the passages as two series of thirty-second notes, it will be easier to play.  As soon as I finish this post, I am going to see whether I am right.  As I just observed to Susie, I am in perpetual awe of professional violin and viola players.  They in turn, it is my impression, tend to take a rather prosaic view of their skills, rather like mechanics, and think it is really hard to write books, which for me is easy. 

The thing that most non-musicians get wrong is supposing that the skill is all in the left hand, with the fingers flying over the strings, whereas the real secret to great string playing is in the bow arm -- the right arm, if you are not Cary Grant in Indiscreet. 

I shall as usual continue to blog from Paris.  I am looking forward to my Paris morning walks, some of which I have described in detail in past blog posts.  I shall be curious to see whether the big ugly stands in front of Notre Dame have been taken down.  They were erected to commemorate the 850th anniversary of the launching of the construction of the great cathedral, which took more than a century to complete.  A friend who sometimes sings in the cathedral choir told me that the Monsignor in charge of the celebration got the brilliant idea of offering indulgences to devout worshipers with a little spare change.  Considering how that worked out for the Church in the sixteenth century, one might think there would be some hesitation about that idea, but like the Bourbons, the lords of the Church have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

A QUICK REPLY TO ARFAMO

Let me offer an historical answer to arfamo posted comment. In the sixties, when I wrote In Defense of Anarchism, the US had a universal male military draft. During the Viet Nam War, a great many men were ordered to report for induction into the Army and then to fight in Viet Nam. Some went willingly. Many went unwillingly. And there were a not inconsiderable number of young men who anguished over the question whether they had an obligation to obey even though they opposed the policy, BECAUSE AMERICA IS A DEMOCRATIC POLITY. Now, you may dismiss such considerations as foolish, but to those faced with the draft, they made a very great deal of difference. My little book was, among other things, a direct attack on this principled defense of the obligation to obey in a democracy. The disaster of the Viet Nam War almost destroyed the Army, in response to which the military high command switched to an all volunteer army so that the US would never again have to justify ordering citizens to fight. This switch to an all volunteer army was the last step in transforming the US into an imperial power. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars would have been next to impossible with universal conscription. I never considered my book an argument for a utopian anarchist society. I have always believed that we must begin wherever we are in trying to change the world.

A FEW MORE RESPONSES TO COMMENTS

No walk today.  I got all suited up at 5:15 a.m., but it was 30 degrees outside and the high winds made it feel more like 15, so I turned around and came home.  I figure eighty has its privileges.

Andrew, I am ashamed to admit that I have never given much thought to the hot issue of nominalism versus Platonism,  despite the fact that when I was not yet eighteen I had studied with both Willard van Orman Quine and Nelson Goodman.  I even constructed a little Calculus of Size along nominalist lines for my term paper in Goodman's course when I was a Freshman [got a B+ -- bummer], but it was all just a lark for me.  My sights were set on bigger game:  The Transcendental Unity of Apperception.

LFC, you are indeed correct that Sam Beer was in the Government Department, not the History Department as I said.  I looked him up on Wikipedia and discovered to my astonishment that he passed away only four years ago, at the age of ninety-seven!  Perhaps Billy Joel was wrong.

Michael, I never encountered either Julian Schwinger or Alan Dershowitz while I was at Harvard.  My high school friend, Herb Winston, who went to Harvard a year before I [and told me to take Quine's Methods of Logic course] took Schwinger's advanced Quantum Mechanics course, despite being pre-med.  Schwinger was quite upset when he found out that a pre-med was in his course.  [In those days, pre-meds were considered pond scum by serious academics.]  Herb said that when he went to the annual meeting of the American Physics Society, senior physicists clustered around and quizzed him on what Schwinger was lecturing on in his course.  For reasons that need not be detailed, I am just as happy not to have met Dershowitz.

Finally, just a word on the exchange between Mesnenor and David Auerbach [to whom thanks are due for a recipe for pork cheeks.]  I have always thought of myself as striving to express the insights of the non-analytic philosophers about politics and other matters in a fashion that was consistent with the methodological strictures of Analytic Philosophy, but not necessarily constrained by the prejudices and blindness of Analytic Philosophers.

Now that I am caught up, I can go back to packing for our trip to Paris on Monday, while also practicing the viola part to K424 -- which turns out to be even harder than K423.

CATCHING UP

It is a new year, and though the world looks pretty much unchanged from yesterday, some drawing of a line is called for, so today I shall try to catch up on a variety of interesting comments to which I have not yet responded.  In no particular order:

Andrew, when I wrote that post, I thought of your difficulties many years ago with my insistence that a metaphor is not an appropriate foundation for a philosophical theory.  Apparently it continues to haunt you.  I shall take a pass on your invocation of Plato and Aristotle.   Far be it from me to attempt to settle a dispute between those distinguished gentlemen.

Chris, the answer to your question is yes.  When I wrote In Defense of Anarchism in 1965, I was convinced that an  a priori justification of objective moral principles could be found.  When I published that little book five years later, I was in the midst of my struggle to find such a justification in the pages of Kant's Grundlegung.  It was my failure to find the argument there that persuaded me to give up my long-held belief [on the pious supposition that if Kant could not produce the argument, it did not exist, a methodological guideline that I still adhere to all these years later, having seen nothing to change my mind in the intervening forty-four years.]

LFC. a propos Sam Beer, I actually once scrubbed his floors!  As an undergraduate, I earned my own pocket money as a way of lifting from my parents some of the burden of putting me through school -- tuition at Harvard when I began was $400 a year, after all, rising to $600 by the time I graduated.  One of the odd jobs that I got through the Student Employment Office called for me to wash the floors in the Beer household.  I met Mrs. Beer, a wonderful woman who chatted with me as I worked.  She told me a hilarious story that, for some reason, seems not to have made it into my Autobiography, so I will tell it here.  Shortly after her husband was made a tenured Associate Professor in the History Department, she invited the wives of the senior members of the department to tea.  Although she made every effort to produce an elegant afternoon tea, it was obvious to her from the stiff and awkward behavior of her guests that something was seriously wrong.  As everyone was leaving, one of the oldest ladies kindly took her aside and explained what the trouble was.  Mrs. Beer had seated the wife of an Associate Professor higher up at the table than the wife of a Full Professor.  To Mrs. Beer's credit, she made it clear when she told me the story that she thought it was hilarious.

Joseph Streeter, I was quite interested in your comment about Lewis and Cheryl Misak.   There is no question that Quine and others took a dim view of Lewis' pioneering efforts in modal logic -- Quine because he thought all modal logic was nonsense and others because they thought [correctly] that Kripke's work made Lewis' work outdated.  But it is Lewis' work in the theory of knowledge that I consider important, and still do.  For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with it, I can perhaps say, in a phrase, that it was an effort to achieve a fruitful conjunction of Kant with Peirce and James.  As I think I indicated, it is in my opinion Lewis' early book, Mind and the World Order that is really important, not his magnum opus, Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation.   My copy of Analysis by the way is a gift from Lewis and is inscribed by him.  His very last semester, Spring of 1953, which was my last undergraduate semester, I took Lewis' graduate seminar on Theory of Knowledge.  At the last session, he brought in a stack of books he had no further use for -- mostly presentation copies of new books from the authors.  He offered them to the students.  The grad students -- stupidly, in my opinion -- grabbed for the latest work by some minor figure, but I saw a copy of Lewis' own book in the pile and dove for it.  That last year, I took all three courses Lewis offered, including his great course on the Critique of Pure Reason.  The paper I mentioned on Hume to which he penned his comment was the term paper for his Fall semester undergraduate course.

Michael, I have lots of stories about Harry Austryn Wolfson, who will always be my image of what a true scholar is.  I have told some of them on pages 97-100 of my Autobiography, which you can find by following the link at the top of the blog to box.net [look for Total Memoir, or alternatively look in Volume I.]

Several people:  I agree with many of you that severe income inequality is not the root of the problem, although it is a very severe symptom.  As Chris said, the root problem is capitalism.  But there is no serious possibility of capitalism being replaced by socialism in America, so having identified capitalism as the problem, we must then ask, What if anything can we do to alleviate the suffering of those who are so adversely affected by the workings of capitalism?  I do not take the apocalyptic view that we must hope for things to get worse so that then they will [miraculously] get better.  That way lies end times eschatology.  I also agree that the Occupy folks were quite wrong to think that greed, as a human failing, has anything at all to do with the workings of capitalism.  But we are in a bad way, folks, and we must start with whatever we have.  If large numbers of people can be brought out into the streets to protest Wall Street, that is a start, admittedly a small start, but a start.  It is a measure of how bad things are that we would all consider it a great victory to return to the state of affairs that obtained at the beginning of the nineteen seventies.

And finally, to one and all, another warm thanks for the generous and friendly birthday wishes.  On the basis of the early evidence, I can report that being eighty is pretty much like being seventy-nine.  Who knew?