PUFF [BUT NOT THE MAGIC DRAGON]

On the theory that one scratched back deserves another, I hereby post the blurb of a new e-book written [or assembled] by fellow philosopher Gerald Dworkin.  I have looked at a selection of the contents, and they are great fun.

"This commonplace book (a book in which extracts are organised for personal use), compiled by Gerald Dworkin, collects aphorisms, jests, put-downs, jokes, epigrams, apercus, and longer (but shortish) reflections, definitions, meta-philosophical observations, insights and words of wisdom from, and about, philosophy and philosophers. Such collections of other people's writings were very common in the 17th century and were notebooks in which writers and scholars accumulated material for future reference and for re-reading.

It contains extracts, comments and jokes from philosophers such as Nietzsche, Hume, Dewey, Russell, Kant, Leibniz, Rousseau, as well as from contemporary thinkers such as Jerry Fodor, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, Gerald Dworkin, and many others. It also contains remarks from novelists, playwrights, poets, and comedians such as Woody Allen, Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Chesterton, Brecht and Stoppard.

It may not be completely correct that, as Wittgenstein said, a serious and good philosophy book could be written entirely consisting of jokes, but for me any piece of philosophy writing is more attractive when laced with wit and humour. While every discipline has its jokes - mathematicians, lawyers, economists - philosophers seem particularly prone to wit; perhaps because so much of the writing is critical in nature and hence open to sarcasm, irony, and other forms of intellectual assault.

Philosophy: A Commonplace Book is intended to provide amusement as well as enlightenment about Philosophy in general and Morality in particular."

MOVING ALONG

This morning, I finished re-reading the last of the blog tutorials to be included in Volume IV of my collected papers.  It will take a while for a cover to be designed, but before the summer is over, there should be four volumes of my published and unpublished papers available on Amazon.com as e-books.  There is some good stuff in there, if I do say so myself [and if I do not, who will?  :) ]

MAJOR SCHOLARLY ANNOUNCEMENT

Every decently educated person has at least heard of W. E. B. Du Bois, the great 19th and 20th century African-American scholar and activist who is, in my judgment, the most important social scientist of any race that America has produced.  But almost nobody has heard of St. Clair Drake, the scholar and activist perhaps best known in a narrow circle of scholars as the co-author of Black Metropolis, a classical urban study of South Side Black Chicago.  Drake was for decades a significant scholar and also an important leader of the Pan-African movement out of which so many of Southern Africa's post World War II political leaders came.  He stands second only to Du Bois in the pantheon of Black American intellectuals.

A very great deal has been written about Du Bois, most famously David Levering Lewis' magisterial two-volume biography of Du Bois.  But virtually nothing has been written about Drake.  That is about to change.  Dr. Andrew Rosa, who wrote his doctoral dissertation about Drake in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass while I was the Graduate Program Director there, has just secured a contract at the University of Chicago Press for his extremely important new book, St. Clair Drake:  A Biography of the African Diaspora.  Rosa is literally the first scholar to examine the 100 boxes of Drake's papers at the Schomburg Library in New York.  He has interviewed scholars who knew Drake, and has set Drake's life and work in the context of the world-wide movement for Black liberation.

When it appears, it will be a major contribution to the now rich and deep scholarship of the African-American experience.  I consider myself honored to have had the opportunity to serve as a second reader on Rosa's dissertation committee.

MEDICAL UPDATE

Change of plans.  I received this message from the doctor.

"Dear Ms and Mr Wolff,

 I first thought you could not move too easily that is why i proposed to come to your place. Actually it would be much easier  for me if you could come with two appointments to my clinic where I have my computer and the possibility to create a file.

 Could you call my secretary on: 01 49 83 94 70 and ask for 2 appointments starting monday the  3rd.

Best regards"

In an odd way, this is even better.  When I contacted her, I told her our ages [79 and 80].  She offered to come to our apartment because she thought we would be feeble.  When she received our medical records, she saw that we were functional, and decided it would make more sense for us to go to her clinic [which, by the way, Google street pictures shows me is above a café.  I love it!]

I shall call today for the appointments, and report on the visit.  With any luck, we shall not need medical attention, but at our age, one never knows.

PARIS MUSINGS

I have just finished volume IV of my collected papers.  This is the one that contains the tutorials and appreciations that I posted on the blog.  Volume I is juvenilia, Hume and Kant essays, and essays, published and unpublished, on higher education.  Volume II is Marx and Classical Political Economy.  Volume III, which is next, will be Political Theory and early practical political writings.

New fabulous recipe, which I have just invented:  Get a large number of really fresh cherry tomatoes and cut them in half.  Chop up three or four cloves of garlic.  Chop up some fresh Basil leaves.  Melt some butter in a pan and sauté the garlic, then add the tomatoes and the basil.  Simmer for a while [ten minutes?] until the tomatoes are beginning to melt.  It is fantastically good, and looks really nice on the plate.  This evening, we had it with steamed asparagus and broiled pork cutlets, seasoned with crushed red peppercorns [Susie's idea].  Susie, as usual, had Sancerre blanc.  I had Beaume de Venise, a nice red wine.

WHO KNEW?

Today, Susie and I walked from Place Maubert to rue du Four, and turned up to go to rue Princesse to visit the Village Voice, an English language bookstore in Paris.  We were stunned to find it closed.  A waitress in an eatery next door said they just couldn't make a go of it anymore.  So we bought two dozen cartons of Nespresso capsules on rue Bonaparte two blocks away and trudged home, pausing to rest in the garden of the Cluny -- the Museum of the Middle Ages at the corner of Boulevard St. Germain and Boulevard St. Michel.

When I got home, I googled  Village Voice, Paris, and closing, and up came a 2012 story in the NEW YORKER about the demise of the famous bookstore.  Susie and I subscribe to the NEW YORKER but never noticed the story.  I guess maybe I should look at something else besides the cartoons.

Radical or no radical, I hate it when some things change.

CULTURE SHOCK

Susie and I are not spring chickens.  She is eighty, and I am a lad of seventy-nine.  We have been coming to our apartment in Paris for nine years, and by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, we have in all that time not needed a doctor.  But clearly it is feckless and irresponsible of us not to have made some sort of connection with a doctor to whom we could turn in time of need.  So I went on line and found a list, posted by the American Embassy, of English-speaking doctors in Paris, one of whom is located rather near us off rue Monge.  I wrote to her, got a reply, had our Chapel Hill doctor fax her our medical records, and came to Paris planning to make an appointment for an initial visit some time during our stay.

Last week I wrote to her again, and today I received a reply.  I was so stunned by it that I read it twice, and then read it aloud to Susie.  Here it is, verbatim:

"Dear M. Wolff, I hope for you a much better weather for June! I could come and visit you Thursday afternoon around 3pm. Would it be convenient for you. Yes, I received your records, I will read them now you are in Paris.  Please send me everything I need to reach your apartment.
See you soon, sincerely"

I am deeply ashamed to admit that when I read this, my first thought was, "Maybe she is not such a good doctor."  I mean, who ever heard of a doctor who makes house calls?  I figure she is either about twelve, or else about ninety-five and hasn't heard about recent developments in medicine.

Obamacare indeed!