Westciv

individualism

2009-05-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

You can read this article as an inroduction to Isaiah Berlin, one of he great liberals of the twentieth century(which he called the worst in human history) The article directs you to Berlin's seminal essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" The two concepts of liberty that the title refers to are 1 Negative Liberty:The common sense idea of liberty as doing whatever you like or 2 Positive liberty, that is, liberty as a state that you achieve through transformation to a higher state of existence. According to a benign interpretation of these, negative liberty emphasizes freedom of choice as in "a woman's right to choose." Positive liberty implies a new, higher state of achievment, such as when I am trained to be a pianist.
As is evident the proponent of positive liberty supports authoritarianism and paternalism. We are brought to freedom by piano instructors or tennis coaches. In the twentieth century totalitarian governments claimed they were bringing freedom to the masses This was the usage of "freedom" that Berlin questioned
The article gives us some indication of how complicated this issue is. Anatole France famously claimed that in a capitalist society the poor and the rich have the freedom to sleep under a bridge. Fraser, the author of this piece, makes the shrewd point that after communism fell the societies that escaped the delusion of positive freedom have become disillusioned with negative freedom as the sole achievment of a good society
I never met Sir Isaiah but I was once in a small restaurant with so few tables that one could hear all the conversations taking place. On this occasion one could only hear Sir Isaiah.
Does his essay still carry the same authority

Religion

2009-05-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

Eagleton is a Christian and Marxist. Does his argument (as summarized by Stanley Fish) do justice to the claims of secularists? Does it do justice to the claim of secular skeptics such as Freud(I know some people call psychoanalysis a religion) who don't profess the militant secularism described by Fish/Eagleton, but the more modest secularism which says simply that reason can't provide answers for everything but what reason cannot answer can't be answered elsewhere ?

Enlightenment

2009-02-22T08:08:00.000-08:00

This review is from Dissent a journal that represents democratic socialism and therefore regards itself as an heir to the Enlightenment. The reviewer is Richard Wolin who has written on Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and others. One of the books he reviews has a segment on Kant's essay on Enlightenment where he reminds us that Kant wrote during a period when humans were "subjects" not "citizens

Religion and Bill Maher

2009-02-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

I saw this film. It was very funny. It is more problematic than this article admits. Basically it is freak show starring a number of amusing cranks.There are serious people,as Maher points out,but they don't seem very dangerous. The film ends with horrific scenes of destruction that religion will bring about, as though all of the people that have been interviewed are subspecies of Bin Laden. But we don't experience them as such

Ideology

2009-02-20T08:11:00.001-08:00

One of the self definitions of the 1950's is that it was an age that had grow up, gotten past the destructive ideologies of fascism and bolshevism. The defining essay of that period was Daniel Bell's "The End of ideology" Since the sixties, however "ideologies"keep popping back. In the sixties it was Marxism and now according to this article a new batch

scepticism about science

2009-01-10T07:31:00.000-08:00

Here is a chilling article by a philosopher I have mentioned in the past. (Was it to this class?) Peter Singer,who holds the chair in bioethics in Princeton,is probably the most controversial philosopher in the world. He has defended euthanasia and abortion but is best known for his campaign on behalf of animal rights. There were near riots when he was awarded the chair in Princeton.People were holding placards calling him a Nazi. One of my conservative colleagues called him the "enemy of humanity,the champion of the chicken"
This article is about Mbecki,former President of SouthAfrica, who took the usual post colonialist critique of the "hegemony of western rationalism" to tragic extremes. Is this a logical consequence of the anti scientific discourse that is so common nowadays? Is President(soon to be expresident) Bush's policy limitng stem cell research a milder version of the same outlook as Mbecki's

Greetings

2008-12-29T08:18:00.000-08:00

Greetings: I've missed all of you! The weeks of seclusion are over and finally I am plunging back ino the world. Was I crushed with boredom? You decide. I woke up every morning and performed the following ceremony: I washed ,I dressed-first one sock, then the other, then my walk,then breakfast-then a rest. When I was finished I was as elated with a sense of achievment as Rembrandt when he finished a painting Then I sat down to decide, which DVD to watch, which podcast to download, which book to read,Then lunch etc.__what a miserable life! Now I am back! Not a moment too soon! Since I've been away the Canadian government almost fell,and the world economy almost collpased. I feel needed.
Marshall Goldstein loved the class!
Tomorrow I will post a revised class curriculum. In recent weeks the west has suffered a heavy blow to its prestige. After years of sermonizing to the rest of the world about how to manage its affairs we are going down the tube, a mere twenty years after the Marxists went down the tube.
Once again west civ has to be reassessed. One of the shocks of recent days is the comeback of the state.Remember that only a few weeks ago tne smart money was betting on "the disappearance of the state" except as a handmaiden of the globalized economy. To day globalization means global panic. The State has been enlisted to save the global economy. A profound change.
We'll discuss this via a video that I will show on Wednesday. On Monday I will open our discussion on "modernity as the Age of Reason" I recommend that we turn to the new technologies that I've been experimenting with(i"ll never catch up to my twelve year old nephew) In this case a wonderful podcast at CBC.ca/ideas/podcasts . called How to think about Science. There you will find a list of interviews conducted with world famous figures conducted by my esteemed friend David Cayley. The most important one for us is the program featuring Christophe Norris and Maragaret Midgley. but the programs with Steve Shapin and another Bruno Bauer are also significant.

John S, Mill bio

2008-10-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Here is an article

Machiavelli

2008-09-15T04:55:00.000-07:00

This article is a good summary of the "Machiavelli problem.It provides (a) a good summary of his life and experience(b) and raises the question I try to raise in class which is can we live with Machiavelli? Can we live without him. His means are ruthless but his end..a stable democratic republic.Do we have to become monsters to face monsters. I am wary of Machiavellis and I am suspicious of people who reject him outright.

Decline of the West

2008-09-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

John Gray is an important political scientist who believes that so far as the west is concerned the jig is up -it no longer runs the show and because of the destruction of the environment and the emergence of religious extremism the show may be over. Though This article is about one crisis his books and academic articles are more general and provide an excellent source of essays

link to determinism article

2008-09-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to determinism article I mentioned in class determinism

Conservatism

2008-02-06T20:15:00.000-08:00

If you followed the Big Tuesday primary results you will know that in the Republican McCain was deprived of a clean sweep and Romney of any kind of sweep by the "conservative" votes that went to Huckabee(my absolutely favorite evangelical preacher) But conservatism in this context is very different from the conservatism of Burke. US conservatism is fiercely individualistic ,Burke celebrated the organic nation,US conservatism is fiercely opposed to government, Burke is not, US Conservatism is ready to tear the world apart in order to bring about the end of the welfare state and liberal morality,in other words it is either revolutionary or counter revolutionary. US conservatives celebrate change and innovation (our Canadian version of this new conservatism was called the common sense revolution)and accuse liberals and socialists of clinging to the past...a great reversal from te nineteenth century. But they have sufferred the consequences of being in power since the early eighties--they are the status quo and now the mantle of change ,a la Obama and Hillary, once again falls to liberals

Religion

2007-12-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

At the end of the nineteenth century decades of evangelical fervor were followed by decades of cool headed but triumphalist atheism. In those years it was not unusual for people to have inner illuminations that made them atheists, reminiscent of the illuminations that made their grandparents evangelicals.

The twentieth century ended with a triumphant flood, some would say tsunami ,of fundamentalism(remember that for a time, and perhaps even today evangelical student clubs have been the most active voluntary organizations on campus)But the atheist counterattack has come and is gaining momentum. Hitchens volume "God is not Great" and Dawkins have been on the best seller lists for months and Hitchen's new Atheist reader" is offerred as vintage gift to place under the Xmas tree or Channuka Bush. ("I'm dreamimg of a godless christmas")

We've encountered many critiques of religion in our classes and fairness dictates that I post te ideas of religion's defenders, While I may not support many of their ideas ,I beleive that Dawkins and Hitchens go too far in calling religious believers self deceiving nincompoops. After all those of us who have read Voltaire etc. know that many of the argumenst of the atheists aren' new.

The latest defence of religion to its cultured despisers(a phrase from the German theologian Schliermacher) comes from the theologian John Polkinhorne (who spoe at McMaster) in te Times Literary Supplement Nov. 20 207 p.27 -28.

Polkinhorne is not Savanarolla warning of imminent hellfire. he is eminently civilized anda bit defensive. He makes the following points.

1. Dawkins and Hitchens are guilty of overkill and don't give religious believers the honor of having minds at all

2Their atheism cannot cope with the reality of human conscience. While it may seem evident to Darwinists that self sacricie and conscience can be traced back to the animal's who offer their lives to perpetuate family ,this kind of altruism cannot be the source of a very different self sacrifice such the willingn ness of a woman like the Pole "Irena Sandlarova' to risk her life to save some 20,000 Jews.

3. They refuse to engage the truthfullness of many theologians who honestly grapple with issues such as those who grapple with the issues they themselves have raised.

4. They underplay the horrors of secular regimes such as those of Stalin and Hitler.

They gloss ove rthe limitations of science, which, after all give us only a part of life(Polkinhorne is a scientist) e.g a scientist sounds as though "he would substitute a series of case notes on senile dementia for King Lear'(p.27)

Worthy argumenst,though defensive-as they should be_. Let's try to follow this debate. At best Polkighorne has helped make agnosticism respectable.

Kant and Machiavelli

2007-11-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

Both Kant and Machiavelli have been brought to life this week-Kant by General Hiller and Machiavelli by President Musharraf. General Hiller spoke up about the war in Afghanistan. He contradicted the government by saying that Canadian troops would be required for some time to come. Kant tells us that in a free and moral society all speech should be free. However he places limits on those who are constrained by their public offices. Enlightenment, he tells us,implies "freedom to make use of ones reason in all matters" (CP 55) . But,he tells us, sometimes we have to make private use of our reason. For example:If I am an official in government that has instituted tax cuts ,can I publicly object to such cuts because I disagree with them. Kant has a complicated formula for dealing with this issue. Is he successful?This issue has been thrashe dout in the press because of General Hiller's remarks, Can he, as a general publicly contradict the government? see this lnkhref<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071102.wcogee02/BNStory/Front/>

Passages

2007-10-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Here is the first of a series of quotations such as people used to record in commonplace books. This is from a wonderful novel by the writer's writer Richard Ford,The lay of the Land. With thanks to the blog by Terry Teachout "About Last Night" from whose Almanac section, I am borrowing this device.

"Home may only be where you've memorized the grid patternwhere you can pay with checks,where someone you've already met takes your blood pressure,palpates your liver,slips a digit here and there,measures angstroms gone off your molars a bit-in other words, where your primary caregivers await,their pale gloves already pulled on and snugged."

Protestantism and opera

2007-10-29T07:11:00.000-07:00

Good to run into a delegation of Arts and Science Students at opera yesterday. Don Carlos is four and a half hours, an opera of Wagnerian length. Ajzenstat was with me, has seen the opera many times, told me this was the best production he's seen
In my opinion the central character, the one who gives the opera focus and stature was Phillip ll, sung and acted by a wonderful Norwegian.
The opera has 2 connections with West Civ. First, Phillip ll was meant to be the hero of the CounterReformation.I was intrigued that Verdi never mentioned that the Flanders Rebellion was Protestant. One of the early victories of the Calvinists.
There is also a view of Macchiavelli. Phillip is portrayed as a ruthless monarch being crushed by the (what he sees) as the necessities of maintaining power. The Scene where he bemoans his isolation, loveless marriage, son a traitor etc.maes you feel sorry for him..glad to be a powerless retiree.
There is also a brutal portrayal of Catholicism . Bloody crosses ,a well staged auto de fe, a villainous Grand Inquisitor...
Imagine singing for four and a half hours. I'm dead after two hours of yakking

Individualism

2007-10-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

On George Clooneys' latest film Michael Clayton(unless he's made another one since last week)
Clooney has discovered a niche in the genre of protest films: the insider who has been granted enlightenment and becomes a scourge. In Michael Clayton he is a fixer in a law firm,looking a bit dishevelled,holding life together with scotch tape,whose partner begins to fall apart, undresses at a hearing then disappears to collect incrimnating evidence agains the company his law firm is representing. Clooney finally discovers his partner is on to scumbaggery and ....I won't reveal the plot but remember Clooney played a similar role in Syriana.
What has this to do with 2A6. Connect to Edward Said's view of the intellectual as outsider. Said is pluggling into the tradition that only someone who is outside the system can expose and bring it down. There is a long tradition of this ,notably Isaac Deutscher's view of Spinoza, Freud, and Marx, who as Jewish outsiders could see through the hypocrisy of the system . But are we forgetting the sunversive insider.e'g Clooney. Gorbachev, who ended communism ,was a vintage insider,women who had made it helped bring down Enron. (This kind of insider is to be distinguished from C.E.O's who ruin their companies and receive large bonuses.)Can you think of other examples of the redeemed insider.

J,S Mill

2007-09-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Greetings to all. I'm starting the blog again Here is one from the colourful/notorious Ted Honderich on J.S Mill http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/MillAndLiberalism.html

Cities

2007-03-12T12:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a good background to our course
http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/pdf/v2/n4/McNeill.pdf

Definitions

2007-02-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

Here are a a few of the definitions that Deirdre and Liz asked about. I was going to draw on dictionaries of political science and philosophy but decided instead to begin at the beginning:the Oxford dictionary hence:
The State:2. a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government: the state of Israel.• an organized political community or area forming part of a federal republic: the German state of Bavaria. • ( the States ) informal term for United States.
Note the two definitions, Germany is a state, but so is maine,the latter being part of the United States....something like Province in our country...oops I mean state
Here is one for this week:

2. conservatism
Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions. In this ‘organic’ form it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, ...
(From The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy in Religion & Philosophy)

and here is another
Nationalism
Is a concept that arose in the 19th c. among peoples who became aware of their national identity without having a national state; in these cases nationalism had first to be affirmed linguistically and culturally, then be given political embodiment. In France, the state came first, and over the centuries created the nation, so that the roots of national self-consciousness can be traced long before the concept or word existed. French nationalism was clearly one of the driving forces of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, but the word nationalisme appeared in a dictionary only in 1874.

West Thought: Reprise

2006-12-30T15:33:00.000-08:00

Finally the winter break and a chance to flee West Civ. But there is no place to hide from the smatterings of western thought that are always with us. The first film I saw was "the History Boys" This is the film version of a successful play that first opened in London and is now being acclaimed on Broadway. It is about a group of High Schools Students(our term-they call the A level students) preparing for exams to get them into Oxford. They bring in a slick tutor whose only concern is that they pass.His job is to turn them into upbeat versions of Cole's notes,who are able to pour out colourful versions of what the examiners want. His antithesis is an old teacher who loves poetry and thinks that the purpose of West Thought is to is to enhance and to civilize. For him Knowledge is eros- too much eros as it turns out.
Then just as I was settling in with last week's issue of "The Economist" to denounce those who use their god given free will to perpetrate mayhem and chaos I stumbled into this article which pronounces the impending victory of determinism.
Attempting comic relief I rented "The Devil Wears Prada" which,as it turns out, is the story of a female Machiavellian who runs a fashion magazine where there is little room for waverers and the faint of heart. I think Machiavelli would have found her grotesque.As is often the case with Hollywood films about brutal business or military leaderrs this one ends in an orgy of sentimentality designed to show the "just like the rest of us" qualities of the hero(ine ) of the film
To end the year on an upbeat note, one of the Globe's more interesting reporters,Doug Saunders gives 2006 a much neededboost

Individualism

2006-12-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

Here is a point we may have forgotten.Freedom is not an innate idea,embedded in our hearts at birth.It is a western construct.But neither is it foreign to us as human beings. Since the end of worl war 2 most cultures have come to pay homage to freedom but, the author claims,freedom cannot be imposed upon people's who have no experience of freedom or no language of freedom,or who equate freedom and anarchy. We have seen that in the age of science and corporate power it is a concept fraught with difficulties -Remember Kant on determinism and Kafka on the individual in corporate cultures.

Reading

2006-12-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a wise quote from a blog by the critic Terry Teachout,who took it from a blog called "The Reading Experience" that was quoting Marly Youmansi

. . .it is in rereading that a story or poem reveals itself—and tells us the extent of its merit. Most reviewers know only the first cursory passage through a work when they pen a review; a reader can know more. Though life is short and art long, we ought to reread often, because it is there that we “dive,” as Melville would say.

Individualism ,free press

2006-12-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/weekinreview/03myers.html?ref=weekinreview

Here is an argument against press control in Russia. Conspiracy theories abound in countries where no one believes what is in the press. Does freedom of the press avoid this problem?

Bon Mots

2006-11-25T06:51:00.000-08:00

Mr. Dion is the outsider from within the party, whereas they are the establishment candidates, an ironic twist for Mr. Ignatieff, who spent most of the past 30 years outside the country, and for Mr. Rae, who spent all 30 years outside the party.
jeffrey Simpson Globe and Mail Sept.24

Knowledge vs bullshit

2006-11-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

Here http://www.powells.com/tnr/review/2006_11_02 is a review of Harry Frankfurt's new volume On Truth which is the successor to his very successful monograph "on Bullshit." Regarding the latter, the reviewer (Simon Blackburn ) writes:'Frankfurt put his finger on on the esential characteristic of the bullshitter,which distinguishes him from the liar.The latter is concerned to communicate something false as if it is true.The former is iondifferent as to whether what he communicates is true or false,"

Multiculturalism

2006-11-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

Multiculturalism is central to Canada's self image, to what it is to be a Canadian,and to the curriculum of teh Arts and Science program But multiculturalism is not without problems. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061120.COSHEEMA20/TPStory/?query=multiculturalism
Here is an article by a Muslim woman on one of the most difficult issues of multiculturalism,namely how our respect for different cultures might conflict with women's rights.

Knowledge,Descartes

2006-11-18T07:11:00.000-08:00

An http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061120crbo_books article about Descartes in the New Yorker, written by Anthony Gottlieb,author of "The Dream of Reason," a highly readable history of western thought from the Greeks to the early modern period.
The article emphasizes the point that in his own time Descartes was better known as a scientist than as a philosopher, his life as a wanderer, that God not the self was the centre of his philsophy, and that he was desperately anxious to unite the mind and the body-so are we all. Sadly, he was discovered by Court ladies and amateur intellectuals before he was taken seriously in any university.

Individualism: Capitalism versus Social democracy

2006-10-17T13:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/magazine/15leftist.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Here is the website of a New york times article on the issues we discuss in the works of Hayek and Dewey. Here is a similar debate in contemporary China

Individualism,Calvinism,Capitalism

2006-10-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

Max Weber's celebrated (and derided) thesis about the link between capitalism and calvinism still lives on.There is no smoking gun to decisively prove the thesis but there is tantalizing circumstantial evidence. Here is a review of a biography of the celebrated mogul , philantropist and strikebreaker Andrew Carnegie. He is a vintage specimen of the capitalist/calvinist ethos, and though a disciple of the now forgotten Herbert Spencer he came toAmerica from Scotland ,a Calvinist country http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/12/AR2006101201097.html

Determinism

2006-10-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the speech of the Elder in GB Shaw'Too True to be Good" on the seismic shock felt in the twenties thirties by the discovery that Newton's laws didn't work in the realm of microphysics.
"yes sir: the universe of Isaac newton , which has been an imprgnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years,has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before teh criticism of Einstein. Newton's universe was the stonghold of rational determinism:the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws:and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms,there too we found electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal laws.Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment,and it was dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Evrything was calculable: everything happened because it must: the commandmenst were erased from the tables of the law;and in their place came teh cosmic algebra: the equations of mathematicians. here wa my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility: I who scorned alike the Catholic wit his dogma of free will,and the Protestant with his pretence of private judgment. And now -now-. The orbit of the elctron obeys no law:it chooses one path and rejects another:what is left of it:...all is caprice...p.84

Religion

2006-10-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2150548/?nav=tap3
Here is a link that helps us understand the decline of Judaism, Protestantism and Catholicism in recent years

Individualism

2006-09-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

Another view of the "great Individual"is given in the Andy Warhol show at AGO in Toronto. David Cronenberg's taped commentary is a model of how to think about Art.
Warhol gives us individuals ehibiting their moment of celebrity-with the shadow of death hovering over them

Individualism

2006-09-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

One way to think of this course is as a study in obsessions in western thought because "individualism" "reason" etc. Have come to have this character. Obsessions are sometimes strange. I am told there was a band called "rage against the machine" (contra industrialism) a name that seemed strange when you consider that their electronic instruments were examples of the machines they were raging against
In another vein the great film director David Lean has given us a number of films on the pathos of the great individual. "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia" are films about heroic individuals who overreached themselves(a theme in Greek Tragedy) Dr. Zhivago is about an individual truing to survive as an individual in time of revolution"

Marxism

2006-09-13T18:08:00.001-07:00

Tony Judt's article in the most recent New York Review of Books is a fine account of one of the seminal books on Marxism, Main Currents in Marxism"by Lesez Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher. It is more than another death of Marxism article , it is an attempt to discover those strengths that made Marxism so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It end by warning that world economic conditions make the return of Marxism a possibility.
The book itself is too detailed for review in an undergraduate class, but Judt's article is ideal

Marxism

2006-09-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Tony Judt's article in the most recent New York Review of Books is a fine account of one of the seminal books on Marxism, "Main Currents in Marxism"by Lesez Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher. It is more than another death of Marxism article , it is an attempt to discover those strengths that made Marxism so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. It end by warning that world economic conditions make the return of Marxism a possibility.
The book itself is too detailed for review in an undergraduate class, but Judt's article is ideal

Multimedia

2006-09-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

I have two items that you might want to consider for your essays. The first is for anyone doing Calvin It is an LP of "The Pilgrim's Progress- a vivid and once popular account of the Christian life, The second, very relevant for anyone doing Hayek, or Dewey, is a set of DVD's called"the Commanding Heights, on the controversy between Keynes and Hayek over the policies that cause and that avert economic disaster,
These both can be reviewed as audios or videos,

Commonplace

2006-09-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

A commonplace book is a reading diary. Sometimes it consisted of comments and responses to the book the author of the diary was reading and sometimes it consisted of direct quotes. Terry Teachout's blog on the Arts About Last Night discusses plays, novels and music, (he writes for several magazines)but has a popular section of quotes called "Almanac) I've already posted one quote-about universities- Here is another set from Michael Dirda's "Book by Book"-notes on reading and life-itself a kind of Common place book (Michael Dirda has been a reviewer for the Washington Post for two decades)

Every day one should at least hear one little song,read one good poem, see one fine painting and-if at all possible-speak a few sensible words.p.2 Goethe(The last one is the hardest(L.G)

If a thing is worth doing,it is worth doing badly p.26 G.K Chesterton

Genuine Criticism will never seek to prove but to point out.p.100 E.Curtiss

Caress the details,the divine details... what colour was the bottle containing the arsenic with which Madame Bovary poisoned herself.p132 Vladimir Nabokov

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before,but in saying exactly what you think yourself (p.131) Leslie Stephen

My favorite
I have never worked in a coal mine or a uranium mine,or in a herring trawler;but I know from experience that working in a bank from 9:15 to 3:20,and once in four weeks the whole of Saturday, with two weeks holiday a year,was a rest cure compared to teaching in a school.(p.9) T.S. Eliot

Industrialism

2006-09-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

Rennee Dubos "The goat has probably contributed even more than modern bulldozers to the destruction of land and the creation of deserts" Another take on environmentalism
The goat and teh elephant have done as much damages as we have. What would Al Gore Say?

Aquinas

2006-09-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a fine specimen of Aquinas use of the "disputatio" as a style of exposition. Note the various stages(1) His position (2) Range of propositions that oppose him (3) his arguments againsg his opponents. Notice also the bland lucidity of his style. The problem of "just war"is,of course , still with us and Aquinas' views are still the starting point.

INDIVIDUALISM:Calvin

2006-08-14T12:18:00.000-07:00

Calvin has an undeservedly bad name nowadays. He is known in popular culture as the founder of Puritanism,(meaning the morality of super uptightness) the enemy of the laid back. In the sixties when people claimed they were discovering leisure, ethnic food and sexual ecstacy Calvin was the symbol of what they claimed they were shaking free of. He symbolized what was called "the Protestant Ethic" a big drag I hope we'll see that Calvin should be treated with respect and there are several sources that do.
First there is Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" which makes Calvin the most important founder of the modern world. A good instance of practical Calvinism(mentioned by Weber) is "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" a great read about a life of discipline. Franklin was the kind of person we resolve to be after we have debauched ourselves(I'm too old for this) on New Year's eve. he coined phrases such as "a penny saved is a penny earned." Another great presentation of calvinism is Bunyan's"the Pilgrim's Progress.

-"on the benefits of university"

2006-08-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

This should cheer you up. From a review by Martha Nussbaum, of EXCELLENCE WITHOUT A SOUL. How a great university forgot education. By Harry R. Lewis. 288pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $26. - 1 58648 393 5.in TLS July 14

Of the eighteen US Presidents since 1900, however, only seven went, as undergraduates, to any Ivy League institution.
(Harry Truman never went to college at all.) Among the various people who represent or govern me as a resident of Illinois, only one had even a passing connection, as an undergraduate, to the Ivy League. I conjecture that a similar story would emerge from a study of leaders in business, journalism and the arts. Bill Gates himself dropped out of Harvard in his third year and never finished college

The State

2006-08-11T09:19:00.001-07:00

Fareed Zakaria's "The Future of Freedom" is manageable, thoughtful and discusses a significant chunk of the material in our coursepack. Chapter 1 is a brief survey of some of our topics.Zakaria is very smart.He is the editor of Newsweek International and hosts a TV program on current affairs(available on the web).A Newsweek coumnist once told me that he and his colleagues are trained to write prose that can be read in a dentist's office. Zakaria meets this standard even though he deals with weighty subjects.
This book raises a forgotten question:what is the difference between a liberal society and a democratic one. We will consider this question when we consider Locke and RouseauBriefly, a liberal society gives priority to free speech, freedom of the press,and an independent judiciary. A democratic society calls for the rule of the people. As we know the people don't always want free institutions. Plato argued that a domcratic society was one step towards tyranny. During the Cold war someone asked a sampling of Americans to give their opinions on the Bill of Rights in the American Constiution,without telling them its source. The majority thought it was Bolshevik text.
Zakaria argues that one of the tensions between the west and the rest of the world is that in the west we moved from liberal societies to democratic ones, whereas in the rest fo the world is moving towards democracy without first having adopted the above named institutions of liberalism. Alarming he notes that these very institutions are under attack in America.

Miscellaneous

2006-08-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

Many students ask about Wikipedia Here is an interesting and to me authoritative article on the subject from the New Yorker According to the author Wikipedia has a spectrum of reliability ranging from the article on "Global Warming" which one of Wikipedia's critics claims is the the best article on this subject in print, to articles on a subjects such as G.W.Bush which are revised every few minutes. (I've seen articles on controversial subjects which change several times a day) One person who worked for Wikipedia sums it all up by saying Wikipedia"gives no privelege to those who know what they're talking about." Check with other sources

2006-08-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hobbes

A number of years ago a friend of mine created a sensation by writing an article showing that Clint Eastwood's "Fistful of Dollars" was a great commentary on the philosophy of Hobbes. At that time the idea of finding philosophical ideas in popular culture was outlandish-movies were for escape ,not for study. Today there are lots of philosophical books and article about films ("The Matrix" is a favorite)
I thought the best presentation of Hobbes on film was Scorsese's "The Gangs of New York (see A.O Scott's review Dec.20 2002) It ends with a ruthless display of force by the state to crush the riots and gang war that plagued New York during the Civil war,thus allowing the city to emerge into the New York we all love.Do you buy this?

2006-08-05T10:03:00.000-07:00

UTILITARIANISM: J.S.MILL,We will be discussing Utilitarianism when we come to John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism is associated with the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number, and Jeremy Bentham's calculus of pleasure and pain.Many consider it a trivial philosophy, yet utilitarianism is championed by
Peter Singer now at Princeton. Singer is very controversial.He argues (roughly )his version of utilitarianism is concerned with pain, and starting with the premise (I am oversimplifying) that pain is evil arrives at support for abortion as well as for euthanasia. His arrival at Princeton was marked by demonstrations and other expressions of outrage. His critics accuse him of taking ideas and driving them over a cliff. He has a liberationist side . He is one of the most famous champions of animal rights, and the uses of Darwin in ethics.
His web site is excellent and has reference to many of his articles. Feel free to choose one for your tutorial essay.

2006-08-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

CONTEMPORARY:
While I was in London (England that is) I stopped in to see Tom Stoppard's new play "Rock and Roll" (Check out the review by John Lahr in the New Yorker Set in England and Czechoslovakia,it is a memoir of the last days of communism and of the hopes raised by a succession of alternatives to communism:the Czech Spring of 1968,socialism with a human face etc. It suggests throughout that when all has failed there is still Rock and Roll. I know many of you will sympathize with this apotheosis. I like Rock and Roll(my son is a musician) but I would say ,when all is said and done there is still Chinese food.The play is rather depressing but ends with ecstatic vusuals of the great Rock musicians: Rolling Stones etc. The material is promising but the play is unfocussed. I have a copy with an introduction by Stoppard if you want to do an essay on it In a cast of excellent actors the strongest character is Max, the old unreconstructed Bolshevik who has the best lines including app.I'm a Eurovegetarian ,I eat lambchops.

2006-08-04T19:49:00.000-07:00

THE STATE Here is the first in a series of views of the state(ignore the references to the Lebanese war.) Thecommon wisdom holds we live in a post state era, one in which the state is superseded by international organizations which together make up globalized world. Timothy Garton Ash, renowned columnist who became famous for his reports on the fall of communism, thinks that this view is too neat ,that the world is much messier.

2006-06-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Here is a short article on liberalism, a topic connected to Individualism, from the Guardian

Liberal