There is a trend in intellectual histories of the 20th century that involves blaming philosophers for unpleasant events. The implication is strong that the philosophers have erred, but the books never quite get around to showing the problems in their philosophical investigations, nor do they point the correct alternative philosophies. Richard Rorty reviews another unreasonable book from Richard Wolin of that genre. Humanists want the foundations of philosophy to to demonstrate that humanism is right, that good is better than evil, democracy is the best, and so forth. Philosophers can find no such proofs, and so are attacked. Their thinking isn't debated, but instead these types of books amount to ad hominem attacks on their lifestyles, political choices, and so on. This one was a Nazi, that one into gay S&M, he seduced grad students, she was anti-Semitic, the young were corrupted, and the other lied; all the while never advancing philosophical alternatives. Rorty points out that these philosophers' real crime is to be popular. Readers like philosophers that proclaim that "God is Dead" and the "End of Philosophy" in their discussions of the problems in metaphysics. When other philosophers, such as the 19th century American Pragmatists, find the same problems in metaphysics in less dramatic language, they sell less books, and are not subject to personal attacks.

Sometimes these attacks are presented as attacks on the Po-Mo left, but
that is a mistaken projection by these writers that feel they are defending civilization. Darlings of the Neo-Con right like Leo Strauss, and Catholic theologians like Karl Rahner also find the same problems in metaphysics, and then are all philosophers that find there problems in the foundations that Plato lay down. Philosophy advances by recognizing these issues and thinking new thoughts. That is what keeps a civilization dynamic. It is unreasonable absolutists on the left and right, and lazy polemicists from the Sunday supplements, who are stuck demanding that philosophers provide us with secure foundations, without rolling up their sleeves and going into the basement themselves.  ¶ 12:25 AM 0 comments

  I peruse Edge's website once a month to see what's stimulating there. The Julian Barbour article, a few years back, was pretty stimulating, but unfortunately most of the "original" thinkers on Edge appear to have gone through the similar indoctrinations. Jaron Lanier appears to have good instincts, possibly because he got started without having his mind coerced by the, err, finest institutions of higher learning that the rest of the Edge gang appear to have traveled through--like fresh food travels through me!

Earlier Danny Hillis proposes "ARISTOTLE" a computer based personal tutor as an educational improvement. Should work, not! There's merely the trivial matter of getting a computing device to think first! It's possible that with sufficient computing power, we may get very good simulations someday. Maybe good enough to simulate a tutor, but I don't see it.

The latest Edge essay is from Paul Bloom insisting that dualism is "required", especially by religion. I don't think the Tao or Zen Buddhism requires dualism. And since Vatican II catholic theologians have also been questioning the need for dualism--e.g. this text from Thomas Sheehan at a colloquium at Loyola. File under: stuck inside the Cartesian box with the subject-object dualism blues again.  ¶ 4:40 PM 0 comments

  When Baghdad ruled the world: here's a map of the Muslim world in 1500. The Reconquista of Iberia had finished only eight years earlier. In the original Muslim conquest--here's a map from 750 years earlier--Muslim armies had pushed north of the Pyrenees.  ¶ 11:40 PM 0 comments

  This opinion piece on the Iraq war finds an analogy in mythology.

Agamemnon's dream came after nine years of the Trojan War. Did September 11, coming 11 years after the first Gulf War and the failure to go on to Baghdad, give George W Bush the false dream that he could at last finish the business? Mr. Bush is the commander-in-chief. Did he, believing himself inspired by what he calls, to Bob Woodward, his 'higher father', lead his people to disaster? And has young Blair, like Nestor, accepted where he should have doubted, and thrown in his own people's lot with the deluded king?

No, the author decides. But good use of "historical" analogy!  ¶ 9:25 PM 0 comments

  With the hullabaloo about the photographs of torture by American jailers in Baghdad I remembered this passage from an article on psy-ops in the war, The Secret War:

Arab toughs cannot tolerate insults to their manhood. So, as American armored columns pushed down the road to Baghdad, 400-watt loudspeakers mounted on Humvees would, from time to time, blare out in Arabic that Iraqi men are impotent. The Fedayeen, the fierce but undisciplined and untrained Iraqi irregulars, could not bear to be taunted. Whether they took the bait or saw an opportunity to attack, many Iraqis stormed out of their concealed or dug-in positions, pushing aside their human shields in some cases to be slaughtered by American tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

Despicable and unacceptable as the behavior of the prison guards was, will the net effect be to tame some individuals that believed being martyred is a quick way to get to heaven, but are now considering the possibility they might be captured? File under asymmetrical warfare.  ¶ 9:55 AM 0 comments

  Sofia asked me why I started Ereignis. It was mainly to learn this web and HTML stuff, back in 1995. I learn practical things best by doing rather than reading about them, so I decided to create a website that people would find useful, to give me feedback, so I could improve it, and learn some more.

At first I considered making a site on the best band out there, but I found there were already several sites on The Fall, and Nick Cave was also covered. I had always been interested philosophy so I looked for philosophy web sites and discovered that the only philosophy web sites listed on Yahoo (the web's table of contents back then) were for Ayn Rand and a couple of swamis. The field was wide open.

I decided to narrow the scope to something I could do a decent job for. I had more books by or about Sartre than any other philosopher but my interest in him had peaked in my late teenage years, while I was finding Wittgenstein and Heidegger more interesting, and I had more on the latter. So I searched the web for anything related to Heidegger and found a handful of papers that people had posted. The internet already had ftp sites with philosophy documents before the web came along. I also found pages on other unrelated Heideggers, and pages in languages I could not read. I collected the links to the pages on Martin Heidegger in English, turned them into a web page, signed up for a web hosting account on webcom.com, and posted the page.

I named the site Ereignis because in German it means "event" and I understood visiting a web page as an event. The web is not static, it changes over time, and a page appearing in a browser is an event. Dasein was another option for a page on Heidegger, but it seemed rather silly as the name of a web site. I didn't want to call it the Heidegger Home Page because that seemed too presumptive. Any day someone that understood Heidegger better could do a better job, and then having a site presuming to be his "home page" would ring wrong.  ¶ 4:31 PM

  Got a Gmail account. The address is enowning at gmail.com.  ¶ 4:35 PM 0 comments