Because I would not stop for Death…

… he kindly dropped by my office for a photo opp. This is William Holloway, Philosophy major, completing a creative assignment for another class.

Music update

I’ve been to two chamber music concerts this year, both of them excellent. The first was last September, with the Shanghai Quartet. They played fascinating, difficult, and very compelling pieces by Penderecki and Yi-Wen Jiang. They have an incredibly balanced tone — very unified, and highly expressive. But it was their performance of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” that stole the show. I recently purchased a recording of the Emerson Quartet playing the piece, and blasted it while home alone yesterday afternoon. Schubert is, as the cognoscenti all say, friggin’ awesome, and that piece just rocks. An added plus: the Shaghai’s cello player, Nicholas Tzavaras, looked a lot like Schubert, and I had the chance to chat with him over wine and snacks afterwards. Very interesting guy.

Last night we heard the Claremont Trio, with guest clarinetist Jonathan Cohler. They played Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and did well by each, though I usually find Mendelssohn’s music sort of muddled: it’s like Brahms, but without the emotional purity, and not complicated in a way that speaks to me. In their second half they played Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” — a strange, mystical work that maintains a very high tension over a long time, and is hugely unpredictable. It left me in a sort of welcomed daze. Messiaen wrote the work while a POW in a German camp during WW2, and performed it with a couple of imprisoned fellow musicians in a bitter January, 1941. No word on how the fellow prisoners felt about it. Probably not a Johnny Cash/Folsom Prison sort of deal.

And a recent purchase: a boogie-woogie style version of Khatchatourian’s “Russian Sabre Dance” on a 78 — soon to be featured in an upcoming video, to be sure.

Ladyman and Ross, Every Thing Must Go

I recently finished this book, which aims at correcting current ways of doing metaphysics by insisting that metaphysicians take seriously what contemporary physics tells us about the world.

The problem is that “many” (I guess) contemporary metaphysicians suppose that the world, ultimately, is composed of tiny, billiard-ball like particles, which bang in to each other, and somehow generate the macroscopic world we experience. Sure, there are supposed to be some complications coming from the direction of quantum mechanics, but metaphysicians typically suppose that whatever complications there are may be safely ignored.

Not so, say these guys. Lots of claims passing for “apriori” or “intuitively certain” among metaphysicians are just false, if we take physics seriously. The positive campaign of this book is to show what a scientifically-respectable metaphysics would look like. As it turns out, we are wrong to think of thing-like particles as fundamental. What’s fundamental, it seems, are certain structures best described through mathematics, from which we derive claims about so-called “particles” and “waves” and “fields”. So what’s real, ultimately, are structures. Further down the road, we discover that these structures somehow contribute, at some level of analysis, to “patterns,” which we may identify as macroscopic objects (including you and me), and their characteristic behaviors. Structures and patterns; that’s it. Every thing must go!

I skimmed 80% of the book, since I’m not well-educated enough to follow all the science. But I hope I’ve come through with a roughly accurate summary. I like the way it confirms Nz’s view that we are wrong to let our grammar determine our ontology, and Spinoza’s view that individuals aren’t genuinely real, when all is said and done. But I’m wary, since more than once I’ve read something like this and entered into discussion with physicists, only to discover I’ve been sold a bill of goods. It really does frustrate me that there’s no easy way to get a decent synopsis of all this important stuff, and incorporate it into philosophy, without doing all the real work required to have a thorough understanding. What’s a lazy guy like me to do?

James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible

Most readers are probably familiar with the Documentary Hypothesis. The basic idea is that the Bible, as an artifact, is best explained by supposing that it is a compilation of several ancient texts, written by different people in different times and cultures. Somebody (“the Redactor,” maybe Ezra) compiled many of the texts by the third century BCE. This explains why not all of the stories fit smoothly together; why there are two accounts of creation, and two accounts of the ten commandments; and why the style varies so much. Moreover, as one delves into the Bible along with archeology and the study of ancient civilizations, one begins to suspect that many of the stories served quite different purposes that the ones uninformed readers project upon the stories nowadays — or, indeed, from the first century CE onward.

An example. After Moses and the Jews have left Egypt, they get into a battle with the Amelekites (Exodus 17). Moses’s plan is to have Joshua command the Israelites while Moses stands atop a nearby hill and holds up his hands. So long as Moses’s hands are outstretched, the Israelites do well; but if he lets them drop, they begin to fail. Moses’s arms get tired, so his helpers give him a rock to sit on and help prop up his arms, and the Israelites eventually prevail.

Weird story. What does it mean? Jewish commentators say something along the lines of, “So long as we turn up our hands in supplication to the Lord, we have his favor.” Christian readers suggest that Moses, in stretching out his arms, foreshadowed the crucifixion, and the victory over death. But compare these readings to a more ordinary hypothesis. The name of the place where the battle takes place, Rephidim, resembles a Hebrew phrase meaning “spread out” or “prop up.” When you say the name aloud, it sounds sort of like you are saying “the hands grew weak.” So maybe, in the area, there was a prominent hill with a couple of rocks on top of it, called “Rephidim,” and the Moses story was invented to explain how the hill got its name. My family when I was growing up similarly made up all sorts of stories about how “Sheboygan” got its name, all of them invoking an ancient Indian who was disappointed at his wife’s inability to give birth to a daughter (“She boy again!” Har har).

Kugel, in this book, provides many similar etiological hypotheses (explaining weird stories as attempts to explain how a place got its name, or why we have some expression, or why two groups don’t get along, and so on). The overall effect is twofold. On the one hand, the Bible becomes a very interesting and complicated text from which you might be able to learn a lot about how ancient people saw their world, as well as how they tried to explain it. On the other hand, a lot of divine significance is drained from the work. Many allegedly inspired and inspiring stories turn out to be just about as rich as my old “Sheboygan” stories.

What’s fascinating is that Kugel is an Orthodox Jew, and so he really wants to revere the text, though his reverence is challenged by his considerable expertise and knowledge. He ends up with the following view. Yes, there are humdrum natural explanations for everything in this old, complicated text. But what makes it sacred are the layers and layers of interpretations that commentators have shellacked over it for centuries. The text has managed to hold the fascination of brilliant scholars for all that time, and the interpretations are wondrous, and somewhere in all that lies the sanctity of the work.

I’m glad this works for Kugel, and I’m hesitant to ask whether he’d also revere any work that supported wild misinterpretations over several generations. (He does give a groovy religious reading of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes,” so I’m guessing this possibility has already occurred to him.) This seems to me to be clearly a case of denying what he knows to be true, and hiding behind a thin veil of hermeneutics.

This is a fascinating book, though — highly readable and well-informed (I guess, but what do I know?). I really think it needs to be read by anyone who wants to take the Bible seriously, or by anyone who wants to get a clearer picture of how this book — the most influential one in the western world, by far — came to be written.

Free will fictionalism

Let’s first assume determinism is true, at least with respect to all human actions.

Next, let’s agree that we inevitably talk and think about what we could do, or could have done, even if we end up doing or having done something else. That’s what deliberation is: mapping out what we could do, predicting results, and making a decision. And that is what happens when we are deciding whether to praise or blame someone for what they did: we are assigning value to a behavior that need not have come about. Even card-carrying compatibilists do this. They may say that all behavior is determined, but when they start talking about the faculties or mechanisms in a human being from which free decisions are made, they always end up talking about the general capacities of those faculties or mechanisms, which means the wide range of decisions they are able to produce, in some range of circumstances. I submit that this ends up being disguised talk about being able to do otherwise. Free actions, according to the compatibilists, are actions that stem from faculties that would have behaved differently, had reasons for different actions been present. But that’s just to say I could have done otherwise, if I had had reason to.

So all of us talk seriously about being able to do otherwise, even though the truth is that no one ever can do otherwise. So this serious talk about free will is just so much fiction. But it is useful and beneficial fiction. By pretending that we have free will, and by holding people accountable for what they do in a free-will sort of way, we create systems of incentives and disincentives which then act as causal determinants for behavior in the future. So when you steal my coconut, and we blame you for the theft, and sentence you to cleaning the hut, we make it less likely that you or others who witness your punishment will steal coconuts in the future. It may be true — though how on earth would anyone prove it? — that a society which believes in the fiction of free will ends up with better-regulated social behavior than a society of genuine, “no talk of freedom” determinists, whether hard or soft.

The phenomenology of trying to do philosophy while in the middle of a semester

It’s like this. You’re really hungry for beans. But first you need to wash the pot. But then you need a sponge — where is it? Then the phone rings. It’s the guy who took your sponge. Why did he take the sponge, and why is he calling to tell you? Rats, the water is overflowing. Remember, you want the beans. But first, you need to find the pot again; you set it down somewhere. Is that guy still on the phone? Can I find another sponge? And so on.

Final causes

My friend Kleiner has been trying for years to get me to understand what final causes really are supposed to be. When I’ve talked about them in various classes, I’ve always called them the ‘pulling cause’: a final cause pulls the little acorn into becoming an oak, pulls the embryon into becoming a human, etc. I suppose I gained this understanding through studying early modern philosophers, who routinely ridicule the doctrine of final causes as a clear example of using some later state (i.e., adult oak) to explain the behavior of an earlier thing (acorn). That would be backward causation, and silly and stupid and wrong.

But Kleiner has insisted this ‘pulling’ account is all wrong, and now I think I get it. Aristotle never intends to use later states to explain earlier ones — in fact (I am told), he somewhere denies this is even possible. Instead, when Aristotle defines the four causes, he is identifying four ways in which we might try to account for a thing or its behavior. We might point to the stuff it’s made of, or the way its parts are organized, or what caused it to come into existence, or what the point of its behavior is. And the fact is, we do appeal to accounts of the last sort all the time. We ask, “Why is the dog circling before it lays down?” and “Why is the turle coming to shore?” and “Why do cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds’ nests?” and we expect some answer which points to the fruitfulness of this behavior. And when we do this, we don’t mean to commit ourselves to any sort of spooky backward causation. We are just identifying the function/role/purpose of that behavior. In evolutionary terms, when we’re explaining behaviors or features of organisms, we want to know what purpose the behavior or features serve, such that they were at one time selected for rather than against.

OK. Now consider this very interesting passage from Aristotle’s Physics, book 2, part 8:

“A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this – in order that the crop might be spoiled – but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity – the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food – since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just as they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his ‘man-faced ox-progeny’ did.

“Such are the arguments (and others of the kind) which may cause difficulty on this point. Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view. For teeth and all other natural things either invariably or normally come about in a given way; but this is not true of the results of chance or spontaneity. We do not ascribe to chance or mere coincidence the frequency of rain in winter, but we do to frequent rain in summer; nor heat in the dog-days, but only when we have it in winter. So if it is agreed generally that things are either the result of coincidence or for an end, and some things cannot be the result of coincidence, then it follows that they must be for an end; and that such things are all due to nature even the champions of the theory which is before us would agree. Therefore action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.”

The view Aristotle describes, and then goes on to dismiss, is evolution through natural selection. EXACTLY. Some lucky folks happen to get sharp teeth up front, and flat ones in the back, and that works out well for them, and they out-eat everyone else, and the others perish, and the good teeth creatures have kids with good teeth, etc. But Aristotle dismisses this idea because, he says, if an event or thing comes about by chance, that simply means that it does not come about regularly. Anything that comes about regularly, he says, must come about for an end. And that means it is not chancy, but end-related.

I can’t figure out what this means. At first, what Aristotle seems to be ignoring is the possibility that something can first come about by chance, and then become regular (and so lose its chanciness). So the teeth come about, and then it proves to be useful, and so those with them outsurvive the others, etc. Or is he saying that the fact that the feature becomes regular itself indicates that there must be some purpose the feature is serving? That makes some sense. After all, it’s no accident that the animals with the usefully-arranged teeth flourish; it’s the fact that the teeth are useful that explains this. So, in this sense, their flourishing is not by chance. But then why is Aristotle saying there is anything wrong with the natural selection model? That seems to be exactly what the model is claiming. So who does he imagine his opponents to be? Maybe he is disputing the claim that a feature can only seem to come about for a purpose without really coming about for that purpose. But then that would mean that it is simply incoherent to say that the good dentition itself came about by chance, but turned out to be useful. I’m trying to see the incoherence about this, but I can’t. Can’t something come about for no end, but persist because of an end? Is the problem that he is taking the claim “that things are either the result of coincidence or for an end” too severely, and not allowing for mixed cases? That seems to be the problem, though I can’t see what would motivate him to propound this “law” so forcefully.

My flat-footed filosophy

For whatever reason, I’ve felt the need lately to try to articulate my broader philosophical view. And that’s always fun to share, especially when someone points out problems. So here goes.

CH’s principles of philosophy

1. My metaphysics ought to be continuous with science. I don’t deny that there are significant controversies within science, nor that there will be advances in science which supersede what is now taken as true. But nothing that I come up with about the natural world will be better grounded than what scientists largely presume as they go about doing their research, so it would be foolish not to take advantage of what they have been able to put together.

Chiefly, I draw the following from science:

I. Ontology of masses, events, forces, relations, etc.: I believe that, ultimately, the things that exist, along with their properties and relations, are those described by physics. Everything else is some kind of human invention or manner of speaking. For a wide variety of reasons, we find it useful and illuminating to speak of species, societies, art, rights, opinions, prejudices, colors, mutations, love, and so on, but all of these phenomena emerge, or seem to emerge, out of an overall picture which is itself generated out of the materials physics describes. It is a lot like “cloud-spotting” with a friend: you point out the cloud that looks like a crab, or a horse’s head, and from that description your friend is able to see what you see in it, but some shapes are more clearly identified than others, and none of them have very much to do with what’s really in the cloud. There is something about the cloud, surely, which allows it to be identified as crab-shaped rather than flower-shaped, but the crab-shapedness also has something to do with the perspective you have upon the cloud, together with the various sightings of crabs you have enjoyed, and the similarities between your sightings and those of your friend’s. Another way of putting this: physics tracks the primary properties of the universe, and any property not tracked by physics is a secondary property (or tertiary, if any Lockeans are reading).

(My attitude here is very reductionistic. I just can’t shake the belief that what the big stuff does is determined by the behavior of the smaller stuff which composes it. “Holistic” seems to me a synonym for “magic.”)

II. Denial of both determinism and contra-causal freedom: Small-scale events, like quantum phenomena, are frequently indeterministic: there is and can be no full explanation for why they happen. Somehow, they all sum up to large-scale events which are fully deterministic. Every large scale event can be (in principle) fully explained, and could not have been otherwise. In particular, human behavior is fully determined, and nothing a human does could have been done otherwise.

III. Denial of objective values: the universe does not prefer any state of affairs to any other. Every actual state is equally natural.

IV. Denial of special mental facts: consciousness emerges ultimately from the ontology of physics, and no souls or spirits or irreducible phenomenal properties are required to account for human experience.

2. My account of ethics needs to remain true to my metaphysics. From the above account, I am committed to believing that moral values are in the “cloud-spotting” category: entities of our perception, or secondary qualities, with only a loose grounding in what is real. Indeed, I think the grounding here is very, very loose.

I. Morality is rooted in an error. When we think in moral terms, we assume the truth of contra-causal freedom. We believe people have genuine choices, at least from time to time, and ought to be held accountable for those choices. When we make a claim of the form “I could have done X,” I think we typically mean: if I had been slightly different in my desires or beliefs, or attitudes, I would have done X. That’s true, but irrelevant, since of course I was not different in those ways, and could not have been, given the truth of determinism for large-scale events. So moral thinking requires some “let’s pretend,” or some forgetting (to paraphrase Nietzsche). We may be able to distinguish those determined actions whose principal causes lie outside an agent’s realm of typical control from those which lie within it (compatibilism), and there is some overlap between this distinction and many common distinctions between “free” and “compelled” action, but it’s not a perfect match.

II. But it sure is effective. The interesting thing is what emerges from this sloppy thinking: moral norms, or rules and principles, which go into the constitution of human communities, and then turn around and play real roles in influencing human behavior. Out of ignorance, we unwittingly invent seemingly nonsensical rules (like “You ought not lie,” etc.), teach them to our children, and the belief in those rules then governs, in part, what those children do. And, as it turns out, some rules tend to be better than others at ensuring the survival of those communities, etc. So, in the end, moral talk is ultimately nonsense, but very potent nonsense which has significant effects upon individuals and communities. Humans need this nonsense in order to survive as individuals, and as a species. (Not that there is any “objective value” in this.)

III. Morality is a composite of means of evaluation. Moral thinking consists in a broad mix of ways of evaluating actions – some basic and deontological (“Don’t lie!”, etc.), some more evaluative and consequentialist (“In this case, let’s do X, since most people are interested in doing that”), some aesthetic (“That’s simply an ugly way of behaving as a human being!”), and there may be many others. They are all rooted in what we are taught, on different occasions, for different reasons. When we argue over morality, all of these different means of evaluation play their roles, and often lead to opposing results, or paradoxes, controversies, and perplexities. That is unavoidable. And, again, debating over these conflicting results is a significant activity, to the extent that it leads to real actions, and real consequences. The universe doesn’t care what those consequences are, but individuals typically do.

There are nice-looking donkeys …

… and then there are the beautiful ones:

Nature’s reclamation

The canal running behind my home is now closed forever, due to the tragic collapse this summer. But nature is finding new uses for it.

Oxford philosophical report, part 2

Graham Parkes, author of Composing the Soul (perhaps my favorite book on Nz), presented what was to me easily the best address of the conference. The first half of his presentation was a discussion of the links between Nz and meditative practices in eastern philosophy. Nz hiked and walked extensively, claiming that he didn’t trust any philosophy that was conceived while sitting down. Getting to know nature as it is in itself means quieting the clutter of consciousness, which consists in tangled relations to other people and what they say and think. One way to quiet consciousness is through walking meditation. By silencing consciousness we allow the drives of life to surge forward, unrestrained by all the filters and “thou shalts” of consciousness. The second half of the presentation was a video Parkes made of the Alpine region where Nz summered and hiked — a very beautiful video, effectively showing that when you stop thinking and simply try to experience, the quality of one’s state of mind does change in some substantial way. I’m probably not putting everything quite right, and there were many more fascinating details I won’t try to relate here, but it was a marvelous presentation.

Another presentation I enjoyed very much was Galen Strawson’s. Strawson is a very smart, very well-read metaphysician, and he’s not afraid of making bold, sweeping pronouncements (along the lines of “There really isn’t any intelligible alternative to Spinoza’s metaphysics; when you think about it, it’s perfectly obvious”). I’m very skeptical of metaphysics, so I really was incapable of seriously considering most of the claims he made, but it was a delight to watch a master metaphysician going at it, carving and distinguishing and deducing and proclaiming.

Finally, among the talks I enjoyed most, I will mention Günther Abel, whose topic was “Consciousness, Language, and Nature,” and who did indeed attempt to cover it all. Abel has read and understood very broadly, and has an enviable synoptic vision bringing everything into focus. One of the interesting claims he made in his far-ranging talk was that freedom of the will is essential to personhood — not because of some metaphysical fact about the human mind, but because of the multiple roles the concept of “person” plays in the community of language users. We need to understand the person as free, simply because our usage of the term implies that freedom.

Oxford conference: philosophical report, part 1

I thought I’d share some of my impressions of some of the papers I attended.

The conference featured seven plenary addresses, which everyone attended, and three groups of concurrent session. I’ve recounted now, and I guess I only heard 16 papers in all (counting my own), not 19 as I had thought. I don’t have comments on all of them, as sometimes one cannot help but daydream from time to time.

Two of the plenary addresses, Reginster’s and Poellner’s, did not have much impact on me. I’m sure it’s my fault: I was jet-lagged, and even if I hadn’t been, my mind tends toward broad and shallow, and their papers were focusing fairly narrowly and deeply on topics that don’t interest me much. Reginster was documenting Nz’s account in GM about how the Christian sense of guilt emerges from a more basic, everyday sense of guilt. One key point that I found interesting is that Reginster claimed Nz wasn’t really interested in providing a more general account of how guilt arises in the first place; rather, he was interested in a diagnosis of the Christian variety of guilt — that is, Nz was more interested in pathology than reduction. That seems right.

Poellner’s paper was concerned with understanding the precise sense in which the hatred giving rise to slave morality could be in any sense unconscious. Actually, Poellner was arguing that hatred simply can’t be unconscious; instead, it must be conscious, but the slaves are engaged in loads of self-deception about it. Okay.

I’ll mention two other concurrent session papers for now. Lawrence Hatab focused on the importance of language for self-consciousness, and a puzzling remark of Nz’s, that “man thinks without knowing it.” The upshot, I think, is that a lot of our thinking is done for us, by our language communities, and by the time our consciousness comes on the scene, a lot of presuppositions are already in place. This leads to interesting questions about the ontology of individuals in Nz: basically, there can’t be any, without a community providing a deep and significant backdrop.

In the same session, Jutta Georg-Lauer probed the embodiment of consciousness in Nz. So far, Nz claims, “we have embodied only our errors.” The task is to embody something other than errors. He thinks our embodied knowledge must be enhanced, and not further abstract/conceptual knowledge: we need a different way of being in the world, to speak Heideggerianingly. Doing this means reducing the opposition of body and reason, and recognizing thoughts as shadows of the senses and reflexes. We also must devalue the notion of truth, in the sense in which we have regarded truth since Plato. We should allow for the ecstasies of “body reason,” and let the natural affinities of the body replace our marshaling our forces under the will to truth. Very provocative, I thought, though I guess I’m too will-to-truth oriented to really climb aboard that wagon.

Oxford: the video

The soundtrack, by the way, is an old 78 of Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers, with the great, growling Bubber Miley on horn.

All OK in the UK

More than ok, in fact: simply freaking awesome is more like it. This was my first trip to the UK, and as I told several people there, my impression is that the sun always shines and people know a helluva lot about Nietzsche. I’ll give an overview of my time there.

Last Wednesday I was supposed to fly to Chicago and then to London. But the plane in Chicago had some broken part it couldn’t do without, and there weren’t any replacement parts anywhere, so I was bumped to a flight Thursday evening. That gave me a day to trot around Chicago, where I found a great coffeeshop on Michigan Avenue, of all places:

The flight Thurs eve was uneventful, though I only slept for maybe 20 minutes. I arrived in London Friday morning, grabbed the bus to Oxford, and arrived in time to stow my bags, eat some bangers-and-mash at a pub, and attend the first conference paper, followed by tea, followed by papers in concurrent sessions, followed by tea, followed by another main paper, followed by dinner, followed by a recital of Nietzsche’s piano music, followed by a drink at the college bar. By the end, I had been going for about 30 hours, and I was beginning to hallucinate. The chapel in which the main papers were read started to transform, in my experience, into the lobby of a bank, with a revolving door, and there were images of little pickles chasing after a sandwich.

I’ll give a more scholarly account of the papers and conversations over the next few days. Generally, Saturday was chock-full of papers and teas, with a fancy dinner at the end, and more drinking in the bar. And Sunday was a shorter day, again with papers and teas. The conference ended at about 4, and I was unprepared for what happens in England on Sundays at 5pm: absolutely nothing. Everything closes. So I bought a ticket to see Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. A masterpiece, with typically Tarantino grotesque hilarity and meaningless but fun blends of genres.

The next day, Monday, was mostly spent touring places (like Christ Church college and the Bodleian library), visiting as many pubs as possible, and walking along the Thames at dusk. Tuesday was a full travel day, and I made it home Tuesday evening at about 10, after only 20 or so hours of travel.

The numbers: 19 scholarly papers, 6 pubs, and maybe 5 new friends. I had an absolutely marvelous time, one I’ll remember the rest of my life, and my brain is jam packed with new ideas, insights, and knowledge. I’ll see what I can do to squander that capital over the next few months.

What’s been going on?

It appears I haven’t posted in about a month. What’s up?

Well, a cluster of little things. There’s been painting the house, the kids starting school, me starting teaching, etc. I have been rewriting a paper on Nietzsche for the upcoming “Nietzsche on Mind and Nature” conference at Oxford, and arranging travel, etc. That’s next week. And I am working on a book on Spinoza’s philosophy, tentatively entitled God or Nature: Spinoza’s Radical Theology. It is a shift for me, moving from Nietzsche’s thrilling prose to the ever-cautious geometer (who encased his philosophy in an invincible iron maiden, as ol’ Fritz once wrote). I’m not sure readers of this blog will be as interested in periodic updates about the Spinoza project, but that’s probably going to happen from here on out, at least for the next few months.

A more interesting question looming in the back of my mind is along the lines of “What next?” I’ll keep reading Nz, but I don’t have a great urge to write a whole lot more about him. Same even more so for Spinoza, once this project is complete. I think that, bound up with the question, is a bit of soul searching about where I am and who I am. The fact is that I am in a backwater, so far as philosophy is concerned: my colleagues are delightful, and I like where I live and so on, but there’s no way to deny that I am “more than somewhat” removed from the action of contemporary academic philosophy. (The web helps to make up for that, but only to a very limited extent. Hallway conversations are where it’s it. Or that’s what I remember, anyway.) And, since I’ve been in such a spot for 15 years, it has had some effect on who I am as a philosopher. In short, I am turning slowly into a backwater sort of person, the geezer who shows up at a conference in bib overalls and with bits of straw in his hair and strangely opines, “But you’re all forgetting the question of Change! How can you do any of this without settling that first?” Then he stomps off, back to wherever he came from. And everyone goes back to discussing Dretske and closure principles of knowledge, or whatever.

I could probably buck against fate, but I think I’ll just go with it. The virtue of being in an inconspicuous place is that you’re free to pursue your (possibly weird) views of things without feeling compelled to relate it to what more conspicuous people are saying and doing. There’s some pleasure in that, though you have to give up the pleasures of belonging to some wider, professional, academic community, and make do with the delightful people around you, who take an interest in what you write just because, well, you’re you.

Yes, sounds like a rationalization to me too. But the other option — trying to stay conspicuous in and engaged with an intellectual community that seems awfully far away — sounds a bit like trying to be someone I’m not. What I truly revere in Nz and Emerson is that they didn’t let their untimeliness or Americanness (respectively) stop them from trying to express frankly what was on their minds. I certainly am no FWN or RWE, but, hell, I don’t have to be Lance Armstrong in order to enjoy cycling, either. So I’ll just do things my way, and everyone is perfectly within their rights to take no notice whatsoever. Just keep your eyes open for me — I’ll be the guy in the bib overalls.