the coffee philosopher

Posted on December 29, 2011December 29, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

What People Get Wrong About Hume

According to Simon Blackburn, it’s a lot.

The sad thing is, David Hume is an easy read. I don’t mean that his ideas are necessarily easy to fully comprehend nor that you can breeze through him, but that his writing style is clear and concise, which is all the more amazing because he was writing more than two hundred and fifty years ago (we are almost at the end of the third centenary of his birth). His An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (generally considered the foundational book for his particular brand of philosophical empiricism) is a wonderfully lucid read compared to your average philosophical tome (more so even than Locke) and it’s sad that it’s not more widely read as a means to provide a solid grounding in a significant thinker and provide one with, for lack of a better term, ‘food for thought.’

Posted on December 29, 2011December 29, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Habermas & Religion

Is Jurgen Habermas experiencing an intellectual conversion to religion/spirituality?

Religion seems to be creeping more and more into his thoughts.

But don’t let that think he’s no longer constantly wrestling with the nature of a just and rational society.

Posted on December 29, 2011December 29, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

How Will Essayists Be Remembered?

I’d never heard of this Epstein fellow (which is, no doubt, a flaw in myself, rather than in him), but it does make one wonder which, if any essayists, will be remembered a century from now.

Michel de Montaigne seems timeless. Likewise, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau seem like they should have longevity.

Conversely though, it feels like Alan Mencken and Edmund Wilson are already fading.

And among today’s essayists, who will know the names ‘Christopher Hitchens’ and ‘Joan Didion’ in fifty years, except as historical curiosities (‘though little read today, Didion was a well known prose stylist in the late twentieth century, loved for her witty, though shallow analyses of the political mores of the day…’)? And in hundred or two hundred years? Will they be anything but ancient books to picked up at a flea market and then set down, never to be purchased nor read again?

Posted on December 29, 2011December 29, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

The Modern Commune

The Paris Commune is a bit of history of great importance in Europe but seldom thought of over here. Until the seventies, one of the legacies of the Commune was that a mayor of Paris could not become the president. But if it is discussed here, it is as a small sidebar in the history of the unification of Germany.

I agree with this article that the Commune has some lessons for and parallels to the Occupy movement, though I could do without the moralizing about the Museum of Modern Art.

Posted on December 29, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto LXVI

This another Canto taking place in either the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. I would hazard to say it is the eighteenth century.

I say this because if there is one thing Pound does well is capturing the style of that period. If you have done any reading of English letters from the seventeenth through the end of the eighteenth century, you’d see a unique style. Things like writings of Samuels Pepys and Johnson or of Lawrence Sterne’s comic masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The French have a wonderful term for the sort of shapeshifting, genre-less writings of the period: belles letres.

In terms of contemporaries, I think of the scene in Ulysses (the Scylla and Charybdis episode, I believe) when Stephen is drinking with the medical students and entire chapter progresses, stylistically, through the history of English literature, from the Anglo-Saxon through Middle English through Shakespeare through Dickens…

That same commitment to capturing the particular voice of periods in literature is something that Pound clearly shares.

Whereon said Lord Coke, speaking of Empson and Dudley,
the end of these two oppressors
shd/ deter others from committing the like
that they bring not in absolute and partial trials by direction
…by every legal measure, sirs, we recommend you…

Posted on December 28, 2011December 28, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

Marcuse’s Occupy Comeback?

The question of John Rawls and the Occupy Movement has already been asked.

I guess, now it’s Herbert Marcuse’s time.

Of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, also known Critical Theory, Marcuse, like Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm, wrote much of his most influential writing well after the group’s first gathering in the thirties. Indeed, it seems like only Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer peaked before the fifties – and Benjamin died in 1940 and Horkheimer was of a slightly earlier generation than the others.

Anyway, yes I was one of those college students who read One Dimensional Man with trembling awe. I devoured books by the Frankfurt School (and tried to understand them to the best of my ability) as a young, would be rebel (revolutionary?), but now I have mixed feelings about most of the original Critical Theorists, Adorno excepted.

With the exception of Adorno and, yes, including One Dimensional Man, there is something too facile about them. Too much polemics and too little critical philosophy. One Dimensional Man, like Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, seems too much written to appeal to the growing counter culture movement. Trying to tie into the zeitgeist artificially, rather than organically. Or perhaps trying to latch onto it, rather than create or drive it.

Posted on December 28, 2011December 28, 2011 by the coffee philosopher

More Poets & Politics

The poet Robert Hass, in particular, got some press for his involvement in an Occupy protest in Berkeley. He probably got more press than other poets who participated by virtue of his status as a former poet laureate.

But this piece asks the question: would we have paid as much attention to what he had say if he had said it, not as he did, in a newspaper op-ed, but in a poem?

Depressingly, I think we all know the answer to that.