A sort of history of mostly twentieth century American philosophy (Carlin threatens to talk about Emerson, but doesn’t; he also writes briefly about the mostly nineteenth century Peirce and James in the context of Peirce, but those two reached into the next century; he also finds space for this millennium and even for Obama). Read more
What began as an admirable effort to show the wide ranging influence of an eighteenth century London club whose members included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, and Edward Gibbon rapidly devolved into an unsatisfying biography of Boswell and Johnson. Read more
Apparently, and I didn’t know this before, no one really explored the Mekong River until intrepid white folks arrived. Sure, many of them were racist, cruel, and exploitative, but we should admire them for… reasons? Read more
What might be most interesting about The Metaphysical Club is that it purports to be about how figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey (among others) created a new and modern American from the ashes of the Civil War, it manages to never explicate James’ nor Peirce’s nor Dewey’s philosophy nor that the first two are both considered the founders of American pragmatism (James association with it is mentioned once or twice; Pierce never) nor that Dewey’s has work might be connected to it over the course of three fourths of the book. Instead I found a series of frustrating threads, connecting Holmes to James and James to Peirce but not Peirce to Holmes in any meaningful sense. Supposed schools of thought like the Burlington transcendentalists (shouldn’t transcendentalist be capitalized, too, in this case, if it’s a legitimate, albeit no longer extant, school of American thought?) appear, are discussed in not insignificant length and then noted to be almost entirely meaningless to the topic and not influential at all. Jane Addams is the only woman noted beyond her relationship to a man and she gets briefly shoehorned into a lengthy rumination on Dewey’s Chicago. Read more
So, I am still returning to Thomas Jefferson, this time with Ta-Nehisi Coates or, at least, with his recent congressional testimony on the issue of reparations. I am not going to go into that issue, which may represent a kind of cowardice on my part, but I do want to flag one line that I can’t shake:
That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings.
Did I need to read another Jefferson book? Probably not. My fifth in the last two years, though the first traditional biography (the others being guided by conceits or else by Christopher Hitchens and so read to understand him rather than Jefferson). Read more
Of course, this article from LRB drew me because of Gore Vidal’s novel, Julian. And this review, while never mentioning the novel (an odd oversight, I thought, even if you are not a Gore fan), suggests that the novel’s history is t bad.
We visited Colonial Williamsburg and made a brief stop in Yorktown to visit the Yorktown Battlefield and to, ahem, check out a bookstore. I have continued to read (and feel conflicted) about Thomas Jefferson and was disappointed that the Raleigh Tavern wasn’t open, because it featured prominently in Jefferson’s life while studying in Williamsburg, including being where the Virginia House of Burgesses met after being officially dissolved by the Royal Governor.
My father explained that The Riddle of the Sands was about sailing, as he watched the seventies film version (with, of course, Michael York). I didn’t understand much of pay attention much at the time, but the memory stuck with me.
Without actually reading the book or watching the movie, I became more aware of it.
It was an early book that premised the idea that England’s future enemy was not it’s traditional foe, France, but a rising Germany. It was also an early version of the modern spy story.
A sailing enthusiast becomes convinced that a german yachter tried to get him killed by leading him down a dangerous coastal waterway, so he recruits a college friend to investigate was the Germans could be hiding, the titular riddle (the area is filled with sand bars and shifting sand islands). There is a British traitor, disguises, and a lot of dangerous sailing – which he manages to make exciting (there is no violence or fighting, but plenty of tension).
I will admit that I skipped the very end, which is a brief treatise of how England could secure her coasts against a German invasion using small, light boats arriving unexpectedly from that sandy coast, but I can’t imagine it’s very relevant now.
I felt a little bad reading this because I have a nice, inexpensive copy of The Rights of Man which I have never finished and here I am putting the cart before the horse and reading about it before actually reading it. I suppose that makes me like most readers of this book but, to be honest, I have always thought I was better than most people, at least as regards my reading habits, if not morally and hygenically.
We read Hitchens, of course, for Hitchens, regardless of the ostensible focus, but we can see the appeal: a polemicist and pamphleteer in the Enlightenment tradition who made a widely recognized contribution to the course of human events. In dedicating the book to the then president of a post-Saddam Iraq, he must have been hoping, somewhere, that one day he might be recognized in some small way as contributing to a similarly successful product, even if the years appear to have only proven him more wrong on that particular adventure than it seemed even when he wrote this.
I had never heard it before and won’t vouch for its provenance, except to express my belief that Hitchens would have made a good faith effort to examine its sources, but I love the anecdote about William Blake, the mystical poet, warning Paine, the (small ‘r’) republican pamphleteer, that he was in danger of arrest, inspiring the latter to immediately cross the water to revolutionary France.
Learning about Paine’s career was the fascinating. My own knowledge, prior, was rather thin. While no substitute for a biography by a professional biographer or historian, I am not likely to read one, so I’m glad that I got this brief look at his career.
the coffee philosopher 