Worldly Philosophers is a famed attempt to make economics sexy. Mainly by skipping out of the math (which is cool by me; Warrant: The Current Debate had way too much math for my liking).
Author Robert L. Heilbroner, despite being an avowed socialist (or was for most of his career), wrote this passage, which absolutely infuriated me:
[Sir William Petty] was observing a fact that can still be remarked among the unindustrialized peoples of the world: a raw working force, unused to wagework, uncomfortable in factory life, unschooled to the idea of an ever-rising standard of living, will not work harder if wages rise; it will simply take more time off. The idea of gain, the idea that each working person not only may, but should, strive to better his or her material lot, is an idea that was quite foreign…”
Firstly, that whole passage reeks of colonial-minded paternalism.
And also, how is it that greater leisure time is not also part of an “ever-rising standard of living?”
It has been noted that those envy-inspiring images of Austrians conversing over coffee in the caffe’s of Vienna or of the French enjoying long lunches and leisurely glasses of wine are not a result of uniquely gallic or tuetonic culture. Or at least not how we usually think of it.
It’s about time. It’s about a culture that does not believe a people should have to work 60+ hours a week to support themselves and their families. Germans and even the Japanese, despite myths to the contrary, work fewer hours than Americans. When you have an extra three hundred and sixty hours a year (as the average German worker does), you can spend more time with family and enjoy leisurely activities.
I want to thank Heilbroner for introducing me to Thorstein Veblen (even his name is awesome! and descriptions of him washing his dishes with a garden hose aimed at the sink and showing up at his justifiably estranged wife’s door with a pair of socks are hilarious in a sad way), but I’m still fuming about that remark (which actually occurs very early in the book – before he even gets to Adam Smith).
I don’t think I’d seen this before, but apparently, Eugene Genovese died late last month.
That’s a real bummer. He was a Marxist and sometimes leftist (don’t make the mistake of thinking Marxist thought is necessarily leftist) historian of the American South and of slavery in the American South. Even when he became, in some ways, more conservative (he became quite infatuated with the Southern Agrarians), he never stopped seeing the influence of class structures on society.
Anyway… Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. I had to read it in college. It’s awesome. You should read it, too.
Eric Hobsbawn was both Britain’s most celebrated historian in the second half of the twentieth century and a lifelong Marxian. Like it or not, the man was a giant in his field and respect for his body of work transcended ideology.
I finally finished Alvin Plantinga’s Warrant: The Current Debate. I’d already written him a letter apologizing for bad mouthing it and got a nice response back. But I hadn’t actually finished it. And that was a while ago, though I did write him that I was in the process of reading it and did not claim to have finished and/or fully understood it.
And I still don’t fully understand it. Or rather, there’s nothing there to fully understand.
It’s like that movie where it seems to have been entirely created to set up the sequels.
While I am looking forward to trying to read and understand Warrant and Proper Function, I hadn’t realized the extent to which Plantinga would not be making his own, positive case in Warrant: The Current Debate.
The first book is entirely dedicated to taking apart and criticizing the works and theories of contemporary epistemology and epistemologists.
I can see the value of this as a learning tool. After all, the extent to which I have kept up with modern in trends is… well, actually, I haven’t kept up at all. So the experience can be classified as a ‘learning experience.’ I know now more about contemporary theories of epistemology. But I hardly know a damn thing about Plantinga’s epistemology.
Actually, the only thing one gets from this about Plantinga is that the idea of ‘warrant’ was not something that was in wide use when he wrote the book. I got this because he quote extensively from other philosophers and no one is using that term. Which is fine. Alvin’s going out on a limb here, forging his own path. I’m down with that. That’s why I’m here, in fact. But because he doesn’t advance any positive ideas, it’s almost like ‘warrant’ is something he built to characterize other theories as comparative straw men when actually, the reader has no one idea if that’s correct because ‘warrant’ is a fully owned subsidiary of Plantinga, Inc. and he doesn’t actually say what he thinks it means.
He writes that ‘None of these views, as we saw, offers the resources for a proper understanding of warrant or positive epistemic status.’
Well, how can they (they being philosophers who argue for an internalist view of justification or, if you prefer, warrant, I guess) offer resources for a proper understanding, since, apparently, know in the world can actually know what warrant is until reading the second book.
He writes that ‘Warrant is that (whatever it is) such that enough of it together with truth (perhaps a codicil aimed at Gettier) is necessary and sufficient for knowledge…’
Really? Is that what warrant is? Because I distinctly recall him consistently talking about warrant as replacing ‘justification’ in the classic ‘justified true belief’ formulation. Apparently now, it’s fulfilling a larger role (except for this possible codicil that… wtf? where did that come from?).
Oh, and he also writes about the idea of proper function as being key to warrant and of many folks he criticized struggling with resolving it. Funny, I don’t remember this coming up before… and wouldn’t you know that the phrase ‘proper function’ appears in the title of his next book.
I’m sorry. While this book is learned, educational, mind expanding, and fascinating, it is also sometimes an exercise in playground games, where the leader of the group keeps all the other kids in second place in a made up game by raising the bar or changing the rules ex post facto.
But I’ll still slog my way through the sequel (that’s gonna be like thirty-five bucks… but this one was something like seventy bucks, so we’re moving in the right direction, not that I begrudge Professor Plantinga his royalties…)
P.S. – In a bit of fortuitous timing, I just came across this review of a more recent of Dr. Plantinga’s books.
You probably heard about this: a PPP poll that found that 15 percent of Republicans in Ohio think Romney is “more responsible” for bin Laden’s death than Obama; that 47 percent of Republicans are “not sure” whether Obama or Romney deserves more of the credit; and that 6 percent of all Ohio respondents gave Romney credit where credit is not at all due and thirty-one percent of them weren’t sure whether the President or the candidate deserves more credit.
And if you’re on my side of the ideological divide, you were most likely horrified.
But speaking from a purely partisan perspective, this is nothing but good news for Democrats. It’s why contemporary Republican leaders and consultants are so desperate and why the contemporary Republican party (which is not what the Republican was and probably little like what it or its natural successor will be). The current version of the Republican party is slipping ever more quickly away from everyone else.
GOP pollsters and strategists look at those kinds of numbers and they see a party which will soon no longer look like anything that moderates, centrists, independents, or pretty much anyone else can relate to.
Everybody sees the world and (shades of Wittgenstein, for those paying attention) the facts that make up the case that is the world differently and we all put our own slant on it. But most people still tend to accept most facts as, well, facts. By publicly and vocally not accepting basic facts as facts (like a former governor of Massachusetts who had never served in the military having had nothing to with a federal, military action that occurred while said former governor was a private citizen with no formal relationship to any state, local, or federal government agency, including the military), it makes it much for anyone but the minority of core ideological followers to accept anything they say because when so much they say is so kooky, everything they say becomes suspect.
the coffee philosopher 