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| Jorge Luis Borges |
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"Like
all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave;
I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail. Look: the index
finger of my right hand is missing. Look again: through this
rent in my cape you can see a ruddy tatoo on my belly. It is
the second symbol, Beth. This letter, on nights of full moon,
gives me power over men whose mark is Ghimel; but it also subordinates
me to those marked Aleph, who on moonless nights owe obedience
to those marked Ghimel. In a cellar at dawn, I have severed the
jugular vein of sacred bulls against a black rock. During one
lunar year, I have been declared invisible: I shrieked and was
not heard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated. I have known
what the Greeks did not: uncertainty."
Borges - The Babylon Lottery
When he was
six, Borges began attempting to write in the style of Cervantes.
At nine he translated Oscar Wilde into Spanish for publication
in a Buenos Aires newspaper. But it wasn't until he was sixty,
sharing the Prix Formentor award with Samuel Beckett and finally
being translated into French, did he become visible to the world
outside his native Argentina. The excerpt above was written in
1941 but not translated into English until 1962 - it is from
his finest single work - Ficciones.
I really don't
know what to say about Borges. He'll screw with your head on
too many levels to count. You simply cannot tell when Borges
is telling the truth or inventing perfectly consistent and well-documented
lies. I've put links here to some full e-texts of some of my
favorite stories. Ficciones is considered one of the primary
postmodern texts. Tlön,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
is my favorite story, followed maybe by Funes the Memorious - a tragic story about a man who is
incapable of forgetting:
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"We, in
a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw
all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered
the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of
April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection
with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book
which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray
which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle
of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual
image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations,
etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two
or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me:
I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had
since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are
like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir,
is like a garbage disposal."
Read also The
Babylon Lottery. Also read Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
- a fictitious review of a re-write of Don Quixote which is word-for-word
identicall to Cervantes' original.
The Babylon Lottery (You'll have to copy
& paste this text into better format.)
Funes The Memorious
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
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| GK Chesterton |
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Those of us
who have gotten inside the head of GK Chesterton (1874-1936)
recognize him as Lord and Master of the talent most often associated
with Oscar Wilde.. Almost every writer you love loves Chesterton.
Here's a man who wrote hundreds of published essays packed from
salutation to signature with more insightful turns-of-phrases,
ironies, paradoxes and witicisms than Wilde or anyone else. Chesterton's ability
to play skittles with the structure of Aristotelian argument
and his ability to capture "wonder" ranks him as one
of the great writers of the twentieth century.
Chesterton
stood 6'4" and weighed in at 300 lbs and usually wore a
cape and carried a swordstick. He suffered from chronic absent-mindedness
and laughed at his own jokes. He wrote fairy tales for children
and sometimes theology (which he would call fairy tales) for
adults. For a sampling of his take on Christianity see the chapter
titled "The
Ethics of Elfland" in his book Orthodoxy. There Chesterton
observes that it's precisely fairy-tales' strict adherence to
necessary truths that make its play with the contingent ones
remind us of the contingency of our own "bewitched"
world:
"The only
words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms
used in the fairy books, "charm", "spell",
"enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the
fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic
tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched."
"We have
always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between
the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws,
and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws,
but only weird repititions. We believe in bodily miracles, but
not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed
up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our conviction
on the philosophical question of how many beans make five."
Chesterton's
essays on social reform directly inspired Mohandas Gandhi to
lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India and inspired
Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish independance. His
books were also instrumental in converting an Oxford atheist
named C.S.
Lewis to
Christianity. As a somewhat heterodox self-appointed apologist
for Catholicism, Chesterton spent some time engaging in public
debates with George
Bernard Shaw
on matters of religion and social reform. Shaw eventually gained
so much respect for Chesterton that upon Chesterton's death bitterly
complained to have outlived him and established a fund to support
Chesterton's widow for the rest of her life. There are newspaper
records of Chesterton humiliating Clarence Darrow in a religious debate in the United
States -- of which Chesterton mentioned only briefly in his autobiography
by saying that, while in America, he had "debated a man
who seemed to be arguing with his fundamentalist maiden aunt."
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The cult of
Chesterton admirers have included T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway,
Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy
L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley
Amis, W.H. Auden, Anthony Burgess, E.F. Schumacher, Neil Gaiman,
and H.G. Wells (another close friend of Chesterton's.)
Near the end
of his life Chesterton wrote in a letter to a friend:
"I believe
the biographers of the future, if they find any trace of me at
all, will say Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. From the fragments left
by this now forgotten writer it is difficult to understand the
cause of even such publicity as he obtained in his own day; nevertheless,
there is reason to believe that he was not without certain fugitive
mental gifts."
Here is a good
web resource for essays and bibliography. www.chesterton.org
And see especially
hs essay on Oscar Wilde http://chesterton.org/gkc/critic/Oscar%20Wilde.htm
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| David Copperfield |
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Not the fan-blown
"illusionist" with the missing shirt buttons, but the
little boy created by Charles Dickens. Dickens expressed sadness
upon finishing the final pages of David Copperfield -- which
in its Modern Library Classic paperback is still 900 pages long.
He felt that Copperfield had become something like a son to him
-- his "favourite child" he wrote to a friend -- and
that by signing off on the novel he had ensconsed him.
"It would
concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the
pen is laid down at the close of a two-years' imaginative task;
or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing some portion
of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures
of his brain are going from him for ever. Yet, I had nothing
else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might
be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative,
in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing. So true
are these avowals at the present day, that I can now only take
the reader into one confidence more. Of all my books, I like
this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent
to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that
family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents,
I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name
is DAVID COPPERFIELD." - Dickens, 1867
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| Paul Feyerabend |
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Paul Feyerabend
died in 1994, the same year as Karl Popper -- two years before Thomas Kuhn. He taught philosophy of science at
UC Berkely until 1989. I was made aware of him during my early
twenties while he was still living and teaching at Berkely, but
wrote him off as a fuzzy-thinking relativist on account of the
fact that I was completely entranced with A.J. Ayer and Bertrand
Russell at the time. In those days I was very influenced by the
class of apologetics which are published out of Amherst New York
(Prometheus Press) providing young readers with a positivist
context into which Feyerabend is hastily misplaced and subsequently
easily (mis)criticized. Fifteen years later I really regret my
dismissive caricature of him. His book Against Method (Verso, 1993 third edition) is one
of the best books I've read.
Against Method
is Feyerabend's defense of theoretical anarchism in scientific
research. The bulk of the book is a thorough (extraordinarily
thorough) analysis of Galileo's 1633 case for Copernicus' heliocentric
cosmology. Feyerabend effectively shows how Galileo used rhetorical
tricks to conceal the theory-laden character of his experimental
observations during his attempt to persuade the Church that Copernicanism
was more than a conceptual heuristic for astronomical prediction.
These fallacies did not go unnoticed by Galileo's Inquisitors.
Feyerabend argues that from a modern scientific "methodological"
point of view, the Church had been far more rational and scientific
than Galileo had been. But Galileo was right after all. Feyerabend
uses this case study as a means for showing the cultural contexts
which determine the identification of "rationality"
and argues that canonical norms of rationality in scientific
research must be overtly violated in order to wrestle the trajectory
of scientific knowledge out of conceptual ruts - such as the
ruts enforced by the Aristotelian astronomers and physicists
of Galileo's day. (Feyerabend rightly rejects the pop-culture
story of Galileo's trial as a case of "science vs religion.")
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Feyerabend,
a physicist and an insider of institutionalized science on two
continents, called for a Separation of Science and State. He saw contemporary
scientific orthodoxy just as creatively stifling as it had been
during the Church's hegemony in western Europe.
"Do not
be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for
joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science.
It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization.
Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most
severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has
to offer."
- Feyerabend - How To Defend Society Against Science.
The complete
e-text of Feyerabend's - How To
Defend Society Against Science
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| Steve
Fuller |
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Steve Fuller
is an odd guy. He holds a chair in the department of Sociology
at the University of Warwick and is a principle developer of
the discipline called Social
Epistemology.
My introduction to him was his book Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History
for Our Time. Fuller uses 400 pages
to argue that science's new post-WW1 relationship with Big Government
and Big Business has restructured the mechanisms of scientific
development that Kuhn had observed were at work between the 16th
and 19th centuries. Gone are the days of scientists being encouraged
by internal anomaly to decide what questions call for their attention
and resources. As defense contracts (and then pharmaceutical
companies) began to dictate research trajectories they also provided
Big Science with powerful state and corporate resources for end-running
the paradigm transisitions which have been the hallmark of what
we historically identify as scientific progress. Fuller
believes that Kuhn's curious lack of historical examples from
the mid 19th century to the 1960s (when Kuhn wrote Structure)
is indicative of a right-leaning cold war strategy on the part
of then Harvard president, and Kuhn groomer, James Conant. According
to Fuller, Kuhn, while retrieving the analysis of scientific
development from the grip of "method", and while bringing
history to bear critically on the philosophy of science,
failed to fully situate science in terms of the ambient political,
economic and social forces which have directed it during the
last century. By honoring Kuhn's analysis, social scientists
are still subscribing to a meta-picture of natural science as
an internally-driven practice. Its effect on contemporary science
studies and sociology of scientific knowledge has been, according
to Fuller, to convince these disciplines that their business
has no normative responsibilities, is purely descriptive, value-free
and therefore judgment (and reform) prohibited. This, according
to Fuller is how conservative cold-war bomb-developing politicians
prefer it.
A friend of
mine described Fuller as "...one of those guys who, like
Chomsky, wants to shove Democracy in every dark corner."
While Democracy sounds appealing to most folk I know, the secularization
of institutionalized science is an exception they're willing
to tolerate. Consider Fuller's remarks on the secularization
of science:
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"...it
is important to recall that the process historically associated
with 'secularization' is most precisely rendered, in today's
terms, as religion's loss of a state-protected market. In other
words, secularization does not correspond to a decline in religious
belief as such, but a decline in the view that only one such
belief is legitimate. By analogy, then, 'science secularized'
means that people continue to believe in science, but now also
believe that they have a choice as to which science they believe."
Fuller, a leftist
rhetoritician who has never voted for a Republican and hasn't
been to church since he was a kid, threw everyone for a loop
when he recently served as a chief expert witness on behalf of
Intelligent Design in the recent much-publicized "Intelligent
Design" case in Dover, Pennsylvania. Not a fan of Intelligent
Design per se (and certainly no fan of "creationism")
Fuller argued that ID deserved a place in research competition
purely on sociological, philosophical and historical grounds.
Of course as of yet, ID has no research merits by which to have
its plausibility compared to the incumbent paradigm. ID lost
the case and had some critics of ID perplexed enough to speculate
that Fuller's involvement was a publicity stunt.
Fuller shows
up on Michael Bérubé's blog to defend himself against
a few good criticisms (and a whole bunch of lame ones.)
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/783/
He has a website
with many downloadable audio lectures relating to the sociology
of science, the history of social research and information science.
He has the bad habit of saying "Okay?" as an interjection.
Try to hear past it.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academic/fullers/fullers_index/audio/
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| Richard
Rorty |
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Richard Rorty
thinks he's continuing a tradition best exemplified in the American
pragmatist philosophers William James and Charles Sanders Pierce
-- and maybe he's right about that. His particular gift is his
ability to state the pragmatist's position in a way which cuts
through the language in which it must be conveyed and the discourse
in which that language most often finds itself. Though he was
trained as an analytic philosopher, his interests occupy the
space between analytic and Continental philosophy. He presents
a shrewed analysis of the history and sociology of Anglophone
philosophy and hopes for a future where Philsophy and science
become yet two more literary genres - neither laying claim to
a type of knowledge which answers to something transhuman. His
critics foam at the mouth.
I recommend
three volumes of collected essays; Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, Essays on Heidegger and Others and Truth and Progress.
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"The essays in this
book are attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory
about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing
one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory
about. For pragmatists, "truth" is just the name of
a property which all true statements share. It is what is common
to "Bacon did not write Shakespeare," "It rained
yesterday," "E equals mc2" "Love is better
than hate," "The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer's
best work," "2 plus 2 is 4," and "There are
nondenumerable infinities." Pragmatists doubt that there
is much to be said about this common feature. They doubt this
for the same reason they doubt that there is much to be said
about the common feature shared by such morally praiseworthy
actions as Susan leaving her husband, America joining the war
against the Nazis, America pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not
escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and
the suicide of the Jews at Masada. They see certain acts as good
ones to perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there
is anything general and useful to say about what makes them all
good. The assertion of a given sentence -or the adoption of a
disposition to assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition
of a belief -is a justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances.
But, a fortiori, it is not likely that there is something
general and useful to be said about what makes All such actions
good-about the common feature of all the sentences which one
should acquire a disposition to assert." - Platonists, Positivists
and Pragmatists.
"It is
often said that religion was refuted by showing the incoherence
of the concept of God. It is said, almost as often, that
realism has been refuted by showing the incoherence of the notions
of "intrinsic nature of reality" and "correspondence",
and that pragmatism is refuted by pointing out its habit of confusing
knowing with being. But no one accustomed to employ a term like
"the will of God" or "mind-independent World"
in expressing views central to her sense of how things hang together
is likely to be persuaded that the relevant concepts are incoherent.
Nor is any pragmatist likely to be convinced that the notion
of something real but indescribable in human language or
unknowable by human minds can be made coherent. A concept,
after all, is just the use of a word. Much-used and well-loved
words and phrases are not abandoned merely because their users
have been forced into tight dialectical corners."
"To be sure, words, and uses of words, do get discarded.
But that is because more attractive words, or uses, have
become available. Insofar as religion has been dying out among
the intellectuals in recent centuries, it is because of the attractions
of a humanist culture, not because of flaws internal to the discourse
of theists. Insofar as [Arthur] Fine is right that realism is
dying out among the philosophers, this is because of the attractions
of a culture which is more deeply and unreservedly humanist than
that offered by the arrogant scientism that was the least fortunate
legacy of the Enlightenment." - A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic
Philosophy
A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Anaytic
Philosophy
Analytic Philosophy and Transformative
Philosophy
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