I would be interested in a philosophy of Horns. I would be very interested in that. A philosophy of horns, thorns, swords and knives and even 'A'ā lava. What is it about spikes that causes them to show up repeatedly in nature, in plants, animals, human weapons and even in extrusions of rock? You have horns made of chitin, bone, keratin, even modified teeth, occasionally branching in the same fractal patterns in animals as plants. In plants it can be a modified leaf or stem, it doesn't matter, the same patterns repeat.
I guess that the shear utility of the wedge--one of the simplest of the simple machines--as a weapon is so powerful that it it comes about almost by default, but if there is an argument that 'forms' exist I don't think there are many better. These questions never bothered me when I was young but now I can't escape them. I find myself sitting and asking impossible formulations like 'Why are fractals?' or 'How is a wedge?' and thinking that there's something I'm missing when I look at them, like I had a stroke and just can't grasp something essential, like how to use a spoon, that I once knew,
There just doesn't seem to be any room for this kind of thing in modern discourse unless it's crammed into a Ted talk and then used to talk about our Iran policy.
So all of that is a long way to say excellent article. I really enjoy seeing in your works an image of what The Humanities could be. My own humanities education was awful and sent me into a spiral that left me in orbit of Rufo/Lindsay types in an attempt to understand why what I paid (a lot of) money for was so bad and left me feeling as awful as it did and your work has gone some way to pull me back. I will admit that like a lot of others I first came here for culture war fodder, but your writing reminds me of what I once pursued and has done more to convince me that it could still exist than anything else.
Bravo for calling out the ever more widely practiced 'paint by numbers ' approach to whipping up an edited collection for one's academic CV. The level of philosophical argumentation in many of these 'dialled in' offerings leaves much to be desired. And I say this as a contributor to "What Philosophy can Teach you about your Cat" 😺
I couldn't agree more that we philosophers are in the process of being booted from our century long public sinecure, into an employment situation much more akin to our brothers and sisters in creative arts such as music, theatre...It would behoove us to learn a thing or two from these industries about self sufficiency and mutual help.
Thanks, Justin. As a fiction writer and poet turned editor of “popular” or “public” philosophy, with very little if any formal education in the discipline, I found myself approaching it as literature and using those sensibilities as guideposts. I always felt I was inhabiting an interstitial space but on the other hand I felt lucky to support and publish work that was emotionally and intellectually honest and rich, that, regardless of category or technical proficiency, moved many readers, including myself, to delight and further thought. It’s part of the reason I continue to appreciate the work you do to this day.
also, I will never leave a comment on the fiction, as I left one years ago, elsewhere, and to continue that swoon would be undignified, andif I don't read it well, its a timething
"body-without-organs" (I assume you do get this WTF, i.e. that this WTF is rhetorical-- I feel I have to bracket everything …) —I still feel I should here explain it, but I stop… —what is the philosophy/psychoanalysis of that feeling? What is that feeling, is it organly? a-organly? Are the horns organic dilemmas? Are horns unhairy hairs?
This is only tangentially related to your essay here, but a while ago I used to be socially connected to a lot of professional analytic philosophers in academic positions, high and mid level, younger and older. I got to see all their Facebook posts, etc. The way they used the word "philosophy" was interesting. For one thing, they referred to themselves as "philosophers" in ordinary speech, etc. I have been around a lot of academics in a lot of fields and have never seen any other group, including groups known for being dickish, do this with their field title so much -- e.g. even economists do not refer to themselves as "economists" with anything like the frequency or sense of self-satisfaction I found with philosophers. To say nothing of chemists, engineers, etc.
Many (especially younger ones) were also very into talking about or writing about anything they wanted to write about as "philosophy of". For example, they would try to publish essays about their experiences with their boyfriends or girlfriends under the rubric of "philosophy of love", "philosophy of romantic love", etc. Or about trips they took under "philosophy of travel", etc. Of course any political opinion could be certified as some form of philosophy as well. These were professionals so there was potentially money and tenure in it if you could spark interest, but I also felt a lot of personal investment was going on. "Philosopher" did status work for everyone, including older and established academics looking for a pickup line that differentiated them. I also got the sense that a lot of the younger ones had been trained in analytic philosophy but now found it narrow and boring and looked to "philosophy of" etc. as an escape.
Ever since that period in my life, which lasted until I started getting annoyed and saying intemperate things on Facebook and then just deleted my account, I have found even the word "philosophy" to be sort of cheesy and cringe. There was just a lot of smarm associated with it in my mind.
How do I get to be considered for a free, or reduced-rate, subscription to your blog, which explains as much as it fails to explain? (Good.). As a high-school student, “The monads have no windows” was my mantra. I majored in philosophy in college; I wish you’d been around to explain, or fail to explain, why this was a terrible idea. Anyway, my husband and I, who I must say are not at all opposed to paying writers for their work, are in a patch where we can’t subscribe any further until Things Improve. Can we try a reduced-cost subscription until improvement obtains? Contact me at wotankat@yahoo.com. Thank you for your attention, kind, scattered, surfeited.
I would be interested in a philosophy of Horns. I would be very interested in that. A philosophy of horns, thorns, swords and knives and even 'A'ā lava. What is it about spikes that causes them to show up repeatedly in nature, in plants, animals, human weapons and even in extrusions of rock? You have horns made of chitin, bone, keratin, even modified teeth, occasionally branching in the same fractal patterns in animals as plants. In plants it can be a modified leaf or stem, it doesn't matter, the same patterns repeat.
I guess that the shear utility of the wedge--one of the simplest of the simple machines--as a weapon is so powerful that it it comes about almost by default, but if there is an argument that 'forms' exist I don't think there are many better. These questions never bothered me when I was young but now I can't escape them. I find myself sitting and asking impossible formulations like 'Why are fractals?' or 'How is a wedge?' and thinking that there's something I'm missing when I look at them, like I had a stroke and just can't grasp something essential, like how to use a spoon, that I once knew,
There just doesn't seem to be any room for this kind of thing in modern discourse unless it's crammed into a Ted talk and then used to talk about our Iran policy.
So all of that is a long way to say excellent article. I really enjoy seeing in your works an image of what The Humanities could be. My own humanities education was awful and sent me into a spiral that left me in orbit of Rufo/Lindsay types in an attempt to understand why what I paid (a lot of) money for was so bad and left me feeling as awful as it did and your work has gone some way to pull me back. I will admit that like a lot of others I first came here for culture war fodder, but your writing reminds me of what I once pursued and has done more to convince me that it could still exist than anything else.
Bravo for calling out the ever more widely practiced 'paint by numbers ' approach to whipping up an edited collection for one's academic CV. The level of philosophical argumentation in many of these 'dialled in' offerings leaves much to be desired. And I say this as a contributor to "What Philosophy can Teach you about your Cat" 😺
I couldn't agree more that we philosophers are in the process of being booted from our century long public sinecure, into an employment situation much more akin to our brothers and sisters in creative arts such as music, theatre...It would behoove us to learn a thing or two from these industries about self sufficiency and mutual help.
Thanks, Justin. As a fiction writer and poet turned editor of “popular” or “public” philosophy, with very little if any formal education in the discipline, I found myself approaching it as literature and using those sensibilities as guideposts. I always felt I was inhabiting an interstitial space but on the other hand I felt lucky to support and publish work that was emotionally and intellectually honest and rich, that, regardless of category or technical proficiency, moved many readers, including myself, to delight and further thought. It’s part of the reason I continue to appreciate the work you do to this day.
also, I will never leave a comment on the fiction, as I left one years ago, elsewhere, and to continue that swoon would be undignified, andif I don't read it well, its a timething
"body-without-organs" (I assume you do get this WTF, i.e. that this WTF is rhetorical-- I feel I have to bracket everything …) —I still feel I should here explain it, but I stop… —what is the philosophy/psychoanalysis of that feeling? What is that feeling, is it organly? a-organly? Are the horns organic dilemmas? Are horns unhairy hairs?
This is only tangentially related to your essay here, but a while ago I used to be socially connected to a lot of professional analytic philosophers in academic positions, high and mid level, younger and older. I got to see all their Facebook posts, etc. The way they used the word "philosophy" was interesting. For one thing, they referred to themselves as "philosophers" in ordinary speech, etc. I have been around a lot of academics in a lot of fields and have never seen any other group, including groups known for being dickish, do this with their field title so much -- e.g. even economists do not refer to themselves as "economists" with anything like the frequency or sense of self-satisfaction I found with philosophers. To say nothing of chemists, engineers, etc.
Many (especially younger ones) were also very into talking about or writing about anything they wanted to write about as "philosophy of". For example, they would try to publish essays about their experiences with their boyfriends or girlfriends under the rubric of "philosophy of love", "philosophy of romantic love", etc. Or about trips they took under "philosophy of travel", etc. Of course any political opinion could be certified as some form of philosophy as well. These were professionals so there was potentially money and tenure in it if you could spark interest, but I also felt a lot of personal investment was going on. "Philosopher" did status work for everyone, including older and established academics looking for a pickup line that differentiated them. I also got the sense that a lot of the younger ones had been trained in analytic philosophy but now found it narrow and boring and looked to "philosophy of" etc. as an escape.
Ever since that period in my life, which lasted until I started getting annoyed and saying intemperate things on Facebook and then just deleted my account, I have found even the word "philosophy" to be sort of cheesy and cringe. There was just a lot of smarm associated with it in my mind.
How do I get to be considered for a free, or reduced-rate, subscription to your blog, which explains as much as it fails to explain? (Good.). As a high-school student, “The monads have no windows” was my mantra. I majored in philosophy in college; I wish you’d been around to explain, or fail to explain, why this was a terrible idea. Anyway, my husband and I, who I must say are not at all opposed to paying writers for their work, are in a patch where we can’t subscribe any further until Things Improve. Can we try a reduced-cost subscription until improvement obtains? Contact me at wotankat@yahoo.com. Thank you for your attention, kind, scattered, surfeited.