1. Born at the Circus (July 30)
Today is my birthday. Or, more precisely, as my schoolteacher grandma always corrected us, today is my birthday anniversary. If it were my actual birthday, I hardly think I could have managed yet to get myself online and to crank out a Substack piece for you, indulgent reader, on this very first day of my earthly passage, still lacking even the requisite neck muscles to hold my head up, let alone the digital agility required to write.
I know none of you have been checking my Wikipedia page recently, neither in English nor in Dutch nor in Standard nor Egyptian Arabic, for if you had you would have seen my date of birth clearly indicated there, and you would already have thought to write to me your kind birthday greetings. Instead, I got radio silence, from everyone but my dear old friend Abbas, who has sent wishes without fail for as long as I can remember.
If you had clicked around upon arrival on my page, you might also have noticed this rather concise list I’ve somehow landed on:
This list is strange to me for a number of reasons. For one thing, Murray Rothbard is nothing if not a New Yorker, who seems to have enjoyed only a brief sojourn in Las Vegas. He is not “from Nevada” any more than, say, Hillary Clinton is “from New York”. From this I conclude that any accurate list of “Philosophers from Nevada” should really only have one name on it, and that name should be mine. Now I know the philosophy department homepage at, say, UNLV, will tell a different story, claiming that there are in fact several philosophers resident in this state. But in my view a “Philosopher from Nevada” should be, at the very least, a “Philosopher of Nevada”, in the same way one might be a “Philosopher of Mind” or a “Philosopher of Science”.
Part of what makes me so eager to step up for this role is that we happen to be in Reno today, which happens to be the place I was born. You might thus be tempted to call it a “birthplace anniversary” too, but space, unlike time, does not seem to work that way. Near as I can make out this has something to do with the cyclicity of temporal duration, at least in the sublunar region of the cosmos, while everyone knows that with places, unlike dates, if you just sit still you will never come back to them simply as a matter of course. To return to them you must move — a major disanalogy between time and space right there. I’m sure somebody’s “working on it”.
But look, it’s my birthday and we’re in my birthplace and I’m determined to make this a private party. So go ahead and subscribe, kind reader, if you have not done so already, and then keep reading below the fold, right after this word from our sponsors down at the Slop Factory.
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