*(not this guy)
Kevin Kim is a reader and occasional commenter on this blog, and a blogger himself. Moreover, he’s the author of a (self-published) book entitled Water from a Skull: Essays on Religious Diversity, Christianity, Buddhism, Mind, and Other Things that Matter. I recently purchased a copy, thinking that reading it would be a quicker way to get a handle on Kevin’s views on Things that Matter than trying to sift out the relevant blog posts from the far more numerous posts on what he cooked for dinner last night. 
(And I’d rather read those than these. )
I started reading Water with the relatively brief section on philosophy of mind. Continue Reading »
A few weeks ago I received, quite unexpectedly, a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised my Joy from an old college friend. I couldn’t turn down such a direct invitation, so I’ve read it. Here’s a report.
Unimpressed by Joy
I’ve never been much of a Lewis fan; but, since I haven’t read very much of his work, that opinion doesn’t count for much. As I recall, prior to SbJ I had read The Abolition of Man and The Problem of Pain. (In addition, Mere Christianity was recommended to me in the course of this discussion here; I checked it out from the library and tried reading it, but the bad arguments therein induced a repeated urge to throw the book against the wall, and I was unable to finish it. And just skimming through it, I wasn’t able to locate the passage that Mike was referring to.)
But back to the books I have read. This lecture by J. R. Lucas seems to me a fair appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Abolition. (One discovers, when one starts poking around in Lewisania, that those who are predisposed towards being sympathetic to his positions are often his sternest critics, perhaps due to their disappointment at seeing potentially good arguments handled sloppily.) As for The Problem of Pain, overall it’s a reasonably good discussion of theodicy, but it’s marred by a ludicrous passage on animal pain, one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen in print.
Reading SbJ did not change my overall reaction to Lewis.
Continue Reading »
If Walden was Thoreau’s flight from the market economy, it was, equally, a flight from women, from domesticity, from family life. He walked to town, nearly every day, to dine with friends; his mother often cooked for him…. Above all, he cherished his manly self-sufficiency (even though he carried his dirty laundry to Concord for his mother to wash.)
(from Jill Lapore, writing in the New Yorker)
My old colleague Dave Hildebrand has a penned (or keyboarded) a collection entitled FOUR HAIKU ON THE APA CONVENTION. Here are a couple of samples:
My book is just out.
See it here, amidst the dreck?
Pity the backlists!
Matrix of tables
Saunter forth, meet your makers.
Pluck you from job hell.
A story in this morning’s Austin American-Statesman bears the headline “Parents feel ‘alienated’, seek ouster of school’s principal.” According to the story,
The parents said [Austin High School Principal John] Hudson does not support parents, students or teachers, and said he does not revere some of the 126-year-old school’s traditions. They fault him for cutting the number of pep rallies and reading a book during one of the few athletic events he’s attended.
In this NY Times article, Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg quotes approvingly Richard Feynman’s dictum that “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” Seems to me that the corollary would be, “Scientists understand about as much about what they’re really doing as a tree does about photosynthesis.”
Although I was just a little kid in the late ’60s (my adolescence coinciding with the 1970s), I have memories of those heady times. Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Revolution in the air.
Most of that program didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to. (How could it have?) The utopian vision of unlimited sex without attachment or consequences, and unlimited quantities of mind-expanding yet harmless drugs, turned out to be illusions, and extremely destructive ones for all too many people.
But: today they send kids to rock-and-roll summer camp. Far out, man!!! I mean, during Activities Period do you get to choose between Pot Smoking and Hotel Wrecking? From the perspective of a 12-year-old in 1970, coming to realize how unhip Boy Scout camp was (they didn’t like long hair there) and the devastating effect that the mere sound of an amplified guitar could have on one’s elders, I’d say that part of the ’60s dream came true after all.
In a previous post, I listed some of the books I’ve read over the past few months, and offered to publicize my appraisals of those works for anyone who might be interested. So far, I’ve had no takers (not surprising, in light of the number of readers that that offer is, realistically, likely to have had), so I kind of feel like responding to my own hypothetical question. (Isn’t that really the motive for a whole lot of writing?) What was the best book on that list?
I dunno.
And I mean that seriously, and as a challenge of sorts to anyone who would try to force me to make a choice.
I mean, here, to raise a more general point: a principled objection to the entire practice of ranking and rating, that leads to the practice of Top Ten Lists.
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