Greatest Hits

My site isn't exactly user-friendly, so I've selected what I think are my best works in my various categories of interest. The ambitious things are toward the top, and the fun things are toward the bottom.

Yang Chu's Discovery of the Body

My greatest scholarly success was the publication of this article in a refereed journal, but I did not find that publication made me part of the dialogue on Chinese philosophy. This is an ambitious piece and I hope someone reads it sometime. My argument is that during the late Warring States period, the changes in self-definition and self-awareness (tending toward mysticism) and the changes in social organization (tending toward a rationalized secularism) were essentially two aspects of the same process. A follow-up article is here. Part of my argument is that for a century or two (ending about 150 BC with the state recognition of Confucianism) China was going through a process of rationalization and secularization rather similar to the Sophistic period in Greece, and that if this process had not been reversed China might have developed entirely differently.

The Barbarian Reservoir 

The barbarian invaders from the steppe have been compared to reservoirs (geothermal, electrostatic, or thermodynamic), volcanoes, lightning, storms, black holes, and wombs. Their real nature and their actual relationship to civilized society have been  properly understood by very few. For two thousand years they shaped civilized society from the uncontrolled steppe as a threat, and between about 200 A.D. and about 1300 A.D. almost all of the civilized world came under barbarian control.

2000 years of Barbarians

A 4000-word sketch of the relationship between the steppe barbarians and the civilized world: Inner Asian geography, the life of the nomads. nomad warfare, a brief history of the impact of the nomads on the civilized world, and comparisons: the Mongol empire as a trade empire.  I've been working on this topic for ten years.

A Naive Reading of Descartes

The basic "Cartesian" philosophical principles of mind-body dualism, idealism, and the ontological proof of the existence of God are all there in the Discourse on Method, but in such a sketchy form that they don't seem like philosophy at all. The metaphysical, philosophical part is limited to the six pages of Part Four, and to me seems by far the weakest and least interesting part of the book. What's really interesting is the description of a practical analytic, atomistic scientific method -- including a job description for research assistants, an early version of peer review, and a model for scientific training that looks a lot like "progressive education".  A naive reading of Descartes' text finds a pragmatist. 

Ressentiment and Schooling: A New Theory of Western Civilization

Sexual repression and hatred of the body are often alleged to be at the root of Western alienation. An examination of a number of key figures (Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and St. Augustine, with glances at Sartre, Pascal and Thoreau) shows that behind the sexual repression and ressentiment often lie years of intensive classical education forced upon these authors by ambitious parents -- often mothers, with the fathers absent or ineffectual). The supposed sexual repression is simply the result of the same social-climbing imperatives, which forbid both illicit relationships and marriages into inappropriate families.

Why Relativism?

I think that a real philosophical discussion of ethics would understand ethics in its political and historical context, with particular attention to the limitations of the scope of ethics that have been seen over the last several centuries, and as a result would find relativism as an unsurprising historical reality rather than as a starting point for sophisticated philosophical argumentation. A more meaningful ethical discourse would use real cases instead of fictional ones as heuristic examples, which would require taking the ethical issues seriously and actually trying to resolve them. It would also recognize that ethics, rather than simply being a body of truth-functional ethical statements to agree to, has to be integrated into the ethical agent’s identity by a self-transformation in order to be real.

Starting from Greenland (or, the Turkish Kayak)
 

"Kayak" is probably a Turkish word, and the word "caique" has entered the European languages from Turkish as the name of an entirely different boat. The two words met in Scandinavia ca. 1700, having circumnavigated the globe between them. The Ivory Road from Greenland to China ca. 1000 AD. The Varangian (Norse) circumnavigation of Europe at the time of the Fourth Crusade.

Hemoglobin and its substitutes

The color symbolism of red and green derives from the closely-related molecules hemoglobin and chlorophyll, the first representing animal life and the second, vegetable life. On the other hand, if we were priapalids or "penis worms" whose blood relies on hemerythrin instead of hemoglobin, purple or violet would have the place in our color symbolism that red does now. (Links to a piece  about iron and steel at the end of the Bronze Age.)

Van Gogh as Chump

Today Van Gogh's works are worth billions of dollars altogether, but during his lifetime he was destitute. A study of art-marketing from Van Gogh to Andy Warhol and Madonna.

Menina e moça by Bernardim Ribeiro (including a partial translation)

The strange sixteenth-century Portuguese fiction Menina e moça is unlike anything else I’ve ever read, most resembling some of the dark works of our own time (and perhaps also Gothic novels, or the stories of Kleist). It portrays a nightmarish, inescapably unhappy world where love is doomed by curses, haunts, social pressures, tragic misunderstandings, faithlessness and fate. (This page has become the home page for the "Menina and Moça Project", the goal of which is to get the book translated into English).

The Translation of the Ruins of Rome (including eleven translations into five languages)

Poetry is supposed to be "what's lost in translation", and the translator has been defined as a traitor, but there's one poem which has become part of the canon in at least five different languages:

I have gathered the Latin text and eleven translations, citations of Vitalis' poem by Dr. Johnson and John Dyer, an Italian poem on the same theme by Baldassarre Castiglione, links to some Dutch scholarship on Castiglione (as well as some Renaissance Latin poems by the Dutch scholar Janus Secundus), and Joseph Brodsky's  Russian poem after the Polish translation. (No, I can't read all of it either, but gathering this stuff was tremendous fun).

Eleven Short Untitled Poems

Decades ago I wrote poetry during a difficult period of my life. I still like it, though it's not really me any more. People found my poetry depressing.

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