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.

Thick and Many-legged

I would carry the thickening and polypedification of philosophy much farther than Putnam would. Philosophy needs to deal with its own indexicality (so-called “subjectivity”) as something other than a source of error. It has to recognize that the future is open and indeterminate and that, of necessity, all humans face an unknowable future in the process of being made. “Truth” is only about the past and the eternal and universal, but philosophy also needs to learn to deal with the future and projects. Philosophy has to fully accept not only ethics, but also practical reason governing action. Practical engagement is not a debased form of theory, but a way of making reality, and (as a kind of experimentation) an essential source of knowledge. And last of all, thick philosophy, as an essentially-contested, normative form of projective, practical, social / personal reason oriented toward the not-yet (the unknown, unformed, and nonexistent future), needs to be oriented both toward truth and toward persuasion, since the future becomes real in part through human intention.

Emerson's Zero-One Law

Alternatively, whenever someone chooses to make a thermodynamically-impossible (but not formally impossible) conjecture -- the old "not impossible, but merely very unlikely" dodge -- they should be required to repeat the word "very" a thousand times, so that the reader has some intuition of how bogglingly unlikely it is. Boggling improbability could be even quantified in terms of Monkey-Typewriter-Shakespeare units, so people would know whether a given event were merely MTS-impossible, or (for example) MTS-squared-impossible.

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.

Cratylus

Contrary to Plato's wish, the fateful absoluteness of social actions and decisions is not grounded on reasons as absolute as the decisions, but on historical customs and conventions. As a result, we cannot know the answers to ("normative") social questions the way we know questions of ahistorical scientific fact. And Cratylus can be seen as an ancestor, not only of culture critics such as Nietzsche (who had his own history of the word "virtue") or more recently Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (writing about the history of word "representation" in all its contexts), but also of the legal scholars who rule our lives an the basis of conventional precedents tracing back to the Norman Conquest.

Parmenides in Szechuan

In Chungking, the temporary Nationalist Chinese capital during WWII, Hao Wang (eventually to become Kurt Godel's literary executor, studied mathematical logic  while Ch'en K'ang was  translating and commenting on Plato's Parmenides. Oddly enough, Ch'en does not mention two closely  parallel passages between Chuang Tzu (Watson tr., p. 141) and Plato (Parmenides #130c) on the Forms (or Tao) of hair, mud, dirt, piss, and shit.

The Cynic Emperor

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.

Gary Becker's Treatise on the Family

The supposed child-commodity marks a major problem with Becker's theory. Imagine someone raising goats, which are in fact commodities. You put money and time into your goats, and with luck you can sell them for a profit. Or you can kill or eat them. Or if they become a nuisance, you can give them away or have them put to sleep. Commodities don't really cause a big nuisance. Children, on the other hand, are strictly money down the drain. You can never sell them, and you can't eat them or get rid of them. They impose major legal obligations, because you are both responsible for their care and for their behavior -- yet once they become adults, they no longer have any obligation to you.

When the child-commodity turns eighteen, it becomes independent. At that point the little child-commodity (which had been producing "psychic income": p. 194) turns into human capital -- i.e., an independent adult selling its labor on the market. At this point the parental unit has nothing to show for his efforts. The child-commodity upon which he had lavished so much money and time is gone forever, to be replaced by an independent, competing human unit.

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.

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