Jon Cogburn's Blog

Jerry Fodor

It's past time to draw the moral, which I take to be that a plethora of claims to the contrary notwithstanding, you can't escape Quine's web just by opting for a metaphysical notion of necessity. Not, anyhow, if the latter is grounded in intuitions about what possible worlds there are. That's because some story is needed about what makes such intuitions true (or false) and, as far as I can see, the only candidates are facts about concepts. It's 'water' being a material kind concept that vindicates the intuition that water is necessarily H2O. Well, but if Quine is right and there aren't any such facts about concepts, then there is nothing to vindicate modal intuitions. Accordingly, if the methodology of analytic philosophy lacked a rationale pre-Kripke, it continues to do so.

Richard Wolin

. . . .During the 1980s, students and professors of literary theory fervently imbibed the classic texts of "French theory" — what came to be known on this side of the Atlantic as "poststructuralism." (Tellingly, this appellation, an American coinage, does not exist in France.) Among disciples — often the best and the brightest among newly minted comp-lit Ph.D.'s — the tone was ardent and the expectations salvific. 

. . . .Although traces of French theory remain, the messianic fervor of its halcyon days seems spent. It has settled in to become merely one critical paradigm among others

. . . .Rejecting the tyranny of reason, or "logocentrism," Derrida's writing reveled in the joys of linguistic slippage, textual fissures, and uninhibited play. By the same token, his dazzling displays of interpretive bravado (I once witnessed a laborious, two-hour public exegesis of an eight-line poem by the French bard Francis Ponge) seemed merely to foster a new breed of textual formalism. How might one turn Derrida's impenetrable writing into a viable critical program? In truth, it was impossible. By declaring early on that "there is nothing outside the text," Derrida did little to stanch the metastasizing credibility gap. "Unreadability" was one of deconstruction's signature traits. But when Derrida's disciples tried their hand at deconstructive criticism, often the results were decidedly mixed — watercolor pastiches of a venerable Dutch master. What was good for the master wasn't necessarily good for the students.

. . . .Perhaps the major question that arises from Cusset's book concerns French theory's strikingly different receptions in North America and France. In America, French theory flourished during the 1980s, but during the same decade in France, it was summarily buried. By the early 1980s in France, scholarly citations of Derrida's work had dwindled to a trickle. A 1980 poll on French intellectuals listed Claude Lévi-Strauss and Raymond Aron as the top two vote getters. Among the 36 intellectuals receiving votes, Derrida's name was nowhere to be found.

. . . .Derrida once proclaimed that "deconstruction is America," thereby acknowledging the curious fact that while French theory had caught on in North America, in his native France it remained peculiarly without echo. By appropriating the precepts of French theory, we Americans undermined its residual claims to theoretical and political radicalism — and thereby succeeded in domesticating it. In the end, it became grist for the mill of liberal pluralism.

Roger Cohen

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament.” Bush’s endless malapropisms have made his intellect the object of ridicule. But his mind was not the problem. It’s a better mind than his “nukelar” trashing of language suggests.

Bush’s chip-on-the-shoulder temperament is another matter. He has proved mean, vindictive, surly, controlling and impatient, as befits his guns-at-the-ready gait. Apologizing for tough-guy rhetoric now, as he has, is no remedy. There’s nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of New Orleans levees.

David Mitchell

The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. "You'd have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to  be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one's will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren't going to need will in their New Earth."

Flaubert

One should be wary of touching one's idols, for the gilt comes off on one's fingers.

Roger Scruton

American visitors to Paris, Rome, Prague, or Barcelona, comparing what they see with what is familiar from their own continent, will recognize how careless their countrymen often have been in their attempts to create cities. But the American who leaves the routes prescribed by the Ministries of Tourism will quickly see that Paris is miraculous in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it. Elsewhere, European cities are going the way of cities in America: high-rise offices in the center, surrounded first by a ring of lawless dereliction, and then by the suburbs, to which those who work in the city flee at the end of the day. Admittedly, nothing in Europe compares with the vandalism that modernists have wreaked on Buffalo, Tampa, or Minneapolis (to take three examples of American cities that cause me particular pain). Nevertheless, the same moral disaster is beginning to afflict us—the disaster of cities in which no one wishes to live, where public spaces are vandalized and private spaces boarded up.

Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London.

Citizens protested, and conservation societies fought throughout Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, but the modernists won the battle of ideas. They took over the architecture schools and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio. The purpose of the new curriculum was to produce ideologically driven engineers, whose representational skills went no further than ground plans and isometric drawings, and who could undertake the gargantuan “projects” of the socialist state: shoveling people into housing estates, laying out industrial areas and business parks, driving highways through ancient city centers, and generally reminding the middle classes that Big Brother was supervising them.

Martha C. Nussbaum

It [collective rape and murder committed against dissenting rural people by the cadres of the ruling communist party of West Bengal] is this issue that has split India’s left. The artists and intellectuals I’ve named are in a few cases motivated by a woolly romanticism about agriculture and an ideological opposition to all industrial development. For this they should be criticized. Some of them may also have had unrealistic expectations for this government, whose Stalinists roots they have perhaps insufficiently appreciated. For this lack of caution they should also be criticized. They also, however, have had the courage of consistent moral principle, standing up against brutality even when the perpetrators are friends. For this they are to be greatly admired. Not so admirable, by contrast, have been the statements of some leftists to the effect that one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness. One may or may not trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance.

A particularly fatuous document of this kind was a letter authored by Noam Chomsky, signed by a number of Indian American intellectuals who should know better, and published in the Hindu, a leading national India newspaper, on November 22, 2007. Besides lauding the CPI(M) for “important experiments” for which it deserves no particular credit (such as “local self-government”), the letter reasons that people on the left ought to focus on opposition to the actions of the United States in Iraq, rather than fighting with one another. “This is not the time for division when the basis of division no longer appears to exist,” concludes Chomsky, having asserted, entirely without cause on that date, that things are basically back to normal and that the two sides have reconciled. This is the type of left politics that holds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, no matter how many rapes and murders that friend has actually perpetrated.

Paramahansa Yoganda

The life of ordinary man is monotonous, at best. He wakes, bathes his body, enjoys the after-bath sensation, eats breakfast, hurries to work, begins to get weary, is refreshed by lunch, again pursues his work, and finally goes home, bored and listless. The hour of his too-heavy dinner is punctuated by various noises from radio or television and often ill-humored remarks from wife or children. This typical man may then attend the movies or a party for a brief diversionary respite; he comes home late, is very tired and sleeps heavily. What a life! But he repeats this performance, with unimaginative variations through the best years of his life.

By such habits man becomes like a machine, a human automaton, fueled with food, automatically performing tasks sluggishly and unwillingly, without joy or inspiration, and partially shutting down its activities by sleep--only to repeat, on the following day, the same routine.

The Baghivad Gita commands man to avoid this mere "existence."

James Kunstler

But all the backward-looking crybaby complaints that "we were lied to" still doesn't answer the basic question: what should have been the appropriate response to the extreme injury of 9/11? A diplomatic protest? Another investigation by the UN? The surreptitious assassination of Arab troublemakers all around the world? I don't think the "we were lied to" contingent has a credible answer to this question.

There's another hugely important realm of inquiry that the "we were lied to" folks have never addressed: who lied to us about the way we live in this country? About the amount of oil we consume in the service of all our comforts and conveniences? About our extreme car dependence and what is required in our relations with the rest of the world to sustain it. All these years, Frank Rich and all his whining colleagues at the New York Times barely acknowledged the domestic fiasco of the suburban sprawl economy that placed us in such jeopardy to begin with. Even now, with the airlines disintegrating and gasoline over $4 (diesel over $5) I haven't heard any of these crybabies even raise the issue of restoring the US railroad system. How many of these crybabies live suburban lives themselves, in places like Louden County, Virginia, or Westchester, or Long Island, or the San Fernando Valley? Who lied to us about that?

For my money, the "we were lied to" chorus only represents the obdurately self-righteous cluelessness in every band of the American political spectrum. We lied to ourselves. We continue to lie to ourselves every day. The US public barely understands the first thing about the energy predicament we're in, and what it means for how we live in this country -- or how we get along with the rest of the world -- and the news media tragically reflects that ignorance. We fantasize about being "energy independent" and still being able to drive to the mall three times a day to eat caesar salads grown on the other side of North America. Get this: we deserve exactly what is happening to us. We might as well keep on lying to ourselves to pretend that we are not descending into a dark phase of our own history. After all, the true basis of American life these days is to feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

Douglas Kellner

. . .I found a broad range of continental philosophy attractive. And yet I was not happy with the division of Anglo-American philosophy into continental vs. analytical perspectives. While much that passes for analytical philosophy today is abstract, academic, and often useless, much that parades as continental philosophy is dogmatic posturing and pretentious gibberish. But both the tools of conceptual analysis and perspectives of continental philosophy can be applied together in specific tasks and projects. Philosophy, in my optic, is both analysis and synthesis, deconstruction and reconstruction. Consequently, I would defend pluralistic perspectives that draw on the best work on all traditions.

. . . .Ironically, many of those who I consider the top philosophers of my generation have left philosophy departments, raising some serious questions about the contemporary institutional status of philosophy. On the whole, it seems like contemporary American philosophy seems frozen, in a state of paralysis.

While the dominant analytical philosophy suffers from theoretical sclerosis, a hardening of the categories, and undergoing a slow public and academic death, the situation of continental philosophy is also dispiriting. In the 1980s, it looked as though contemporary philosophy was entering a frutiful state of pluralism with a blossoming of continental philosophy, mutating into “Theory,” crossing over into every discipline. On the philosophical frontlines, there was also a reappropriation of Dewey and pragmatism, of other strands of American philosophy, as well as the move into new fields such as feminism, African American and Latino philosophy, philosophy of technology, environmental philosophy, philosophical media studies, and the philosophy of electronic culture and communication. These trends continue within the broader philosophical-intellectual world, but often not in philosophy departments, and they have been pushed to the margins of the academic discipline of philosophy.

Most distressing, not only has reaction and retrenchment set in with analytic philosophy, but continental philosophy is segregating itself into circles in which specific philosophers are revered as the Voice of Truth, of the revered Word. Thus the ontotheological dimension of philosophy that Derrida decried has its Renaissance in schools of contemporary philosophy.

Living philosophy, however, is always synthesis, always in motions, always taking in the novel, absorbing challenging ideas, trends, and theories, constantly developing and reshaping philosophy, in dialogue with other disciplines and contemporary culture and experiences.