I just finished listening to Wolf: The Lives of Jack London by James L. Haley on my commute. I had known nothing about London except that he was pretty outdoorsy. Turns out he was an ardent and outspoken socialist, too. He had grown up amidst the unspeakable hardships of the lower class in San Francisco, taking on ever greater risks to eke out a living among sailors and, in Alaska, prospectors. Driven by a sense of justice, he went so far as to live and work for a spell in London’s East End, workhouses and all, in order to get the first person view of the lower classes there. He lived hard and drank hard, declining already in his thirties and ultimately succumbing to a self-administered morphine overdose. The description of working class San Francisco in the 19th century alone would have made the book worthwhile.
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Here's a project I'd like to undertake sometime, given unlimited resources of leisure: go through the New Atheist corpus, organize their arguments taxonomically, and attempt a response to each. (The taxonomic structure, as I envision it, would allow me to deal with multiple "child nodes" by addressing their common parent.) It would be a large task, but one that would force me to better articulate and pronounce on matters theological and metaphysical. Now if Edward Feser's The Last Superstition is any indication, the emphasis would be metaphysical as the primary target of the New Atheists is the religion of voluntarists and fideists.
Many of us who were assigned Foucault somewhere in our college days were taught to dread the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's maximally surveillant prison design. In some of us it may evoke the image of the police state and the sound of jackboots in the alley. In others, who perhaps read the text a little more carefully, it stands for more insidious forms of coercion and uniformity that, gulling the population under control, masquerade as higher forms of social progress and even freedom.
Dismal, from dies malus: evil day. I have this from Wheelock’s Latin, which I am laboring through once and for all. It is rainy, and the thermometer has plummeted again.
You know when you’re reading real metaphysics when your pace grinds to three pages an hour and you give up any hopes of finishing the book soon. And when the only chance of getting something out of this laborious effort is to get your pencil out and try to summarize whatever argument you’re in the midst of. This usually opens the door to a world of questions. If only you work up the gumption, and are willing to forgo breezier titles the while. Such is my predicament with Oderberg’s Real Essentialism. Another reason to think on dismal, and another reason to get the cover for that gadget as soon as you buy it: Papa reads late. Papa drifts off. Tablet slips to mattress. Child crawls under covers in the middle of the night. Then another. Both potty trained, but prone to relapse… Dismal again: configuration blues. My application can’t find the very .so file I am looking at with my own eyes. Path variable looks good. Tried rebooting and reinstalling. Several times. Hate to pop the hood on these things. Google gives dies mali as the origin of dismal - evil days - by way of something called Anglo-Norman French. And shows that it has dropped in popularity (i.e. in written texts, extant and determined scanworthy by Google) since 1800. Does this make me a holdout? |
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