I’ve realized I have a problem with writing this blog, apart from lack of time and a general aversion to the genre. What should I write about? The natural impulse is to write about what I’m thinking about, what I’m working on. But there are two reasons against this: (i) I don’t want to write […]
It had been dawning on me that it was a defect in my tennis game that I wasn’t getting to the ball early enough, in time to set up properly and hit with control (the strokes themselves were okay). Watching Melanie Oudin play brought this home to me: she uses her feet to fine-tune her […]
I’m just writing this now to signal my return and test my new site. I just finished the semester, having spent much of it teaching philosophy of sport and tennis (“tennis” here does not come within the scope of “philosophy”–I was teaching my students how to play tennis, not philosophize about it).
Our new president has literary and athletic skills. Not only can he write and speak eloquently and grammatically (his inauguration speech was meticulously crafted); he is also a fluent mover on the basketball court, with good coordination and ball sense. His predecessor was notoriously clumsy around language; he spoke as if language were a disease […]
Most Americans have no trouble believing that God exists, but they are uncertain about whether an American ruling class exists. They seem to think the idea of a ruling class is restricted to European aristocracies of yore and assorted eastern potentates of today. InThe American Ruling Class Lewis Lapham takes a wry trip across America, ostensibly […]
I’ve just finished reading Rose George’s The Big Necessity, about toilets and human waste (euphemism alert!)–as part of my interest in the emotion of disgust. I’d strongly recommend Aurel Kolnai’s monograph “On Disgust” as a philosophical treatment of the subject; it contains some excellent phenomenological work with some important conceptual distinctions (far better than most of what passes […]
“Philosophy is difficult and the difficult thing is to make it look easy; fiction is easy and the easy thing is to make it look difficult (the difficult thing is to make it interesting without making it difficult).” Discuss.
Why is death bad? Not for the same reason life is–that it contains bad experiences; it contains no experiences. The badness of death consists in the removal of all intentionality, not its suffusion by bad intentional objects. This has the implication that a consciousness without intentionality, as may be supposed for the early fetus, has […]
Is anyone else as irritated as I am by the constant description of Barack Obama as “black”? He has a white mother and a black father, which by my calculations makes him half white and half black. So it’s just as true to describe him a white man as a black man. I can’t help […]
I went to see Bill Maher’s documentary last night, on a balmy Miami night. Afterwards the rains came down in Biblical proportions, thus announcing God’s displeasure at the film and my attendance (I thwarted His wrath under a convenient restaurant umbrella). It’s an enjoyable and instructive film, especially if you enjoy groaning at people’s amazing […]