let me summarize the problems/coincidences with me and nehamas. we both wrote books titles the art of living. mine was from suny press, 1995; his from california, 2000. In 2004, in my book six names of beauty (routledge), i gave the first thorough and systematic revival of what might be termed an erotic conception of beauty since shaftesbury or perhaps burke in the 18th century. (i am an expert on that.) in 2010 nehamas, in only a promise of happiness (princeton) also revived that view, in a somewhat different form, without acknowledging my work in any way, and was ecstatically received as an innovator, winning the award for best professional/scholarly book in philosophy from the association of american publishers. these books have, as epigraphs, the very same four lines of sappho (in different translations, though). those are the big items. i have not at all scoured for other similarities.
it would be natural to think that we both got the view from arthur danto. danto suggested the epigraph to me, and i credited him for it. indeed, danto himself published the abuse of beauty with open court in 2003. i was corresponding with danto, seeing him at conferences, and so on; we both knew of the other's work and had been in dialogue on the subject of beauty for many years. his approach is completely different and opposed to that taken by me, and by nehamas. danto influenced me in many ways, but not in that one (it sure is a great book, though).
when his book appeared i emailed alexander nehamas at his princeton address along these lines: 'we really seem to be working along similar lines! we have books with the same title. we're both working along the same lines on beauty. our books have the same epigraph! we should connect more,' etc. no reply. sometimes it's hard to never have heard of someone or read his work; you've really got to delete a lot of stuff everywhere, especially in your brain.
i guess nehamas has replied in daily nous. i'll have a look eventually. here's why it's impossible that he hadn't seen my book, though it is indeed not in his index. so, the first thing i did when i started writing 6 names was go on amazon and search 'beauty philosophy.' i definitely wanted to know what books had appeared recently, assess whether anyone was working in a similar vein, and so on. there was remarkably little; almost the first thing that popped up was mothersill's thing from i think the early 90s, which i'd already read. so, as he set out, or at any point in the process, nehamas certainly was also trying to see what was out there. (if he did not do that, he's an excruciatingly incompetent scholar, and nehamas is not that, whatever the drawbacks). and if he had hit mine he would have immediately seen affinities, if this was already his approach to beauty. so the notion that he never saw it at all - especially, for example, if danto was providing the sappho epigraph - just strikes me as extremely unlikely.
one thing that is very difficult not to notice: that someone has written a book with the very title you are going to use, or that there are two books out there by academic philosophers with the same title. indeed, your publisher is quite likely to make you aware of that fact if, impossibly, you missed it. (titles can't be copyrighted, though.) if nothing else, my book would have brough my aesthetics to nehamas's attention.
all i saw was the quote that said: i had never seen his book; which has that element of sneering so familiar to anyone who has ever run into alexander nehamas; he was so unknown that i didn't notice his book. but anyone who was talking to danto about beauty, or doing a rudimentary search on the topic he was writing a scholarly book about, could not have failed to notice my book.
indeed, if nehamas was talking to danto about beauty, i think 'sartwell' would have been one of the first things out his mouth. we had corresponded as my book was in progress, and he blurbed both books. my book would have shown up in the first few search results on amazon or elsewhere, with a blurb by danto, and a sketch of the basic approach. the idea that you'd decide not to look at it seems to me vanishingly small. so, i do not see any realistic scenario where i am not in the index. if i had been doing 6 names a few years after only a promise of happiness, you would have heard early about the similarities; indeed, i might have been very enthusiastic about the similarities, ready to take account of nehamas's work, and band together as a movement for a new-ancient approach to beauty.
indeed, i can more or less prove that would have been my approach. so unknown was my work on beauty that shortly after nehamas's book appeared, the stanford encyclopedia approached me to do their entry on beauty. despite my misgivings, i associated his work and mine as signs of a renaissance of beauty as a theme in philosophy, and of this approach to it particularly. i didn't pretend not to have read his book. i didn't nitpick or try to show why my book was better, and so on. it's good they didn't get nehamas to do it; his insistence on repressing all signs and memories of my book would have led to a skewed and decidedly self-congratulatory view of the terrain.
i guess nehamas has replied in daily nous. i'll have a look eventually. here's why i think it's impossible that he hadn't seen my book, though it is indeed not in his index. so, the first thing i did when i started writing 6 names was go on amazon and search 'beauty philosophy.' i definitely wanted to know what books had appeared recently, assess whether anyone was working in a similar vein, and so on. there was remarkably little; almost the first thing that popped up was mothersill's thing from i think the early 90s, which i'd already read. so, as he set out, or at any point in the process, nehamas certainly was also trying to see what was out there. (if he did not do that, he's an excruciatingly incompetent scholar, and nehamas is not that, whatever the drawbacks). and if he had hit mine he would have immediately seen affinities, if this was already his approach to beauty. so the notion that he never saw it at all - especially, for example, if danto was providing the sappho epigraph - just strikes me as extremely unlikely.
all i saw was the quote that said: i had never seen his book; which has that element of sneering so familiar to anyone who has ever run into alexander nehamas; he was so unknown that i didn't notice his book. but anyone who was talking to danto about beauty, or doing a rudimentary search on the topic he was writing a scholarly book about, could not have failed to notice my book.
indeed, if nehamas was talking to danto about beauty, i think 'sartwell' would have been one of the first things out his mouth. we had corresponded as my book was in progress, and he blurbed both books. my book would have shown up in the first few search results on amazon or elsewhere, with a blurb by danto, and a sketch of the basic approach. the idea that you'd decide not to look at it seems to me vanishingly small. so, i do not see any realistic scenario where i am not in the index. if i had been doing 6 names a few years after only a promise of happiness, you would have heard early about the similarities; indeed, i might have been very enthusiastic about the similarities, ready to take account of nehamas's work, and band together as a movement for a new-ancient approach to beauty.
indeed, i can more or less prove that would have been my approach. so unknown was my work on beauty that shortly after nehamas's book appeared, the stanford encyclopedia approached me to do their entry on beauty. despite my misgivings, i associated his work and mine as signs of a renaissance of beauty as a theme in philosophy, and of this approach to it particularly. i didn't pretend not to have read his book. i didn't nitpick or try to show why my book was better, and so on. it's good they didn't get nehamas to do it; his insistence on repressing all signs and memories of my book would have led to a skewed and decidedly self-congratulatory view of the terrain.
i figured that the defense would be both sneering and peremptory. but here he just hanged himself. in other words, the defense is so obviously disingenuous that it is tantamount to a self-immolation. the outer shell of elitist arrogance combined with the inner knowledge of mediocrity creates expressions which just cannot be true: true to the facts, or true to the self. alexander nehamas was lost to himself decades ago when he entered into a performance, a simulation that would get him to the highest level of academia. 'i had never seen his book' is the point where the emptiness inside became explicitly external, where there wasn't anything inside anymore, just an automaton playing the Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.
note to princeton faculty and admin: you are asking yourself whether that last paragraph is libelous. before you do that, why don't you try asking yourself whether it's true.
on the other hand, it is worth saying that the locus classicus of this sort of view is plato's symposium, which is certainly central to both books. and of course, nehamas has worked on that material throughout his career. also our theories are certainly not identical; i'd describe them as being in the same family: again, one fundamentally unrepresented in the literature on beauty since burke. we are interested in very different artworks, and so on. the texts do not overlap.
the biggest difference to my mind is precisely nehamas's centralization of the concept of happiness. i regard happiness as one of the worst things that ever happened to philosophy: not even a concept, but a variable or blank or packing crate where each person or philosopher just tosses everything he thinks he wants. thinks he wants, because for example if there really were any person who only wanted maximum pleasure and minimum pain he would be a non-human monstrosity. anyway, then we call the crate happiness. i actually do not think the concept has ever done anything for anyone, but it has made many philosophies into useless circling around a hole into which have been lobbed a random collection of whatever that person thinks they want. the very worst case is aristotle, who keeps throwing all sorts of dimensions of life and values and so on into the empty pit of eudaimonia. anyone can talk for hours about what aristotle means by eudaimonia. ask them what he means by it, like a fairly compact definition rather than a three-hour lecture, and i'm telling you, no one has any idea what he means. neither did he. he could do all of the nicomachean ethics better if he just forgot that empy-ass shit. so i went with 'longing'; it's a certain sort of very fundamental human experience, unlike 'happiness', which is just a blank song from a charlie brown special. actually, i would attack nehamas's book on many grounds, but that would be the first.
oops let me summarize the problems/coincidences with me and nehamas. we both wrote books titles the art of living. mine was years earlier. within five years or whatever, we gave the first thorough and systematic revival of what might be termed an erotic conception of beauty. (i am an expert on that. and notice that i was myself generous to nehamas in that stanford encyclopedia article.) these books have, as epigraphs, the very same four lines of sappho (in different translations, though). those are the big items.
a couple of times over the years i have emailed alexander nehamas along these lines: 'we really seem to be working along similar lines! we have books with the same title. we're both working along the same lines on beauty. our books have the same epigraph! we should connect more,' etc. no reply. sometimes it's hard to never have heard of someone or read his work; you've really got to delete a lot of stuff everywhere, especially in your brain.
