i hate to do the assigning for all the reporters, but i come from newspaperpeople. i'll say again that the fact that the oklahoma 'authorities' were called and responded aggressively, on the grounds that miranda lambert singing a country song advocating gun rights constituted a death threat, just cannot be good for the careers of those authorities in a very red state. better figure out who called whom when and why, and foi or put containers under leaks of the email strings, etc.
this one isn't a death threat?
as much fun as it is to be floundering around with the alligators in the swamping problem, i think that beauty promises more happiness, whatever that is. what i actually want to blog about is art and books, it may shock you to hear. so i am re-opening a blog i had for a class in 2013: writing the arts. first entry: the hilarious book of the incomparable designer raymond loewy.
charge sheet against linda zagzebski (with date of her paper corrected and both of my papers supplied; should be much clearer now; sorry!). originally my concern was more to show that i invented the swamping problem. i won't be accusing anyone else of plagiarism, but i do intend to show that this paper (section III) and this one (section IV) state the problem quite clearly in very much the terms in which it came to be expressed, in terms of epistemological instrumentalism, the ultimacy of knowledge as an epistemic value, and the truth-conduciveness of justification, as well as the use of it to attack reliabilism.
the clearest appropriations are from the earlier paper in the american philosophical quarterly, 1991: "knowledge is merely true belief."
zagzebski uses the argument to motivate virtue epistemology construed as a theory of justification, and actually i think that is a good use of it and a good argument for virtue epistemology (though i still will argue for k=tb). i was getting to be close friends with james montmarquet at that point, though i can't really remember the order of the writing and the friendship. seems like we should have realized this? or perhaps we did but never really did anything about it. but at any rate, in my taxonomy, virtue epistemology qua theory of justification would be a 'deontological' as opposed to a 'teleological' or 'intstrumental' conception of justification. i held that the swamping problem refuted instrumental conceptions of justification - first and obviously reliabilism - and that there were no plausible deontological conceptions (that is, conceptions on which justification is not criterially truth-conducive). but in that sense virtue epistemology does answer the problem.
i think it is a worthwhile or even ingenious application of the argument; in my opinion it tends to show that virtue epistemology (still on the horizon as i wrote) is the most or even only going plausible conception of justification, and hence the only known way to hold on to a justification condition against my attack. it would have been easy to credit it instead of doing what almost amounts to a cut and paste, with a paper she says she had read. i don't know why people do things like that.
to correct leiter (who may have already corrected it himself), i am not charging nehamas directly with plagiarism, but i am identifying a series of coincidences that strike me as suggestive of unseemly appropriations. but that's all i have there (scroll down). and then i think that nehamas's response, to say nothing of zagzebski's, has been damning rather than exculpating.
Zagzebski added that the chair of the department of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma had received a threatening email from Sartwell recently that provoked a security response.
“Sartwell is acting very irrationally as is clear from his many blog posts,” Zagzebski wrote. “I think it is sad when a person’s mental health problems are catalogued in detail on national blogs.”
these are serious charges. here, verbatim is the email i wrote to wayne riggs on march 1, in its entirety (obviously, this can be checked with him).
hate to say it, but i have made pretty serious charges of academic misconduct against linda zagzebski on my blog. no need to respond directly to me, but your department should be aware.
i wrote riggs again on march 2. here it is, again in its entirety.
Sorry Wayne: a clear and decisive presentation of the Linda Z case. [then i pasted in an earlier version of this document: a purely factual accounting with nothing that could possibly be construed as a threat.]
these two are the only emails i have ever written to wayne riggs.
as to zagzebski's assertion, shared by dickinson college, that this whole thing emerges from my mental illness, one must regard this as some kind of desperation move to discredit me, and anyone who has any questions about the sanity of my blog ought to read it thoroughly.
the claim that i sent a threatening email to wayne riggs is demonstrably and confirmably false, and it is libelous.
i have written to riggs again. this is the text.
Hi, Wayne. Linda Zagzebski is quoted in the the Daily Princetonian as saying that I sent her chair a threatening email, which 'provoked a security response.'
I have put up the emails I sent to you, Wayne, on my blog, and I hope you will publicly confirm that they contained no threats whatever. Indeed I was trying to do you the courtesy of letting you know that I was leveling this accusation, before the public uproar.
I think you owe it to the public, the profession, and to the University of Oklahoma to confirm that the accusation - which is itself libelous - is false.
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).
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.
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 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.
that's a perfect performance of a perfect country song. that whole album is great. buy it. oh, miranda, i ended up giving everything for you and not, as i had planned, for lucinda williams.
since last night or something, the daily princetonian has been saying i accused alexander nehamas of plagiarism. now they're adding that i've accused him of libel. just making stuff up, i guess. christ i can't faculty advise every paper out here. i corrected it hours ago in the comments, just emailed the editorial board. man i am finding that princeton education thing less impressive minute by minute.
3:15: they've got the libel down, anyway. maybe i missed the moment when they said i accused him of pederasty? that, too, would be inaccurate.
If you get a chance and feel like calling the President of Dickinson College to congratulate him for using a pre-textual bit of nonsense and some real overreach to get rid of an occasionally irritating professor named "Crispin Sartwell" you can reach her here, at[email protected]
If you want to figure out what the hell happened, I recommend reading Crispin's pieces. You may want to develop a timeline, and possibly find internet pictures. Photos might help.
If you are curious as to why it happened -- whether you see Crispy as the new St Sebastian or an annoying twerp, or both -- and why it is important, you can read the analysis here. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/03/09/this-is-wolf-country-now-academic-freedom-and-dystopia/
who did her thesis at nyu on 'subtractive art practice':
it is impossible to subtract things from the world by art, though i understand the impulse. but it is possible to not add anything. that is reassuring, because every time you do add something, it carries a karmic burden. but i want you to understand that it is also not possible to add things to the world by art. the self is an illusion! i didn't understand what you were saying! now i do, maybe?
chuang tzu: 'hide the world in the world.'
views of one stone, with well water. double click on #6.
anyone who likes these and who wants to understand where they're coming from should read six names of beauty. one thing i'll point out: mountains are actually very large stones, and stones are very small mountains. the relationship is not like a picture to its object or motif.
i realize i have been studying and thinking about and teaching about japanese aesthetics for a quarter century. i've sampled calligraphy and ikebana, been seeing in particular all of very rural life in terms of a wabi sabi aesthetics, and i have been teaching about and in my own way trying to practice zen (or, for me, even more fundamentallly) taoism for a very long time very seriously. all these go together with what i think about myself as a cult of the ordinary, and a continuous cultivation of attention. the tao te ching is how i made my peace with the 'spiritual side' of 12-step programs. i call my higher power the tao! i hear the same thing in zen buddhism.
so i love about suiseki that it calls attention to things that are already there, rather than creating new ones. if you simply attend to things that are already there, your art can't be an achievement; you're not doing it in order to score; it's just happening through you. i want people to see these rocks as i do, and i could never in the rest of my lifetime design any of them, and they are just ordinary rocks. for me, they open up a peephole on how infinitely beautiful the universe is and how far beyond human capacities to describe or envision or see clearly. but you see more if you really attend. it requires no hand skills. i was always one of those kids who couldn't draw, had abominable penmanship, and so on. well i'm not drawing or painting here, just drawing things together from the world.
the best introduction i know to japanese aesthetics is mokoto ueda's book literary and art theories of japan, long out of print. get it on inter-library loan! he knows a lot more about this than i do, but i find myself intuiting it or using it confidently and spontaneously by my own lights, and my ability to do this is bringing me great peace and joy even in a time of wild emotional and practical swings.
when i was writing my country music column, i used to get dozens or a hundred cd's every week or two. so you really have to comb quickly, plus it was the very height of 'alt.country', which came to be called 'americana'. you'd get thirty cd's that were competent renderings of similar styles. it got hard to hear. anyway, i think i did get fred eaglesmith enthusiastically once. but going back to the albums '6 volts' and 'lipstick, lies and gasoline': he is just one of the greatest country writers and singers who has worked in this era. an obvious comparison would be steve earle; they do sound similar vocally and so on. and i love steve earle. but the weakest songs on those albums are comparable to earle at his best, and the best are just trascendently excellent compositions, the kind of thing that only a handful of people in a generation can possibly do. so, i want you to concentrate on this song and really hear the lyric. it is deep; it is amazing; it is profoundly moving (to me, anyway!) i do love the melodies - simple and beautiful country constructions - and the performance/recording style too.
to address the glut of 'janes'. i am attempting to rechristen la irish 'camellia.' she hates it, but i am getting leverage by insisting that if it's not that, it's going to be 'freddie.'
whatever it may look like, i just want to assure you that this thing between frederick and myself is definitely not sexual. we too old for that shit, son!
i reviewed a couple of fred eaglesmith's albums when i was doing a country music column for the nypress, early 2000s. like a doink, i sort of forgot him after that. i assumed without checking and maybe even said, that miranda lambert wrote it. man she owned it like she wrote it, and she is a fine songwriter. someone reminded me about eaglesmith somewhere; man i appreciate that, on many grounds, because the man is frigging beautiful.
shit! i also forgot that i already have a couple of hand-held missile launchers in my basement. calling all janes! load up the trunk with the mawfuckin arsenal, sweeties! (i hurt my back.) we goin skank hunting!
March 08, 2016
many of these - of different minerals, different sizes, and so on - are infinitely absorbing. basically one-hour random grab, and i have enough suiseki to last me the rest of my life. one of many miracles, of late.
i am going to show you some images of an unbelievable stone i just glanced at and pried out of the creek bank in my nearest woods while i was looking for tray material. no number of images can do justice to this thing. all color variations are intrinsic to the stone, not dirt or algae, etc. 9" wide x 7" tall in the first view.
principles of latimore suiseki, all intended to maximize a wabi-sabi aesthetic effect and a zen/taoist spiritual practice. i love the ways the classic japanese stones are treated, and the trays of incomparable craft in which they are displayed. but i think they are incompatible with wabi-sabi aesthetics, or in tension, anyway.
(1) local stone
(2) no treatment of any sort except washing
(3) local, found supports/trays
(4) no stone is permanently installed in any display. many of these stones rest as mountains on several different faces; all must be available.
(5) typically displayed in multi-stone arrangements intended to encapsulate ranges or landscapes.
(6) arrangements should be done quickly and improvisationally, but are revisable at will by anyone who may be around.
(7) to fully appreciate the display, the stones must be handled.
(8) should be displayed outdoors and allowed to continue weathering.
when i was working on the wabi-sabi chapter of six names of beauty, i became obsessed with the art of suiseki. i was trying to at least sample all the arts i was writing about, but i wanted this one more than any other. my son sam (12, perhaps) and i had been taking 'nature walks' since he was little; he got excited too and we searched day after day for stones, perhaps came up with a couple of decent ones. i live about 40 miles away from there now, and i suddenly realized: every damn stone in latimore township is a suiseki. jane irish and i were at an abandoned 18th-century quarry yesterday and gathered 40 great stones of all carryable sizes in as many minutes, including wild fossiles and big chunks of petrified wood. but really, a characteristic rock of this region is rounded, glittering quartz in all colors, not geodes exactly but honeycombed with crystal caves. i cannot believe it, really.
i have always wanted to have some visual practice, and i have never been as attracted to any one as much as this. so, i am just beginning. but i am going to explore a latimore-style suiseki thing, with local stone and found trays. here is a very first effort, using some of the most humble stones, only washed, arranged in a minute or two. a foot wide or so.
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