U Turn

I haven't yet decided if this is how I feel about the West.

Philosophy Dept. Coffee Hour

It's Friday afternoon, so I thought I would have a little coffee hour snack. On my time.

John Hyman's 'The Objective Eye' (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006)

This is a great book. In addition to all of the great philosophy it contains, it also contains a fair number of great lines. For instance:

p. 61: "Both sides mix truth with falsehood and exaggeration, as many philosophical theories that prosper do."

p. 162: "The safest battles to join are the ones that have already been won."

p. 190: "Like many philosophical ideas, it gets a leg up from the doctrine that it clamorously rejects."

p. 39: "Agreements are the only realities that agreements can produce."

p. 41: "It is true that agreement among observers leaves us in no doubt that grass is green, and agreement in clocks leaves us in no doubt that eggs are boiled in five minutes at sea level. But the statement that grass is green is not a covert generalization about observers, any more than the statement about eggs is a covert generalization about clocks."

There's more where these came from, but I encourage you to find them by reading the book on your own. It's worth it.

The Dude's Sweater

One of my favorite things about eBay is that it makes me feel like I'm not alone in my excessive fondness for certain movies. I was going to buy the sweater above, which is the same sort of sweater the Dude wears for the second half of the Big Lebowski, but that was when it was selling for $8. Now it's $36 and rising. And that's not including shipping.

My favorite movie-related items for sale on eBay are the fake movie props. Try searching for "Indiana Jones prop" sometime. You'll love it.

White Russian

Making your own White Russian is much easier than making your own Mojito. The one I made was 50 ml of vodka, 20 ml of Kahlua, 30 ml of cream, and a few ice cubes. I bought super heavy whipping cream at Ralph's, so it almost tastes like a coffee milk shake.

The Dude's Abode

Above is the Dude's bungalow, from the Big Lebowski. It's at 609 Venezia Ave, in Venice, which is just a few minutes from my own bungalow. This means that my Ralph's is the Dude's Ralph's.

The next step, of course, is to start decorating my place like his. And I could start dressing like him. Or maybe I could settle for drinking White Russians.

The Fragmentation of the Humanities

I love reading the MIT Press's Philosophy brochure that I get in the mail every once in a while, because of the extreme contrast between its first and second halves. The first half covers recent releases by their subsidiary Bradford Books, which focuses mostly on analytic philosophy that's heavily informed by contemporary cognitive science. The second half covers recent releases by their subsidiary Zone Books, which focuses mostly on cultural studies that's heavily informed by continental philosophy. Don't get me wrong: I don't think that those two traditions are mutually exclusive; it's the MIT Press brochure that treats them as such. But in reading their brochure from cover-to-cover, one experiences a drastic change from the extremes of one culture to the extremes of another. And it's all presented in the same font and layout, which makes for an experience similar to walking from Epcot Center's fake-French village to its fake-Incan pyramid.

That said, check out this summary of a new book published by Zone Books, Adi Ophir's The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals:

"What remains of moral judgment when truth itself is mistrusted, when the validity of every belief system depends upon its context, when power and knowledge are inextricably entangled? Is a viable moral theory still possible in the wake of the postmodern criticism of modern philosophy? ... Ophir forges a new perspective for thinking about what it means to be a moral being: to be moral, he argues, is to care for others, and to be committed to preventing, at all costs, their suffering and distress."

The complex questions that they start with aren't even the best part. What I really like is his radically new perspective on what it is to be a moral being. Why hadn't anyone thought of that before? Caring for others by preventing their suffering and distress? That's so po-mo! No mere modernist could have even conceived of such a thing.

Home Depot

So I'm in the Home Depot bathroom, minding my own business (quite literally). And the dude in the stall next to me starts calling someone on his cell phone, using its speakerphone function. When the other person finally picks up, it's a receptionist for some business. In an affected super-nerd voice, he asks her where the nearest bathroom is. She recognizes who he is, presumably because this is some kind of standard joke between them. He then says it's been a long time since they talked, and he asks what's new with her. She says she's pregnant. The tone of his response doesn't reveal any shock at this news, although what he goes on to say does. He asks her about the father and she says it's some new guy she's dating. The dude then proceeds to try and woo her, although I don't think that's exactly the right word for what it is (because she's not really in a position to be wooed at this point, and because what he says doesn't exactly amount to any kind of proposal). He says that if he were the father, they would move in together and try and make something of it. They would see how it goes. He declares that that's what having a kid calls for. Or, as he puts it, "because that's what a kid is, a kid". She couldn't be less interested in what he's saying at this point. He asks if he can see her after she has the kid, and she doesn't really respond to the question. He ends the call by saying that they should try doing the whole friend thing. And, once again, he says that if they do the whole friend thing, they would see how it goes.

What made the whole situation totally absurd what that she had to have known that he was in the bathroom the whole time, and in a public bathroom at that. Other people flushed their toilets early in the conversation, and I intentionally flushed mine when he started his quasi-wooing. And he himself flushed his toilet towards the end of the conversation.