The Moviegoer

In a post that's begging to get philosophers frothing at the mouth denouncing the evils of French-influenced humanities departments, Prof. Jason Stanley artfully introduces what probably ought to be (and maybe is) a topic of concern in American academics: the complete neglect of Angle-American philosophical interests within non-philosophical humanities programs.

In other words, professors in your average comparitive literature department just don't care about reading Kripke.

Of course, Prof. Stanley's most important point isn't that they don't care, but that they evidence distate for and attempt to deligitimize the activity of Angle-American academic philosophy.  Which brings us to the next question: why?

There's much to be said about this, and I'm not going to attempt an answer here. But Kosta Calfas, a commentor to Prof. Stanley's post, begins, I think, to note a key difference between Anglo-American academics and French academics when he remarks:

It seems to be the case, rather, that philosophers in the US tend to work with little concern to what their colleagues in the other humanities are doing and vice versa. In contrast to, for example, France, where sociologists(eg. Pierre Bourdieu), historians (e.g. Marc Bloch and the Analles School) and psychologists (Piaget, Lacan) either studied philosophy or had more than a passing familiarity and philosophers (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault) were well acquainted to ultra-philosophical humanistic pursuits of their time. For better or worse, there seems to be a division of intellectual labour in America, which breeds its own kinds of problems (e.g. the near-complete absence of philosophical ideas from intellectual or political discourse, and the conspicuous lack of synoptic philosophical projects of the greek or german variety which attempt to unify or order the disciplines).

That French intellectual life involves such a unification of concerns, and that American intellectual life resembles the structures found in a large business corporations, explains in part why American humanities students have so largely been reading Derrida and Foucault whilst neglecting Frege.

So I'm adding the finishing touches to an old Latin drill program I wrote using PyObjC (a bridge to the OS X native Cocoa programming platform and descendent of NeXTStep), when I realize how much easier it is to program good software on a Mac. It's all in the simple things, in fact.

Take the challenge of adding macrons over the vowels in Latin words.  While real Latin texts don't have macros, teachers use macrons in Latin courses all the time to help students differentiate declension and/or conjugation formats from one another. For example, the word "puella", which is the nominative singular word for girl, can only be differentiated from "puellā", which is ablative singular, by the macron (i.e., little dash above the "a"). Eventually students dispense with macrons - but while they're learning, and doing exercises early on, thindispensablensible.

Hence the challenge for any software program that provides drills on Latin declensions/conjugations.

On Windows, with .NET at least, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to apply macrons over my vowels. I tried combUnicodenicode constants - so sorry, no deal (though this 'theoretically' should have worked). I hard-codingcoding the specific vowels required - not so hot either (I often had to grab the macron directly from a charpaletteallete). Despite a couple of different approaches, macrons were just a pain to deal with on Windows.

On OS X, however, I can just open up the international keyboard settings and use the sequence "alt-a, vowel" to procure a macron-crusted vowel.  I can even download a custom keyboard layout that lets me type 'alt-vowel' to make a macron - easy schemesy! (Go to this page to get the layout!)

Now that I can type macrons, and save my source to a UTF-8 encoded format, working with macrons has become so simple.  I love it! Three cheers for OS X!

So I started cataloging my books in Library Thing when I realized that I have a lot of books by Leo Strauss.

This isn't too surprising, I suppose. I used to be way into Strauss before I decided other modern authors were not only more forthcoming with their philosophical positions, but that they delivered the 'philosophical goods' without all the pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain conspiracy ideas that riddle Straussian hermeneutics.

It's not that Strauss isn't insightful - he is, and he does some simply amazing philosophical exegesis when it comes to PlatoMachiavellili, Spinoza and Hobbes. Even so, he always leaves me feeling like he's just about to divulge some great secret that would tie his ingenious textual exegesis together.... and then he doesn't do it.  This is a shame because he philosophizes at a very important time during the 20th century as one who both dialogues with Heidegger and understands the ineliminable situatedness that burdens modern, objective social science.  He might have been in a position to offer a hermeneutic solution to how a 'science of man' is even possible. Alas. 

Of course, If I were still a committed Straussian I suppose I'd think I need to get better at reading between the lines, or reading slower and more carefully, and that maybe Strauss really does have more to say.  But frankly, that's bunk - I read pretty well and I'm able to read quite difficult material.  I guess if he does have more to say he won't saying it to me in the short term future.