A wholly splendid article by Raymond Geuss on Richard Rorty, including a defense of internationalism which culminates in:

The reason [for the fact that the Pope always turned out to be Italian] most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy (via).

I have very fond memories of Geuss’s lectures at Cambridge, particularly (and I think I’ve told this story to more-or-less everyone I’ve ever met), Read more↴

Interesting piece on the increasingly non-contemporary nature of post-modernism (via Warren Ellis): Read more↴

Maybe I subsconsciously believe the analytic misrepresentations of Derrida. At least, I wouldn’t have expected that in a debate between Derrida and Habermas, it would be Derrida who provides the lucid, rigorous arguments. But what else are we to make of passages like this:

The specialized languages of science and technology, law and morality, economics, political science, etc. … live off the illuminating power of metaphorical tropes; but the rhetorical elements, which are by no means expunged, are tamed, as it were, and enlisted for special purposes of problem-solving.

— Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 209

Is Habermas taking the piss? Read more↴

It is said of Babylon that its capture was, two days later, still unknown to parts of the city.

— The Politics

A striking parenthesis in Aristotle, a propos the recent suggestions at I cite, Poetix, and k-punk that the world has already ended.

Extraordinary video about language, the construction of a world, thinking and personhood. Lots to think about (and more on the filmmaker’s blog), for instance: Read more↴

I never really paid much attention to how I read things when I was an undergraduate; rather, I picked up the strange form of telepathy practiced by analytic philosophers, where the text is merely some kind of mediating fetish object in the transfer of ideas from mind to mind (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Then I got beaten about the head by Quentin Skinner (figuratively; he’s actually a perfect gentleman, of course), and encouraged to think about how to read as it were self-consciously, paying attention to what it might mean that certain words and turns of phrase were chosen instead of others. But what I’d really like is to learn how to misread. Read more↴