23.4.08

I HEARTILY ENDORSE THIS EVENT OR PRODUCT II:

Taking a pause from Alan Patten's excellent book on Hegel in order to watch a bit of the Yankees game, I noticed (via a graphic) that Jermaine Dye is from Vacaville, California. I cannot adequately express how much I love a town with the name of 'cowville.'

Speaking of Patten, I wish I could remember where I saw a reference to his book, which is a uniquely clear and compelling exposition of Hegel's main works. It's a shame I didn't know about it when I took my Hegel seminar.

The New Yorker on The Landmark Herodotus.

Brian Leiter, using his powers for awesome. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about academic freedom issues, but I find his arguments persuasive.

Via Reihan Salam, an N+1 post on dating-v-marriage. A sampling:

We must stop dating. But we can’t. Because the only way to stop dating would be to date more, and more efficiently, to become more adept at spotting, on the first date, those things that on the fifth or fifteenth date are going to become a problem. Of course that only makes it worse—by that standard, even Abelard and Heloise wouldn’t have made it. The other option is to change yourself. But you’d have done that by now, if you could.


The conclusion of that bit is something less than encouraging. I don't know that you change yourself, at least not as an effort of will over a short period of time; everyone changes in the long term, which I suppose is why the imperfections, such as they are, bring about more attachment than the perfections--who knows how long those will last? Ah, but the prospect of changing with someone else, because of someone else, obviates the search for perfection. At least I think that's how it's supposed to work...

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