Log24

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Trends

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:04 am

"The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason
you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed,
to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day."

—  Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker , Dec. 12, 2017

See also "The French Invasion," a Dec. 11 Quarterly Conversation
essay about Derrida in Baltimore in 1966, and the Dec. 10 posts
in this  journal tagged Interlacing Derrida. (The deplorable Derrida
trend is apparently still alive in Buffalo.)

According to Metcalf, Fodor's "occasional review-essays in the L.R.B. 
were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven
Pinker’s suggestion that we read fiction because ' it supplies us with a
mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,' for
instance, Fodor replied, ' What if it turns out that, having just used the ring
that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my
new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to
continue to be immortal and rule the world? ' "

In the Fodor-Pinker dispute, my sympathies are with Pinker.

Related material — Google Sutra (the previous Log24 post) and earlier posts
found in a Log24 search for Ring + Bear + Jung —

Four Colours and Waiting for Logos.

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Far Out

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:10 pm

"Archimedes thought that he could move the world
if only he could get outside of it, and the same idea
inspires writers in the transcendental genre of fiction.
Find some place sufficiently far out and put your fulcrum there."

The late Jerry Fodor, who reportedly died on Nov. 29, 2017

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The Virgin’s Island

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:42 am

From Charles Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies 
(London and New York, Macmillan and Co., 1872 edition, p. 13) —

The title of this post, "The Virgin's Island," suggests one possible answer
to the following question

Philosopher Jerry Fodor parodied Wittgenstein with
a page of elaborations on Michael Frayn’s own parody,
'Wittgenstein on Fog-like Sensations,' of which this
is the best:

'I can’t see a thing in this fog.'  Which  thing?

David Auerbach at Slate.com yesterday
 

The Virgin's Island:

Two frames from the Jodie Foster film "Contact"—

Related material — Welcome to Noplace (Log24 on June 10, 2015).

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