More dead philosophers

Two lovely parties this weekend: one, yesterday, for the seventieth wedding anniversary of Dorothy & Gene, from church; and another, today, for the first birthday of my niece, Penelope.

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Two more philosophers have died: Daniel Dennett and Charles Parsons.

There have been several remarks along these lines: Dennett was one of the greatest recent philosophers. I don’t agree, but he was a wonderfully lively writer. He was … opinionated. This is from the first page I looked at, in the preface of the new (2015) edition of Elbow Room:

The varieties of free will worth wanting, the varieties that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility, are not only not threatened by advances in (neuro-)science; they are distinguished, explained, and justified in detail [in the book]. There are other readily definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with what we now know about how human beings control their behavior, such as “libertarian freedom” or “agent causation.” They don’t, and can’t, exist, but although some philosophers still take them seriously, they are of only historical interest, like mermaids and leprechauns.

Now that’s confidence. (Is there much historical interest in leprechauns?)

I don’t know if Parsons was unconfident, but he was no Dennett; lecturing, he’d pause mid-sentence for minutes … then carry on. (Brilliantly, it’s said.)

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Robert Adams advised the dissertation of one of my dissertation examiners (Derk). My recent browsing of Adams’s work inspired me to find out more about my other examiners’ advisers. Nick’s was the formidable Gilbert Harman; I don’t plan to write about him tonight. Dick’s adviser was Rogers Albritton. Now here was a unicorn – a philosopher so great, he barely published; whose few publications read like spillage from a sloshing cauldron of rich, still-brewing philosophy soup ( fanesca, perhaps); whose notebooks have been mined for posthumous publication. (Cf. two interesting obituaries, here and here.)

By the way, there will be a memorial conference for Dick this Saturday. I wish I could attend: to honor and learn more about Dick, and to see my Salvationist friend, Yvonne, Frank’s widow, whose health is failing.

The “best man” speech

More or less what I said last weekend:

My brother David is a remarkable young man. … He and I are very close — he’s the first child and I’m the second child — no, wait, I’m first and he’s second. … Well, we constantly compete against one another. We compulsively compete. But since this is David’s wedding-day, I’ve decided to treat him nicely. I’m going to mention a few things that he does better than I do.

First of all, David plays soccer better than I do. Some days ago, we had his bachelor party, and of course we played soccer; and even though no one showed David any favoritism, he still managed to score the most goals. David is a very aggressive soccer player. Actually, he’s aggressive at many things. He’s aggressive at driving … he’s aggressive in conversation … he’s aggressive at eating. Once, when he was very little — five or six years old — he ate fifteen pancakes in one breakfast. And not so long ago, he and a couple of the groomsmen each ate four Big Macs. (I wasn’t one of those groomsmen.) But even though he’s so aggressive, David has a gentle, patient side. He’s very good with animals (many of you know how much he loves Toby, the dog he’s going to live with). And he’s very good with small children … even better than I am. 

Another thing that David and I compete over, though we don’t say so, is reading books. Perhaps we tacitly agree that when it comes to reading books, neither of us is the winner. But in one respect David certainly comes out ahead, which is that he reads more books than I do. He’s read all of Harry Potter; I haven’t done that. And he’s read all of Twilight; I haven’t done that. Already this year he’s read twenty-five books. Just in the month of July, he read seven different books from beginning to end. And they were difficult books — philosophy books. And this was while David was busy watching the World Cup and preparing for his wedding.

OK, I should say something about the wedding (I’ve finished talking about competition). In his sermon, my dad said that when you choose whom you marry, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen. And I think that that’s right. But it still seems that some ways of choosing a husband or a wife are better, or wiser, than others. For example, it’s good to choose someone whom you can consistently put up with. Now, Ana and David are very unlike one another. But they’ve known each other for many years and in many different situations. They have as good an idea of what they’re getting into as anyone could have. What I’m saying is, I think they’ve made the best sort of choice; I think they’ve chosen wisely.

That’s all.

The fatties

Last night we watched the final game of the Copa Libertadores. Pope Francis’s team, San Lorenzo de Almagro, defeated Club Nacional of Asunción. It was the first Copa Libertadores title for San Lorenzo.

The winning goal was by one of my favorite players in the world, Néstor “The Fatty” Ortigoza, of whom I wrote in 2012.

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David’s bachelor party will occur this evening. We’ll have sushi at a restaurant; but first, for two hours, we’ll play soccer at our church, on cement. It’s been four years since I last played on cement.

Saturday will be David’s wedding-day.

The groomsmen have been asked to wear the same suits that were worn last year for Kenny’s wedding. I’m too fat to wear the same pants, so I’ll wear those that David wore last year. He’ll wear an even larger pair of pants.

A literary gathering

Kenny had invited over some Koreans and Japanese. When I walked in, the party was winding down. The revelers were sitting on the floor with their dregs of Asian booze; Lost in Translation was on TV, but nobody was paying attention.

I was an instant hit. “You are very handsome,” said the Asians. (Males, all of them.)

I decided these guys were all right.

“All Americans are very handsome,” said the Asians.

This irked me, for I knew that by “Americans” they meant gringos, not South Americans. But I quietly forgave them.

Soon I had them debating which was better – Korea or Japan. Or rather, I had the Koreans debating against each other. The Japanese wouldn’t debate that issue; to them, the answer was clear enough.

Then I showed them which novel I’d been reading that day: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. There were grunts of approval all around. “He’s a good writer,” said one of the Koreans. “He describes everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” said his compatriot. “I mean, he describes all the clothes everyone wears,” explained the first Korean.

I hadn’t noticed that, but I’d noticed how Murakami would describe everyone’s food: spaghetti, stir-fry, cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. I really like it when a novelist will do that; it’s a trick I associate with Hemingway. That prosaic sensualist. That glutton.

The first Korean had earned a degree in English literature, but his favorite writer was Yeats. And so tonight I looked at some of Yeats’s poems.

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A Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music,
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling she knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved hungry sea.’

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