Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL

Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL

Tim's Light Reading (12/7/2009)

1. The Top 15 Most Important, Post-WWII Anglophone Books of Philosophy, According To Google: Brian Leiter, of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog fame, compiled a list derived from Google search results of the Top 15 (plus Top 10 runners-up) most important philosophy books of the last 50 years. To paraphrase a comment made by Mr. Leiter on his own post, I'm not sure these books tell us anything about philosophy, but they do say something about the accessibility and potential usefulness of philosophy to the general public. Several works and authors on the list familiar historians and many readers here include: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge; W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object; and maybe Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. And this Wikipedia post will help you sort through some of the other players.

No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.

2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.

3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:

There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.

...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.

To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?

4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:

The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.

Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.

5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.

6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.

7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.

8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL

Tim's Light Reading (12/7/2009)

1. The Top 15 Most Important, Post-WWII Anglophone Books of Philosophy, According To Google: Brian Leiter, of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog fame, compiled a list derived from Google search results of the Top 15 (plus Top 10 runners-up) most important philosophy books of the last 50 years. To paraphrase a comment made by Mr. Leiter on his own post, I'm not sure these books tell us anything about philosophy, but they do say something about the accessibility and potential usefulness of philosophy to the general public. Several works and authors on the list familiar historians and many readers here include: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge; W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object; and maybe Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. And this Wikipedia post will help you sort through some of the other players.

No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.

2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.

3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:

There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.

...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.

To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?

4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:

The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.

Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.

5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.

6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.

7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.

8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL

Habermas' Legitimation Crisis and Critical Intellectual History

[A guest post-inquiry from Neil B. Miller, Ph.D., Independent Scholar]

I am in the middle of reading the English language translation of Jürgen Habermas' early work, Legitimation Crisis, for theoretical insights applicable to my current research into the transformations of New England print culture and the public sphere associated with the first Unitarian Controversy, an early 19th-century theological and ideological dispute between orthodox or moderate Calvinist ministers like Jedidiah Morse and Lyman Beecher, and Boston Liberals or Unitarians like William Ellery Channing and Andrews Norton. The connection between Boston's Harvard-educated Unitarian ministry and the city's oligarchy of intermarried mercantile and business elites is well documented, as is the Unitarians' social, philanthropic, and political conservatism. Less well known, and the subject of my research, is a contestation between the moderate Calvinists and Unitiarians, that occurred within New England Federalism, over the social role of the press, the involvement of ordinary citizens in public discourse, and the cultural authority of public opinion, as well as over a corporatist versus a liberal capitalist understanding of the print marketplace. My hypothesis, which so far seems supported by the text, is that this aspect of the controversy can be understood as a legitimation crisis of established social norms related to New England's economic transformation to a liberal capitalist society.

My reading of the text, however, has produced numerous questions. First, it is not clear to me on a first reading whether Habermas is seeking fundamentally to discredit structural-functionalism and systems theory, or whether he also is relying in part on structural-functionalism and/or systems theory to develop his ideas about communicative rationality. I am similarly unclear whether there is a positivistic element or ambivalence in Habermas' writing, as he seems to criticize positivism while relying on a progressive theory of social evolution that moves from primitive to traditional, liberal capitalist and advanced capitalist societies. This is also an early work in Habermas' enormous corpus, so it would be helpful to know if Habermas substantially revises any of the ideas developed in Legitimation Crisis in later writings, or if any other social philosophers or theorists have criticized Habermas' analysis of legitimation crises, especially if they deal specifically with crises within traditional or liberal capitalist societies.

Second, I can think of few recent examples in which American intellectual historians specifically, or Americanists generally, have made use of Habermas' writings, other than of his earliest work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I would be very appreciative if members of the USIH community would provide references to essays or texts in which intellectual historians or historians working in other fields (as opposed to non-historians like Seyla Benhabib working in the field of communicative ethics), have incorporated Habermas' ideas into their research, especially his ideas about legitimation crises. More broadly, I would welcome comments on why Habermas' writings seem largely to have been ignored by American historians. In light of the nation's current economic crisis, both his sophisticated critical theorizing on the crises of advanced capitalist societies and his commitment to social science as a radical emancipatory project, seem deserving of greater consideration.

Sincerely,

Neil Miller

Habermas' Legitimation Crisis and Critical Intellectual History

[A guest post-inquiry from Neil B. Miller, Ph.D., Independent Scholar]

I am in the middle of reading the English language translation of Jürgen Habermas' early work, Legitimation Crisis, for theoretical insights applicable to my current research into the transformations of New England print culture and the public sphere associated with the first Unitarian Controversy, an early 19th-century theological and ideological dispute between orthodox or moderate Calvinist ministers like Jedidiah Morse and Lyman Beecher, and Boston Liberals or Unitarians like William Ellery Channing and Andrews Norton. The connection between Boston's Harvard-educated Unitarian ministry and the city's oligarchy of intermarried mercantile and business elites is well documented, as is the Unitarians' social, philanthropic, and political conservatism. Less well known, and the subject of my research, is a contestation between the moderate Calvinists and Unitiarians, that occurred within New England Federalism, over the social role of the press, the involvement of ordinary citizens in public discourse, and the cultural authority of public opinion, as well as over a corporatist versus a liberal capitalist understanding of the print marketplace. My hypothesis, which so far seems supported by the text, is that this aspect of the controversy can be understood as a legitimation crisis of established social norms related to New England's economic transformation to a liberal capitalist society.

My reading of the text, however, has produced numerous questions. First, it is not clear to me on a first reading whether Habermas is seeking fundamentally to discredit structural-functionalism and systems theory, or whether he also is relying in part on structural-functionalism and/or systems theory to develop his ideas about communicative rationality. I am similarly unclear whether there is a positivistic element or ambivalence in Habermas' writing, as he seems to criticize positivism while relying on a progressive theory of social evolution that moves from primitive to traditional, liberal capitalist and advanced capitalist societies. This is also an early work in Habermas' enormous corpus, so it would be helpful to know if Habermas substantially revises any of the ideas developed in Legitimation Crisis in later writings, or if any other social philosophers or theorists have criticized Habermas' analysis of legitimation crises, especially if they deal specifically with crises within traditional or liberal capitalist societies.

Second, I can think of few recent examples in which American intellectual historians specifically, or Americanists generally, have made use of Habermas' writings, other than of his earliest work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I would be very appreciative if members of the USIH community would provide references to essays or texts in which intellectual historians or historians working in other fields (as opposed to non-historians like Seyla Benhabib working in the field of communicative ethics), have incorporated Habermas' ideas into their research, especially his ideas about legitimation crises. More broadly, I would welcome comments on why Habermas' writings seem largely to have been ignored by American historians. In light of the nation's current economic crisis, both his sophisticated critical theorizing on the crises of advanced capitalist societies and his commitment to social science as a radical emancipatory project, seem deserving of greater consideration.

Sincerely,

Neil Miller