Walker Percy Wednesday 118

walker percy

percycovercroppea

I look at him steadily. “That every society has a right to protect itself against its enemies. That a society like an organism has a right to survive.

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I know that you work with dreams. What I want to ask you is this: Is there something which is not a dream or even a daydream but the memory of an experience which is a thousand times more vivid than a dream but which happens in broad daylight when you are wide awake?”    “Yes.” I am thinking of his “spell.”

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“I was dreaming of Germany. Germany! Why Germany? No, not dreaming. It happened. I was wide awake. I was lying down after you left yesterday. It was getting dark but the sky was still bright against the dark pines. It reminded me of—what? the Schwarzwald with its dark firs? I’ve told you about it before. I don’t know. Anyhow, it was as if I were back in Tübingen, where I’d been as a boy. I was lying in bed in my cousin’s house. It was so vivid I could have been there. I stayed with them a year. I would wake every morning to the sound of church bells.”    He moves the kerosene lamp again, leans forward.    “Have I spoken to you about this?”    “About Germany? Yes.”    “But not about—” He stops, rubs his forehead with both hands. “Yes, the church bells. They had a special quality, completely different from our church bells, a high-pitched, silvery sound, almost like crystal struck against crystal. Even the air was different. It was thin and clear and silvery and high-pitched too, if you know what I mean. It had a different—smell. Or was it lack of smell? Anyhow, nothing like our old funky, fertile South. No, it was a smell, a high-pitched sweet smell, almost chemical, yet sweet too, something like the cutting room of a florist’s shop—like old geraniums? Of course it is impossible to describe a smell. But it came back! I would wake in the morning to that high silvery ringing and the chemical geranium smell. I slept in a narrow bed covered not by a blanket or a quilt but by a soft goose-down bolster, like a light mattress. It was like an old-fashioned Southern feather bed with the mattress upside down. There was also the vague but certain sense that something was about to happen.”

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Continuants: Their Activity, Their Being, and Their Identity

david wiggins

One of my favourite living philosophers (if not the favourite) is David Wiggins. He was my tutor for ethics but not unfortunately for metaphysics which by then had become a secondary interest for him. Great to see that he has just released a new book gathering several of his most important essays on identity in one volume. Speaking of identity, it’s disheartening to see the cavalier use of this technical term by many in domains where there is no philosophical culture — e.g. typically in English, gender, and sociology departments. DW must surely be one of the last of the philosophers from the golden age of Anglophonic philosophy and unlike the overtly ideological or scared or bully-type careerists (often all three) that populate most departments now, David is known as a philosopher’s philosopher. a man of unimpeachable integrity.

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Tool selection during foraging in two species of funnel ants

stigmergy

This paper is to be found in Animal Behaviour, Volume 123, January 2017, pp. 207–216. Could this be an extension of the mechanism of stigmergy? (H/T to Jerry Coyne).

We investigated tool selection in two species of Aphaenogaster ants by giving them the choice between different kinds of potential tools (natural and artificial objects). Ant workers showed a clear preference for certain materials to be used as tool objects. Tool selection was also shaped by familiarity with the material as ants developed a preference for artificial tools with a good soaking capacity that cannot be found in their natural environment. Our results indicate that ants of this genus have evolved unique foraging strategies and show plasticity in their behaviour.

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Bowie: The Last Five Years and The Last Supper

david bowie

For those who can’t access BBC player here is (a version?) of the show that has just been broadcast along with a companion piece featuring some of those who worked with him. (For the second time, the first vid has been pulled — just search “Bowie: The Last Five Years” in YouTube and perhaps someone has reposted).

Nat Hentoff

music

Says it all — mensch! Too subtle and honest a mind for the regressives

Mishima and Bowie

david bowie, Yukio Mishima

To mark two close but significant Bowie dates (8th and 10th January) once again check out Chris O’Leary’s terrific Pushing Ahead of the Dame “Tulmudic”-like blog. The particular entry I want to bring to your attention is this one featuring Mishima’s influence on Bowie, two names I’ve long since appreciated totally independently of each other. Chris explicitly vindicates my intuitive linking of these two great artists: Mishima these days would, needless to say, be the regressive’s bête noire — and to this list perhaps one could even add Kafka, Musil, Mann and Percy.

For Bowie, Mishima was the extremity of Japan’s artistic culture. He stands most openly in Bowie’s “Berlin” songs.

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The Web of Belief

quine

While doing some work on Quine I came across Quine and Ullian’s minor classic The Web of Belief which has been made freely available online. (Another great portrait by Steve Pyke as with the previous post on Parfit).

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Derek Parfit

derek parfit

Here’s an obit in Vox but will compile and post other obituaries as they come out.

New York Times

Derek Parfit and Janet Radcliffe-Richards (not an obit)

“With no other philosopher have I had such a clear sense of someone who had already thought of every objection I could make, of the best replies to them, of further objections that I might then make, and of replies to them too,” the philosopher Peter Singer wrote recently on the philosophy website Daily Nous.

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Walker Percy Wednesday 117

walker percy

percycovercroppea

“Tom, would you like to hear my own private theory of the nature of man?”
The nature of man. I can’t stand theories about the nature of man. I’d rather listen to Robin Leach and watch Barnaby Jones.
“Well, actually I think we’d better track down Lucy—”
But he’s got going on his theory of the nature of man. It has something to do with science and sexuality, how the highest achievements of man, Mozart’s music, Einstein’s theory, derive from sexual energy, and so on. “Didn’t old Dr. Freud say it?” he says triumphantly, stopping me and swinging around to face me.

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Van Dorn grabs me and pulls me playfully close—in men’s style of talking at the approach of women and before they come within earshot. “Just suppose, Tom, we could combine the high sexuality of the Don and Einstein without the frivolity of the Don or the repressed Jewish sexuality of Einstein—who needs heavy sodium?”

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Long ago I discovered that the best way to get in touch with withdrawn patients is to ask their help. It is even better if you actually need their help. They can tell. They may be dumb but they are not stupid.

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