Anthony Long on Marcus Aurelius

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For years the name of AA Long was a reliable though unseen friend guiding me in much of my classics reading. One always had the sense of a profoundly engaged and reliable commentator especially regarding Hellenistic and Stoic literature which has been an abiding interest. It was a lovely surprise to come a cross this video of him: now I know what he looks and sounds like but most impressively, the amazing way he “performs,” echoing the tone in his writing, having such a broad and deep grasp of the material and being able to communicate difficult ideas. He is very much a scholar’s scholar, old school. I’m sure that there are other gems to be found on this resource which I’d not come across before: Philosophical Installations.

Part I

Part II

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Elmore Leonard (1925 – 2013)

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Yet another literary loss. Leonard was of course a NOLA boy. Leonard, like Toole, had a gift for rendering localized dialogue, one of the reasons his work translated quite well into film.

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Albert Murray (1916 – 2013)

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Albert Murray, author, critic and friend to Ralph Ellison and Duke Ellington, dead at 97

 . . . foe of Marxists, Freudians, academics, black nationalists and white segregationists;

Like Ellison, he believed conflict was a given, that life was not a formula to be solved but a dance to be danced.

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Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics

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All those interested in extended mind/externalist/situated type thought should be aware of the field of Behavioral Economics (BE) in general and the work of Vernon Smith in particular. BE is a body of literature that was ploughing this trough some twenty years before the hypothesis of extended cognition took root in cognitive science. It is interesting to note that the Clark and Chalmers thesis took some inspiration from Herbert Simon (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Simon writes:

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves . . . [I] would like to view this information-packed memory less as part of the organism than as part of the environment to which it adapts . . . (Simon, 1996, 53, cf.8, 62, 99, 110).

But what is remarkable about this is that Simon in turn credits and endorses Hayek for this view:

No-one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek . . . [His] defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment – the computational limits of human beings (Simon, 1996, 34).

What Simon has grasped is the corollary to Hayek’s spontaneous order externalism – “cognitive closure” (or in Simon’s terminology “bounded rationality” was a key presupposition to all Hayek’s work and set out in its most technical form in Hayek (1952/1976). Cognitive closure is the idea that the human mind is constitutionally delimited – a condition that can be ameliorated if the social and artifactual world functions as a kind of distributed extra-neural knowledge store.

Through the work of Vernon Smith (the provenance going back to his classical namesake, Adam), ecological or situated/bounded rationality has received its most recent and finest articulation. Unlike some Nobel Laureates (no names) Vernon is not a prima donna. He is exceedingly approachable, very kind, generous, modest and open-minded. I was lucky enough to meet  Vernon in Tucson and he put me at ease very quickly as did his charming wife. Recently, Vernon gave me an inscribed copy of his Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms along with his autobiography Discovery – A Memoir, the former deeply informing my work; the latter interest taking wing from my talking to him about his Kansas youth.

Nobel Lecture

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A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 25

A Confederacy of Dunces

Dear Reader,

Books are immortal sons defying their sires.

–Plato

I find, dear reader, that I have grown accustomed to the hectic pace of office life, an adjustment which I doubted I could make. Of course, it is true that in my brief career at Levy Pants, Limited, I have succeeded in initiating several work-saving methods. Those of you who are fellow office workers and find yourselves reading this incisive journal during a coffee break or such might take note of one or two of my innovations. I direct these observations to officers and tycoons, also.

I have taken to arriving at the office one hour later than I am expected. Therefore, I am far more rested and refreshed when I do arrive, and I avoid that first bleak hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality (p. 86).

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Explaining Consciousness: A (Very) Different Approach to the “Hard Problem”

the "easy" problems, the "hard" problem

This article from the latest issue of JMB.

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Kafka and Musil

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This excerpt from the very excellent Philip Payne in Philip Payne, Graham Bartram and Galin Tihanov (eds), A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007, pp. 39-40).

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Musil admired Kafka’s work. He made a point of meeting Kafka when the Czech author visited Berlin. As we have seen, Musil wanted to publish Kafka’s story “Die Verwandlung” (The Metamorphosis) in the journal that he edited, Die Neue Rundschau, but Musil’s employer, Samuel Fischer, insisted on cuts that Kafka would not permit. Kafka’s story deals, of course, with the transformation of the central figure from a human being into a grotesque creature resembling a monstrous insect that provokes disgust in those who see it. (The word that Kakfa uses for this creature is Ungeziej”e·, which might be translated as “vermin”- this was one of the terms that the National Socialist propagandists would use later to describe Jews.) In this and many of Kafka’s other works, readers sense a level of meaning that seems almost tangible, yet remains elusive. An even shorter narrative, Kafka’s sketch “Auf der Galerie” In the Gallery) is typical in this respect; it records a scene in a circus where a visitor watches a bareback rider going round and round the ring. At the end of the sketch, which is only two paragraphs long, a bystander lays his head on a parapet and weeps. That is all.

Particularly memorable, and relevant to our present enquiry, is the linguistic realization of Kafka’s sketch. Kafka’s first paragraph consists entirely of a sequence of “if” -clauses, of unreal conditions; the second paragraph is entirely in the indicative, thus stating unequivocally that it gives an accurate record of the scene before the eyes of an observer. The first paragraph, with its unreal conditions, presents a circus ring from hell, a bleak scene of unrelieved suffering; the second paragraph, in the indicative, is a scene of harmony and beauty, a view of this same circus, but as if seen through the eyes of a young child enchanted by the spectacle. One might argue that the power of Kafka’s writing rests precisely in the way it frustrates any attempt at conclusive interpretation, but I consider that this sketch is one in which Kafka intends his reader to reverse the explicit meanings of the verbs in the two paragraphs. Here the virtual (the “unreal conditions” found in the first paragraph) overturns the actual (the second paragraph with its idyll in the indicative mood). I believe that here Kafka employs the device of ironic dissimulation; the unreal (the circus ring from hell) is in fact real, whereas the real (the circus idyll) is unreal. This insight, the loss of childhood innocence, prompts the despair expressed by the bystander. A similar literary play with meaning-reversal is to be found in a series of curious entries in Musil’s diaries, the so-called “Kriegstagebucli eines Flohs” (War Diary of a Flea).

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