Door-kicking

It's nice when you are reading something ancient and come across a passage which strikes a very particular and direct chord. I'm reading Margaret Graver's new book, Stoicism and emotion (Chicago, 2007) and enjoying it a lot. I was also very pleased to read a passage from Galen which she discusses near the beginning of chapter 3. She is interested in the sense that the Stoics can give to the idea that emotions are 'up to us', that is are ultimately dependent on ourselves and we can be held responsible for them. This is a hot topic for some ancient philosophers, closely related to the famous discussions over the possibility of akrasia -- 'weakness of will' or 'incontinence' -- the possibility that I might be overcome by anger, or pleasure, or erotic passion, or some such and end up acting contrary to my better judgement. The Stoics' general psychological picture would appear to rule out this sort of phenomenon. So it is interesting to hear Chrysippus saying something like this:

“οὕτω γὰρ ἐξιστάμεθα καὶ ἔξω γινόμεθα ἑαυτῶν καὶ τελέως ἀποτυφλούμεθα ἐν τοῖς σφαλλομένοις, ὥστε ἔστιν ὅτε σπόγγον ἔχοντες ἢ ἔριον ἐν ταῖς χερσὶ τοῦτο διαράμενοι βάλλομεν ὡς δή τι περανοῦντες δι’ αὐτῶν. εἰ δ’ ἐτυγχάνομεν μάχαιραν ἔχοντες ἢ ἄλλο τι, τούτῳ ἂν ἐχρησάμεθα παραπλησίως.” καὶ ἐφεξῆς “πολλάκις δὲ κατὰ τὴν τοιαύτην τυφλότητα τὰς κλεῖς δάκνομεν καὶ τὰς θύρας τύπτομεν οὐ ταχὺ αὐτῶν ἀνοιγομένων πρός τε τοὺς λίθους ἐὰν προσπταίσωμεν, τιμωρητικῶς προσφερόμεθα καταγνύντες καὶ ῥιπτοῦντες αὐτοὺς εἴς τινας τόπους καὶ ἐπιλέγοντες καθ’ ἕκαστα τούτων ἀτοπώτατα.”

Chrysippus, in Galen PHP 4.6.43-5 De Lacy

Here is Graver's translation:

For in disappointment we are 'outside of' or 'beside' ourselves and, in a word, blinded, so that sometimes, if we have a sponge or a bit of wool in our hands, we pick it up and throw it, as if that would achieve something. And if we happened to be holding a dagger, or some other weapon, we would do the same with that... And often, through the same blindness, we bite keys and beat at doors when they do not open quickly, and if we stumble on a stone we take revenge on it by breaking it or throwing it somewhere, and we say very odd things on such occasions.

This is cited by Galen as part of his general discussion of Platonic vs. Stoic psychology and that is obviously a worthy and interesting discussion in its own right. The passage made me smile, though, because intense rage at inanimate objects is something to which I am, unfortunately, personally prone.

Now, I am quite prepared to believe that this failing is 'up to me' in the sense relevant to my being subject to moral evaluation for it. But there it is. I could probably do with some well-aimed psychological therapy at the hands of some Epictetus or Socrates. (Then again, they would probably annoy me even more...) And I do know that it has landed me in some hot water. For instance, I once was coming into the house from the garden and carelessly as I opened the door allowed it to bump into and push over my little girl, who had been in the house trying to spy me through the cat flap. In the heat and emotion (embarrassment, anger, self-criticism) that followed, I somehow decided that the right thing to do was to kick the offending back door very hard. I managed, however, to put my foot right through the cat flap, smashing it. So the whole thing was made much worse and I had to spend the rest of the afternoon finding and fitting a replacement.

Well, I'm not sure whose analysis of these situations is right, Chrysippus' or Plato's. But I'm sure that they happen. And it shows that you don't need to go digging around high literature like Homer or Attic tragedy to find illuminating and complicated psychological examples.

Something sustaining

Back at work in earnest today, and I've just realised that I've been through ten or so contributions to the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism that I am editing and have been changing the bibliographies to a slightly incorrect formatting. Bum. I'll have to go back tomorrow and hunt down the pesky edited volumes and move people around. Yes, I know Endnote or something else clever would probably do it for me, but if not all the contributors use it and if I have always been too mean to shell out then I suppose I'll just have to buckle down and do it old skool.

Still, I was cheered up tonight because younger daughter chose one of my favourite stories for bedtime: chapter two of Winnie the Pooh, '...in which Pooh goes visiting and gets into a tight place'. If you haven't read it (shame on you) then you can do so here. I'm not entirely sure that its copyright kosher to put that on the 'net, but it's there. In fact, even if you have read it, then treat yourself to five minutes fun and read it here. It's best, of course with the E. H. Shepard illustrations (shame on those Disney folk...) The prose is brilliant -- especially the exchanges between Rabbit and Pooh. But tonight I particularly enjoyed the reference Pooh makes to the sort of book he would like to hear while he is waiting to get thinner and become unstuck from Rabbit's front door:

"Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?"

(The capitals are important.) That sounds like just the sort of thing that would help me right now, both in my post Xmas/too many Celebrations (the chocolates)/ aren't those new 85% cocoa After Eights good/ just another glass of wine then... sort of state and in my metaphorical need for sustinence in a time of Great Tightness.

Shame on us?

Alain be Botton writes in The Philosophers' Magazine here about the treatment his work has received at the hands of some professional academic philosophers including -- he names names so I don't have to -- one or two people who work like me on ancient philosophy. His piece concludes:

It clearly feels very important for academic philosophers to guard their borders aggressively. Doing so has brought them extraordinary neglect and mockery. I’d recommend that they learn to make philosophy into a big tent and stop being so threatened by practioners who don’t share their assumptions, lest they find out that there are no more true believers.

I know Alain feels very strongly about this; he was written to tell me as much when I posted something he felt discredited his work in much the same way here he says other professional philosophers have done. But I still think there is something of an improper contrast being made, and perhaps being pursued by both sides. It seems to me that a 'big tent' might well be a good idea, but only so long as it's big enough that we can do what we each do without having to jostle for space or feel threatened by one another. Attacking writers like de Botton for doing what they do might well be unfair and/or unproductive. I see no reason not to call it philosophy. But similarly, telling professional academic philosophers they are somehow doing a disservice to philosophy by pursuing more abstruse or technical or less popular avenues of research is not going to get us very far either. That too offers too narrow a vision of what the subject is and should be.

Feedback

And one little coda to the interview story: not long ago I rediscovered a little postcard sent to me in December 1991 by the person who was eventually to be my Director of Studies at Clare; he was writing to tell me that I would be getting a conditional offer of a place. That sort of thing isn't supposed to happen any more, because it's important to be absolutely sure that any communication about decisions comes initially via the Admissions Office and is double-checked etc. But in some ways, that's a bit of a shame. That small card meant an enormous amount to me and also was a very humane way of letting me enjoy my Christmas without the anxiety of still not knowing how my application had gone.

So, tell me a little about....

The admissions interview season is more or less over, so we can at last spend a few days frantically trying to do some of our own work before Christmas. I still remember my own interviews, so this time of year causes some serious flashbacks and I find myself sympathising a great deal with the various candidates who come along and have a go at answering tricky questions in a new and probably intimidating environment with rather a lot at stake. For my part, I hope I do what I can to make the experience reasonably pain-free without stinting on the level of care and seriousness that we apply to the decision-making. It's important for the interview to be revealing of what the various applicants would be like were they to be admitted, so it can't be too cosy.

Like all Classics applicants, I was interviewed at not just the college of my first choice (Clare) but at another place assigned by the Faculty. For me, this was Trinity, and the Trinity interview came first, on the morning after a v. hard test in Clare (which involved a chunk of the nastiest Latin I have ever read; or at least that's how it felt... I don't think there was a verb in the first sentence. Silver Latin, eh?). I had to find my way to Grange Road after a night freezing in a room in Memorial Court. Those were the days before central heating and certainly before en suite facilities -- all now demanded by the paying undergraduate clients and certainly by the lucrative conference facilities. I remember talking to my Trinity interviewer about Herodotus and Thucydides, and wondering how different they were -- even making up something about their prose style. I couldn't read a word of Greek at that time, so it was all a bit off the cuff. At the end, the interviewer told me that he reckoned I had a good chance but Trinity had so many of its own applicants that I probably wouldn't end up there. Fair enough. I hadn't applied to Trinity anyway; but it's interesting to note that that sort of talk is definitely -- and rightly -- verboten these days. (It may well have been verboten even then...)

Then three interviews at Clare, with the Director of Studies and one of the college lecturers, with the person who would eventually be my tutor, and with a Professorial fellow in Classics. These I remember less well, but I was certainly asked if I agreed with Quintilian's assessment of Livy's prose style (ummmm, well.... mumble....) and whether I'd prefer to know a little about a lot or a lot about a little. I have no idea what I said to that. Quite a full day, though.

Still, I think I enjoyed it. At least, I enjoyed the obvious time and attention being paid to my application. And that is still the case. The decisions are taken very carefully and with a great deal of consideration of each candidate's various strengths and weaknesses. It's a shame we cannot take more people, of course, and then there are people to whom the course or the method of teaching we offer are not well suited. In fact, if there is one piece of advice that I would insist upon for potential applicants it is that they all need to look carefully at the course they apply for. Make sure you know what it involves, what it does not cover, and the sort of work you will be doing. All that information is easily available, but it is surprising how many applicants appear not to have spent much time looking and thinking about what they are signing up for...

A new Callicles?

This is from the intriguing http://www.magicmolly.com/:

Looks like S. will have hard time refutin' Kanye. Peace out.

More shirts

It seems to me that there are more philosophy-themed t-shirts on sale than there are people who would wear philosophy-themed t-shirts. But sometimes they make me laugh, all the same. Here's one that made me laugh from Gadflycreations.com, 'Offering products than which none greater can be conceived'.

Grrrr

I've just got home on the Citi (sic) 2 bus service. Yes, I know I probably shouldn't be using Stagecoach buses, but it's the only service in town. It was grim enought waiting 40 minutes for the 'every 20 mins' service, but then when I got on I had to share the bus with a eejit who insisted on playing the assembled passenger aggresive rap from the tinny crap speakers in his mobile phone. Prat. I know it must be hard to get respec' on the mean streets of Impington or wherever, and perhaps somewhere in his tiny brain he was entertaining fantasies of ridin' round the projects of Baltimore but for Pete's sake stop inflicting this trebley drivel on all and sundry. Of course, this being Britain and because we're all worried about being knifed on public transport, no one said anything to get him to stop. And why should we have to in any case? Grrrr.

Ho ho ho

Term is over so we academics should all be sitting back and waiting for Christmas, right? Not a bit of it; hence the lack of much blogging recently. At the moment the colleges are full of students who are applying for admission in October 2008 (or for deferred entry in 2009). Our current first-years have only just started and already we need to think about the next year's intake. I find the whole process a lot of hard work, and pretty stressful. Not, I suppose, as stressful as the candidates find it. But all the same, there are some big decisions to be made and we try to make them fairly and well.

That's not all. For our Faculty, this is the time of year when we begin to set exam papers for the summer. It's a long and baroque process, with all sorts of complicated discussions about formats and fonts and markbooks and workbooks and candidates from other courses and the like. One of the hardest parts of the job, in fact, is moving between the various different teaching, Faculty, college, research, and publication tasks that we each take on. I can't juggle and I'm only just able to manage this working equivalent.

But there are some things to smile about too. Like: www.elfyourself.com (8 new elves per second, apparently...). Or the interesting and often very bright students we get to interview. Or finding out that YouTube has footage of perhaps the best thing that Socrates ever did.

Had I written it...

Ah, the demise of the subjunctive... Not long after I became grumpy at the sight of a college Governing Body paper written with clauses like: 'The committee recommend that X is [sic] tasked with' etc..., I find that the new lamentable OJ Simpson book has the title 'If I did it'. Now, this is fine for the Goldman family, I suppose, because now they have been granted rights to the book they can arrange the title on the front cover with the 'If' in a colour that blends almost imperceptibly into the background. But really, what would have been so wrong with 'Had I done it...'? Perhaps OJ is genuinely unsure whether he did it or not, so the remote conditional didn't strike him as appropriate. But I doubt it.

Charity has its limits

Oh dear. Kenodoxia has now been cited in Mary Beard's 'Don's diary' (in the latest Cam magazine) as a vaguely scholarly trip along the by-ways of ancient philosophy. I have a sneaking feeling I haven't been very scholarly lately, nor very philosophical. But here's a gesture in that direction.

What's the worst argument to be found in an ancient philosophical text? I mean the argument that is the most obviously fallacious or otherwise glaringly misguided? Now, the Principle of Charity often leads us in the business to try to do the best for whatever apparently ghastly bit of reasoning we might find. (Think, for example, of the 'Argument from opposites' in Plato's Phaedo: 'being dead' and 'being alive' are opposites in the required sense, are they Socrates?)

But I can't do very much for the following:

'If you are light, pain, I can bear you; if I cannot bear you, you are short.'

levis es si ferre possum; brevis es si ferre non possum.

Sen. Ep. Mor. 24.14

This is meant to persuade us that intense pain does not last. It's not just Seneca who peddles this rubbish, though: he probably caught it from an Epicurean (see Epic. Ep. Men. 133; KD 4; SV 4; Diog. Oin. fr. 42 Smith; also Cic. Tusc. 2.44.) But Seneca is daft enough to repeat it, even thanking nature for making it so (Ep. Mor. 78.7). If it's an argument at all and not just a daftly optimistic assertion, then it must mean something like this:

If pain is intolerable then it will kill you; it will not last. If pain lasts then it must therefore be tolerable.

This is of course true only in a very special and literal sense of 'intolerable'. I doubt anyone will be much relieved when they turn to a doctor and complain of excruciating agony if the doctor turns round and says: 'Well, it hasn't killed you. So it must be tolerable. Luck you.' Anyone persuaded by this not to worry about pain is an idiot or (and?) already, like Seneca, a Stoic...

Any arguments worse than this?

Why kids are great

Despite getting us all up at 5.30 for the last three days, daughter #2 managed to cheer us up by provoking the following conversation over breakfast:

Daughter #2: 'Will you come to explore a volcano with me?' (Daughter #2 is wearing a bike-helmet to eat her breakfast. In fact, she has been wearing it all weekend since seeing Dr Iain Stewart's new BBC2 series and people abseiling into a crater to look at moltem lava.)

Daughter #1: 'Sorry, no. It's a school day today.'

So, this is what it's all for?

A report in yesterday's Guardian tells me that philosophy graduates are much more popular with prospective employers than perhaps they used to be. Certainly there are many more of them (in 2006 more than twice as many people graduated with a degree in philosophy than in 2001) and they are finding work in some interesting places.

Good for them. But I couldn't help feeling a little deflated by the following:

Fiona Czerniawska, director of the Management Consultancies Association's think tank, says: "A philosophy degree has trained the individual's brain and given them the ability to provide management-consulting firms with the sort of skills that they require and clients demand. These skills can include the ability to be very analytical, provide clear and innovative thinking, and question assumptions."

I would have hoped that all university degrees offer that kind of education. For my part, I don't think that what I am doing when I teach is fit someone out with the kind of skills that management consulting firms demand. And it somehow bores me to hear once again the reduction of philosophy to some kind of 'brain-training' and the provision of a set of transferable analytic skills. But perhaps the increased employability of a philosophy degree will attract some good students who might otherwise have been put off and, if things go well, perhaps they will in the course of their studies read and think about something which lets them imagine doing something interesting afterwards.

More free stuff...

Thanks to Harry who commented on a previous post, I found the Internet Archive. Not only does it hold lots of interesting music, but plenty of free pdfs of books -- with no problems this time with access from the UK and so no need for proxies.

I now have a nice pdf of Mutschmann's edition of Sextus Empiricus PH and also Oliveri's editions of Philodemus On the good king... and On frank speech.

I missed out...

Yesterday was UNESCO World Philosophy Day. Julian Baggini, on the Guardian website, is not sure whether to celebrate. I had no such troubles, mainly because -- I confess -- I didn't know anything about it. From my perspective at least, yesterday was not particularly philosophical. No more than most other days, in any case. But at least I'm not too late for the 2007 World Philosophy Day activities in Instanbul, on November 21-23. There's a programme here.

This is what the DG of UNESCO thinks it is all about:

To give greater depth to political, philosophical and intercultural dialogue and to mutual understanding of shared memories and values, ambitions and joint projects admittedly requires an updated chart of lines of convergence and divergence, of the differences, silences, misunderstandings and deadlocks that are always possible. The purpose of this Day is therefore to set out the conditions for such a universal dialogue by opening up to the diversity of interlocutors, and of philosophical currents and traditions, in an endeavour to take stock, to provide a perspective on the world and to engage in a critical rereading of our concepts and way of thinking.

Admirable aims, I suppose, albeit with a whiff of hand-waving generality...

De morte

Was the first century BC, the years 55-c.40 BC in particular, a boom period for thanatology? I have been looking at some works of that period and I am beginning to compile a relatively long list of works we either have in total or in part or else can be confident belonged to that period:

1. Lucretius, De rerum natura, book 3, lines 830-end
2. Cicero, Tusculan disputations, book 1 (Cicero also wrote a Consolatio just before Tusc. His daughter, Tullia, died early in 45 BC.)
3. Philodemus, On death
4. L. Varius Rufus, On death (a poem; fragments survive)
5. And, perhaps: Pseudo-Platonic Axiochus

This may not be a tremendously long list, but in terms of ancient works which survive or are known and considering the relatively close date of at least 1-4, I reckon this looks like a period of particular interest in such matters. If so, why?

Perhaps the most plausible explanation is that it is the result of a growing Roman interest in Epicureanism, the philosophy which emphasised most strongly the importance of getting right about the fear of death. Also, items 1, 3, and 4 were perhaps composed by people who were acquaintances or perhaps more loosely associated. This is therefore perhaps the result of a particular group's interest in this question. And, I imagine we should not discount the possibility that the turbulent times leading up to and after Caesar's assassination, the ongoing upheavals and -- no doubt -- deaths, might have encouraged this kind of reflection. We ought not to over-emphasise this last point, I suppose, since people die all the time and the Romans can't be said to have lived an entirely trouble-free kind of existence before the mid-first century BC. All the same, a number of these works either explicitly mention or can be plausibly linked to political concerns.

Am I missing any items from the list? And is there any other comparable period of activity? Is it that this looks to be unusual simply because we happen to know a bit about the works from this very well-documented period?

Decline...

You can listen here to Alain De Botton discussing what philosophy is. One claim that emerges in the interview struck me as interesting. Is it really the case that philosophers are often bad writers? Is it a shame that Kant is such a bad writer given that Plato started so well? (By which I mean both: Is it true that Kant is a bad writer? and Is it a shame that Kant writes so differently from Plato?)

Christmas list

Item no. 1 on my list is the new shirt from the good people at Philosophy Football... It commemorates the famous Monty Python joke, YouTubed below. One minor blemish is that the shirt prints 'Empedocles of Acraga' rather than 'Acragas'. The Pythons had on their teamsheet, since the final was being played in Munich, 'Empedocles von Acraga' so it was an easy slip. I'd still wear it, though, particularly since the right team won. (Sophocles at right-back is a bit of a surprise, now I think about it. I think I'd have put Melissus in -- no one gets past an Eleatic.)

Free stuff

Even better than cheap reprinted books are free books. Google Books, for example, will allow you to download Diels' Doxographi Graeci in PDF form for free... There are lots of other goodies there too, including the 1903 edition of Diels' Fragmente der Vorsokratiker... Well, you can get these if you are in the US. Those of us in the UK can't. If you hide your IP address you can get to the page only by getting there via a proxy site, and even then the PDF won't download properly. Shucks.

Reprinting is good

Recently, my life has been much improved by publishers reprinting or re-issuing some otherwise hard to find things. First, Cambridge University Press have begun paperbacking some important things that were otherwise out of print or very expensive. Favourite so far is:

But perhaps even better than that is a series from the Italian publisher Bompiani. They have now released versions of Usener's Epicurea, Von Armim's Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta and, more recently, Luria's edition of the fragments of Democritus. Each volume include a copy of the original publication with facing Italian translation. In the case of Luria, this includes an Italian translation of the original Russian commentary which, up to now, has been a complete mystery to me. Good on you, Bompiani! Best of all, they're cheap.