Reading Midgley

 Having read Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, I thought I might read something by Mary Midgley, whose Wickedness the publisher advertise among other books in the end papers. I did not expect to find her work in the local bookstores I usually rely on. My preferred out-of-town bookstores didn't seem promising, either.

A Little Free Library on New Hampshire Avenue NW yielded The Essential Mary Midgley, edited by David Midgley, which contains excerpts from ten of her books. I am more likely to find some of those books to read than I am to pass along this volume.

The themes that Midgley writes on include

• A rejection of the Cartesian split between mind and matter.
• Related to that, a rejection of the tendency to regard animals as machines, and their treatment as not worth considering.
• Also related, the assertion that humans have a nature, and cannot be considered as acting from arbitrary will.
• The validity of (sound) moral judgments, including the identification of evil and the ascription of blame.
• The need for philosophy in general to clarify our notions, including particularly moral philosophy.
• The misreading and misuse of Darwin's thought.
• The unjustified pretensions of certain scientists who write as public intellectuals.

The book is organized in five sections, each with chapters of about a dozen pages each, the sections being

1. The Roots of Human Nature
2. Philosophizing Out in the World
3. The Myths of Science
4. Reason and Imagination
5. Gaian Thinking: Putting it All Together

 Midgley writes clearly throughout. She requires careful reading, but I recall only one spot where I suspected something omitted in the text. She can be cutting, for example in the notes to the essay "The Elusiveness of Responsibility":

British philosophers, who in many other cases have now relaxed their rule of reading only one book by each philosopher, sternly adhere to it in Kant's case, and treat a few quotations from the rather dramatic opening section of the Groundwork as his last words on individuality and freedom. Both Williams and Nagel take as their chief opponent the resulting shadowy fixture, who is supposed to be Kant, but to whom they amazingly attribute 'a very simple image of rationality.'

So Many Wicked People

 At Second Story Books today, I noticed the volume Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary by Anthony Kenny. Of course I bought it. The book is organized in short chapters, each with brief notices of three persons: "Three Oxford philosophers", 'Three Wittgensteinians", "Three cardinals", and so on. Kenny's career at Oxford and elsewhere brought him into contact with many persons worth writing and reading about.

Among the Oxford philosophers is R.M. Hare, whom I have not read, but have seen quoted and referred to a certain amount. Hare's specialty was moral philosophy, which one might have expected to give him a notion of human failings. But evidently real estate had things not dreamt of in his philosophy:

Because he was now a professor, on a university, rather than a college payroll, Dick had to vacate his college house. He said that trying to buy a house was one of the worst experiences of his life: 'I had no idea that there were so many wicked people in the world!' This from a man who, as a prisoner of the Japanese, had worked on the Burma Railway!

 

Frank Ryan, RIP (Belatedly)

 Frank Ryan, an outstanding quarterback for the Cleveland Browns in the early 1960s, died on January 1, 2024. He received respectful obituaries in the newspapers. Wikipedia has a long and detailed article on him (as on many other football players).

Ryan was unusual as earning a Ph.D. in mathematics while an NFL player. He taught at Case Institute (now part of Case Western Reserve) during some of his off-seasons in Cleveland, and later at Rice (where he studied as an undergraduate and earned his Ph.D.) and Yale. After his playing days, he oversaw the computerization voting of the House of Representatives. His wife, Joan Ryan, wrote on sports for the Washington Post in those days, as she had previously for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In his NFL days, home games were not broadcast on TV--tickets for the games cost an unaffordable $10--so I can have seen only so many of Ryan's games. But I remember the intense satisfaction we felt when he led the Browns to the 1964 NFL championship.

Lighting

 Today, one of the building engineers was replacing lights in fixtures in an open area near my office. The tubes looked unusually thin when I got a look at them, and I remarked on that. He told me that the tubes were not fluorescent lights, but LEDs. I had not previously seen LED lights in that shape. The connectors at the end are compatible with those for fluorescent tubes, so one need not switch out fixtures. The savings in electricity will be considerable. And the light seems to be warmer than a fluorescent's, which is all to the good.