Reading Midgley, Again

 The Little Free Library at Midgley Corner yielded Man and Beast: The Roots of Human Nature some weeks back. I have by now read through it, and am grateful to have done so. Some of the book I had previously read in The Essential Mary Midgley, selections from various of her works. Most was new to me.

Broadly, the themes of Man and Beast are those of The Essential Mary Midgley. There is a great deal more about animal behavior: the mental abilities of primates, the family bonds of such as wolves and wild dogs. She quotes Kant, but also Konrad Lorenz and Jane Goodall, and others working in ethology, and also, with respect but with considerable reservations, Edward O. Wilson.

I have always liked books that suggest or compel more reading. I can tell from Man and Beast that I really should read Wilson, Lorenz, Goodall, and Bishop Butler. But I think that the others will have to wait on Butler, though for his sermons I will probably have to go to Alibris. They may also have to wait on Anthony Powell, since Midgley quotes from novels of his I haven't read.

Translated From the German

 Having just finished a book stated to have been translated from the German, I find myself with the question that occurred to me on page 4: from the German, into what?

For Adorno, this turbulent panorama [of the Gulf of Naples], imbued with a diffuse revolutionary bent, was distilled into a core group of thinkers ignited by Naples's atmosphere, where everyday life spurred even the most pensive of participants to train their gaze on the superficial elements of their era and discern the potential in those elements.

 The way that "imbued", "bent", "distilled", "ignited" have come unstuck from any original meaning bothers me. And why should "even" the most pensive of the participants pay special attention? My best guess at the author's meaning is

Naples had many more or less leftist foreign visitors, and Adorno collected around himself those that most interested him. The quality of  everyday life in Naples was such as to impress itself even on the most introverted and blinkered visitor, and to offer scope for over-interpretation of minor details.

(The last clause may have more to do with my temper, and less with the author's intention. But in fairness to me, I read through 140 pages of this.)

 There is also the odd phrases, within quotation marks,

eccentric structure of this landscape, in which every point is equidistant from the center

In a plane, a figure with every point equidistant from a center is a circle; in three dimensions, a sphere. But a landscape with every point equidistant from the center is simply unimaginable. And how "eccentric"?

 

Production Values

 Yale University Press publishes a series named "Rethinking the Western Tradition". The bulk of a volume will be some classic of the Western tradition, followed by essays by scholars now active. The usual proportion of classic to commentary seems to be between two to one and three to one. I first noticed the series for its edition of Newman's The Idea of a University, in which I thought that some of the essays could have been spared for more Newman.

 I have just finished reading the series edition of Leviathan. Here the first essay I read was definitely worth the time, an attempt to emphasize Hobbes's reliance on natural law. I don't know that the author made his case. But I will have a look at other essays when time allows.

Hobbes will occasionally occasionally give a term in Greek, mostly later in the book. Here in a few places the production process let Yale down. There are a couple of sigmas where omicrons should be, and a nu replaces an upsilon. These are not especially important, but they introduce a doubt: how accurately rendered are the four hundred pages of 17th Century English, with different spellings, capitalization, and punctuation? Cross-checking against an old Pelican paperback edition shows that the Pelican edition does not have these particular errors.

 Well, I bought the book in part to encourage Kramerbooks to carry more works of philosophy. I see in looking at the Yale series that we bought another volume in it last year to give to a friend at Christmas, a collection of Hume's essays.