Journeys of the Mind

Peter Brown's Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History runs to 698 pages, not counting introduction and index. Occasionally in the course of reading it, I wondered whether all those pages were needed. Yet I can't say where Brown would have cut.

I knew of Brown because of his first book, Augustine of Hippo. I finished Journeys of the Mind with the notion that I should find the revised edition of Augustine, which includes insights drawn from recently discovered letters of St. Augustine's, and should probably read two or three more of Brown's books. At least I should read The World of Late Antiquity, and Body and Society. And probably I should read the works of some of the other authors mentioned: the footnotes make for an intriguing bibliography, and a program of further reading, if only one had the tongues and the time.

As an autobiography, it is curious. One reads early and late of Brown's family, mother, father, aunts, and cousins. On the other hand, "my wife Pat" appears first on page 591 and thereafter only on page 631. We learn she wrote her dissertation on "the art and social setting of that most Venetian of Venetian painters, Vittorio Carpaccio", we learn the name of the book that resulted, and we learn that she received a tenure-track position in the Art History Department at Princeton. Comparable memoirs, it seems to me, have given spouses a bit more room.

Princeton University Press will bring out a paperback edition in late October for $28, about two-thirds the price of the hardback. (The date and price are for the US.) The book is not for everyone, but those with an interest in the history of late antiquity will likely find it of  interest. I might buy a copy or two as Christmas presents.

Webs

 There was mist, maybe a light drizzle, last night, and this morning the spider webs on shrubs showed it:

out front,

and a few blocks away.

Gluten Free and Vegan

A reminder from the dermatologist sent me to the store for some sunblock. I came away with a tube of SPF 70 sunscreen lotion. This morning, in going to put it on, I noticed that the tube states that the product is Gluten Free and Vegan, answering  a question I'd not have asked.

I can understand someone objecting to animal products for ethical reasons, or the products of some animals for religious reasons. The interest in a gluten free sun block I suppose derives from the notions some have that gluten can affect one through even brief contact of bread with the skin. I think this most improbable, but evidently you needn't travel far to find someone who holds the notion.

 

More MacIntyre

 This week I finished a first reading of Alasdair MacIntyre's Three Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. Encyclopedia is the late 19th Century liberal consensus, as embodied in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Genealogy is Nietzche's and the Nietzcheans' project of subverting that consensus, unmasking its claims as expressions of the will to power, in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere. Tradition is preeminently Aquinas's synthesis of the Augustinian and Aristotelian/Averroist traditions in the 13th Century.

 The sub-subtitle of the book is "being Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988." I found the book slow going: the sentences are long, and often punctuated more lightly than I am used to. I  wonder whether those who heard them, with the lecturer's spoken emphases and rhythms, would have followed them more readily. The prose is very clear, but to careful reading.

(I believe that the only other set of Gifford Lectures I have read are those that make up Whitehead's Process and Reality. Those made slow reading for very different reasons.)

 MacIntyre's prescription for the university is to make it a place of encouraged and lightly controlled confrontations, so that radically different understandings can confront each other rather than talking past each other as they now do. He does address the improbability of this:

.... The charge of utopianism, so it must appear, cannot be evaded.

This I am not disposed to deny but only if it is understood that the charge of utopianism, sometimes at least, has a very different import from that which is conventionally ascribed to it. Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and future output to be predictable and measurable,  and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are the enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics of all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision.

Who were their predecessors? They included the fourth-century magistrates of the disordered city which Plato described in Book VIII of the Republic, ....

Projects of academic reform have come and gone since 1988. None that I remember has had much effect, and none that I remember was in the direction that MacIntyre had in mind.

I will read the book again, but probably will re-read his Whose Justice? Which Rationality first.

MacIntyre died this May. The New York Times published an obituary.