A brief list

1. Galen Strawson's "Against Narrativity" is interesting, but I'm not totally sure he's right that Alasdair MacIntyre is either a normative or a psychological narrativist.

2. However, this bit from After Virtue strikes me as odd: "We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessay for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is" (p 219). I suppose the "what more and what else" is a bit of a saving addition, because, supposing, as seems plausible, that one can't seek for what one has, I'm not sure what someone convinced by that sentence would have left to do.

3. The work to which Michael Bratman's essay "Planning and Temptation" responds contains (at least if Bratman's summary is accurate) an astonishingly obtuse analysis of how one's preferences change in situations involving akrasia (& would seem to be one that could benefit from looking at the Protagoras).

4. Remember when I was interested in aesthetics and art criticism & history and shit like that? Turns out it's still interesting.  Wonder what happened there.

5. Might it be possible to write a distributed web browser, so as to enable a user with, say, an account on a computer whose IP belongs to a university with access to, say, jstor to make requests from that computer even when running the browser (or rather, interacting with the browser, since "the browser" would be running in both places) from someplace else? (I've been reading about Erlang.)

6. Harry Frankfurt:

One of the best recent moral philosophers, the late Bernard Williams, suggests that it is a person's ambitions and plans—what he calls the person's projects—that provide the motive force [that] propels [the person] into the future, and gives him a reason for living … It seems to me that what Williams says perstains just to people who are seriously depressed. The individuals he describes have no natural vitality. Their lives are inert, lacking any inherent momentum or flow … Surely Williams has it backwards. Our interest in living does not commonly depend on our having projects that we desire to pursue. It's the other way around: we are interested in having worthwhile projects because we do intend to go on living , and we would prefer not to be bored. (Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, pp 36–7; the bracketed replacements are Frankfurts, the ellipses mine.)

Surely Williams has it right. Being bored because one had absolutely no projects at all (cares, whatever you want to call them) wouldn't be the boredom of waiting impatiently for something necessary to fulfill a project one had, but couldn't proceed with; it would be the boredom of an utter vacuum of meaning—not waiting for something, just … interminable waiting.  (Here's a fun little pic that I think I first found at pas au-delà.)  The volitional necessity of caring about one's own life is pretty flimsy; I doubt it could provide much in the way of meaning or motivation.  (And wouldn't that make one seriously depressed?)

Comments

[The Modesto Kid]

a fun little pic that I think I first found at pas au-delà

It appears to come from The Structure of Awareness by Thomas Oden, 1969 -- so I am told by The Diagram, which also features Oden's Structure of Desecration and a couple of mistranslated poems.