Sunday, April 09, 2006
(8:47 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Did you know
that you can buy a case of 70 single serving sized boxes of Corn Flakes on Amazon.com? That is definitely going on my wish list!UPDATE:
that our nation is literally being run by maniacs? At one point, an official compares the tough choice to use tactical nuclear weapons in order to wipe out Iran's nuclear program with the tough choice that "we" faced in Japan in 1945. I hope that all of those conspiracy theorists are right when they claim that all our nuclear silos are empty, just for show -- because this would put Bush in the running for the really elite rung of mass murderers (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).
I'm sure that within the next few months, there will be an editorial in the sober-minded Atlantic Monthly advising us that although conventional wisdom would speak against decimating an entire nation and rendering large swaths of it uninhabitable, we've got to face the facts.
UPDATE (2):
that despite the nihilistic methods of world history, I remain seated at the dining room table, puzzling over ancient texts? Specifically, this sentence from Augustine, De Trinitate, X.5.7, puzzles me:
Multa enim per cupiditatem pravam tamquam sui sit oblita sic agit.The subject of the sentence is "mens." The translation I'm using has this:
In fact many of the things it does show that it has twisted its desires the wrong way round as though it had forgotten itself.That may well be a great way of getting at the idea of what Augustine is talking about, but it offers me very little help in trying to figure out how the actual Latin text hangs together.
(For those who are curious about the structure of Marion's class, he is assuming that we will read the whole text in the course of time, but he is assigning short sections that will be the subject of presentations in the first half of the class, followed by his own lectures on particular topics in the second half, presumably based mainly on the text presented. My procedure then will be to read as much of the entire text as possible in translation each week, while going through the assigned text in Latin several times during the week. One interesting point that he raised last week was to say that just as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a way of bringing the subject to the point where the System becomes thinkable, so also Augustine's Confessions provide a path to the point of contemplating the topics treated in The Trinity.)
UPDATE (3):
that one of Jacques Derrida's first publications was a translation of a text by none other than W. V. O. Quine himself? And that when Quine was in Paris, he used Derrida's office? Small world! (Source: John D. Caputo, Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, pg. 365, n. 4.)
