C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary: Chapter 2, "Against the Current"
30-31, on the primordial struggle of his youth:We know nothing, nothing at all, of the results of what we do to children. My father had given me a bat and ball, I had learnt to play and at eighteen was...
View ArticleRichard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 7, "Men in Office"
There are a few key things a president needs to protect his power. The first is intelligence, especially details of process and policy. Without these, he will not understand the stakes of any choice...
View ArticleOn a telling blindness to the history of philosophy
I will briefly break from the normal programming on this blog to make an observation about Matthew Yglesias'srecentposts on Kant, Christianity, and ethics. Yglesias believes it is a commonly accepted...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone, Forenote to the American Edition and Chapters 1 and...
Among the reasons I picked up this book was a desire to get a better feel for England in the 19th century, and Jenkins goes some ways towards supplying that in his context-setting Forenote.He begins...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 3, "A Terminological...
In this chapter Blumenberg takes a break from tracing truth metaphors through time. He notes that this approach presupposes that each chosen appearance of the metaphor has been properly understood in...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 3 and 4, "A Clumsy Suitor" and "Peel's...
Gladstone rose quickly under the mentorship of the tragedy-struck future prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, becoming a cabinet minister for the first time at just 33.After a brief spell in power in the...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 4, "Metaphorics of...
Blumenberg follows up on another metaphor used by Lactantius: the nakedness of truth.This metaphor brings up the issue of the appropriateness of the truth for human beings, who after all are the...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Ch 5, "Terra Incognita and...
Blumenberg explores how the terra incognita and unfinished universe metaphors shape the modern attitude towards the world. Terra incognita (along with its metaphorical substitutes America and even...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 5 and 6, "Orator, Zealot, and Debtor" and...
Gladstone as orator: the passion, force, and conviction of the delivery was more remarkable than the text -- his arguments were often obscure.Gladstone suffered a number of personal setbacks in the...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 7 and 8, "Ladies of the Night" and "The...
After much foreshadowing of Gladstone's sexual vices, they turn out to have been disappointingly tame. His so-called pornographic tastes amounted to little more than a fondness for suggestive passages...
View ArticleRichard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 8, "The Sixties Come Next"
The key traits of an effective president are expertise in understanding presidential power, a desire to have power, and the grace to deal with the failures and frustrations in attempting to use that...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 9 and 10, "The Chancellor Who Made the Job"...
Although it is not a focus of the narrative, the fluidity of British government coalitions of the mid-19th century is striking (and key to the politics of the era, of course). Both the Whig and...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 6, "Organic and...
Background metaphorics - background of images that makes it possible to reconstruct and understand seemingly non-metaphorical (and even purely theoretical) statements.The language of imaginative...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 7, "Myth and...
77: "[M]etaphorology -- as a subbranch of conceptual history, and like the latter itself considered as a whole -- must always be an auxiliary discipline to philosophy as it seeks to understand itself...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 8, "Terminologization...
Blumenberg now considers the phenomenon of transition from a metaphor to a concept. He focuses on a transition where both the original metaphor and the succeeding concept use the same German word,...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 9, "Metaphorized...
Copernicus's geocentric model provoked a reassessment of metaphors relating to man's stature. While for some, like Goethe, the implication was a vindication of man's dignity as a being able to think...
View ArticleHans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 10, "Geometric...
Blumenberg begins by explaining the contrast he wants to draw between symbolism and metaphorics with reference to Fontenelle's critique of geocentrism at the end of the previous chapter. Fontenelle...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 11 and 12, "Health and Wealth" and "A Short...
Gladstone was out of office for most of the 1850s, so his genuinely political activity was pretty scant. This gives Jenkins the opportunity to notice that Gladstone got sick rather a lot. He also fills...
View ArticleRoy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 13 and 14, "The Hostile Partnership with...
Derby's Conservative government fell and Parliament was dissolved in the wake of Disraeli's failed attempt at a second reform bill in 1859. The Conservatives gained seats in the subsequent election,...
View ArticleRichard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 9, "Appraising a President"
In this first supplementary chapter added to the original text, Neustadt tries to assess Kennedy's mastery of presidential power. He argues that there is a special difficulty in making judgments about...
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