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Haven't seen the sun in seven days
Feb. 11th, 2006 11:59 pm
High today, here: -5. Dewpoint then: -10. High dewpoint: -10.
High today in TO: -3. Dewpoint then: -10. High dewpoint: -9.
Low today on the balcony: -10.2. High: -3.8. Currently: -10.2.
Let's see. Re-read Daniel Haybron's "What Do We Want From a Theory of Happiness?" (Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3, 2003); what's most remarkable about it, really, is its great similarity to his "Two Philosophical Problems in the Study of Happiness" (Journal of Happiness Studies 1, no. 2, 2000), even repeating the same joke: ah, I forget the set-up (my cerebral neuron decay has not in fact abated since I finished my dissertation; it's only getting worse--a few days ago I found myself, just for a second, brushing my teeth at the kitchen sink), but the punch line is, "... is like asking whether water is H2O or a kind of bicycle". I was told a couple of months ago that this practice of publishing variations on essentially the same article is known in The Profession as "shingling".
Finished re-reading Richard Kraut's "Two Conceptions of Happiness" (Philosophical Review 88, no. 2, 1979), and was disturbed to discover in a footnote--he has a lot of footnotes, which is why I would've missed it in the first place--him saying stuff about happiness having a lot to do with fittingness which really ought to have found its way into my dissertation. Oh well.
And discovered that there is an online Journal of the International Plato Society (and, for that matter, that there is an International Plato Society--politicaltheory.info is good for something besides wasting my life away, it turns out), which has an article by Terry Penner called "Platonic Justice and What We Mean by 'Justice'", which says some things about how to decide whether you're dealing with a conflict over what x is or conflicting assumptions about what "x" means that could be very useful for the kind of thing I want to do in the now significantly less than a week that I have to pull something out of the air to submit to APA-E for my annual ritual rejection. (If I can't have a lot of commas, then it has to be no commas. That's all there is to it.)
The article is basically a response to a 1963 article by David Sachs which argued that Plato commits a "fallacy of irrelevance" in the Republic by substituting a "psychological" concept of justice for Thrasymachus et al.'s "moral" one; Penner argues that to say that these are two different things is un-Platonic--Thrasymachus and Socrates are both concerned with what justice really is, or what "justice" really refers to, so there's no changing the subject, because the "moral" and "psychological" accounts of justice are two competing accounts of the same subject. To me, this all goes way wrong when you accept the premise that Socrates/Plato's "justice" is psychological as opposed to moral--which is probably, at least, a conceptual anachronism, though I guess it's in Plato that you see the one thing teased out from the other, maybe for the first time--and it goes even further wrong in supposing that Thrasymachus has any truck with (any truck with? where did that come from?) Platonic notions of there being things that words really mean, apart from how they're actually used. But it does get the problem right: if we're going to argue about whether my "x" and your "x" are really the same x, then we're going to need some Platonic or quasi-Platonic criterion of sameness. Which is what the debate about eudaimonia and "happiness" sorely lacks.
High today in TO: -3. Dewpoint then: -10. High dewpoint: -9.
Low today on the balcony: -10.2. High: -3.8. Currently: -10.2.
Let's see. Re-read Daniel Haybron's "What Do We Want From a Theory of Happiness?" (Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3, 2003); what's most remarkable about it, really, is its great similarity to his "Two Philosophical Problems in the Study of Happiness" (Journal of Happiness Studies 1, no. 2, 2000), even repeating the same joke: ah, I forget the set-up (my cerebral neuron decay has not in fact abated since I finished my dissertation; it's only getting worse--a few days ago I found myself, just for a second, brushing my teeth at the kitchen sink), but the punch line is, "... is like asking whether water is H2O or a kind of bicycle". I was told a couple of months ago that this practice of publishing variations on essentially the same article is known in The Profession as "shingling".
Finished re-reading Richard Kraut's "Two Conceptions of Happiness" (Philosophical Review 88, no. 2, 1979), and was disturbed to discover in a footnote--he has a lot of footnotes, which is why I would've missed it in the first place--him saying stuff about happiness having a lot to do with fittingness which really ought to have found its way into my dissertation. Oh well.
And discovered that there is an online Journal of the International Plato Society (and, for that matter, that there is an International Plato Society--politicaltheory.info is good for something besides wasting my life away, it turns out), which has an article by Terry Penner called "Platonic Justice and What We Mean by 'Justice'", which says some things about how to decide whether you're dealing with a conflict over what x is or conflicting assumptions about what "x" means that could be very useful for the kind of thing I want to do in the now significantly less than a week that I have to pull something out of the air to submit to APA-E for my annual ritual rejection. (If I can't have a lot of commas, then it has to be no commas. That's all there is to it.)
The article is basically a response to a 1963 article by David Sachs which argued that Plato commits a "fallacy of irrelevance" in the Republic by substituting a "psychological" concept of justice for Thrasymachus et al.'s "moral" one; Penner argues that to say that these are two different things is un-Platonic--Thrasymachus and Socrates are both concerned with what justice really is, or what "justice" really refers to, so there's no changing the subject, because the "moral" and "psychological" accounts of justice are two competing accounts of the same subject. To me, this all goes way wrong when you accept the premise that Socrates/Plato's "justice" is psychological as opposed to moral--which is probably, at least, a conceptual anachronism, though I guess it's in Plato that you see the one thing teased out from the other, maybe for the first time--and it goes even further wrong in supposing that Thrasymachus has any truck with (any truck with? where did that come from?) Platonic notions of there being things that words really mean, apart from how they're actually used. But it does get the problem right: if we're going to argue about whether my "x" and your "x" are really the same x, then we're going to need some Platonic or quasi-Platonic criterion of sameness. Which is what the debate about eudaimonia and "happiness" sorely lacks.
