I haven't posted here in a while -- I have some long and incomplete
entries I've been working on.
There's been a lot of nice news in copyright this past week, including
the second acquittal of Jon Johansen in Norway, and Verizon's victory in
the D.C. Circuit.
I'm at home in San Francisco after a lot of trips to various parts of
the country -- but I'll be going back on the road in January.
I felt the earthquake on Monday but escaped the blackout over the
weekend. That earthquake was felt strongly in Los Angeles; it's
really hard to imagine the scale of something that you could feel from
Los Angeles all the way to San Francisco.
Happy new year.
I have been on vacation for a while. I had my best-ever NetHack game
(killed by an Archon on the Elemental Plane of Air, with the Amulet),
saw several friends, and bought a 54-volume set of the Great Books of the
Western World. (This is an early edition. Britannica now sells the
expanded 60-volume set for $1,195 new -- or slightly more than the cost
of a whole OED.)
The Great Books series was the brainchild of Robert Maynard Hutchins and
Mortimer Adler, whose careers have been discussed extensively by Martin
Gardner. (Among other things, they are the subjects of "The Strange
Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins", reprinted in The Night is
Large". Gardner supplements the story in "The Strange Case of
Robert Maynard Hutchins" by reporting in From the Wandering Jew
to William F. Buckley, Jr. that Mortimer Adler converted to
Catholicism in 1999 after years of what might be called flirtation, or
perhaps better intellectual struggle. He admitted that he was a theist
sometime before that and, as Gardner notes, even earlier claimed that
Catholicism was true but without proclaiming himself a Catholic.) Hutchins
died in 1977 and Adler in 2001 (after the publication of The Night is
Large).
Sometimes it seems like everybody has a reason to dislike Hutchins and
Adler (or at least their projects and their ideas). I can think of at
least half a dozen reasons people might have problems with them.
Gardner is unhappy with the central place Adler gave to Thomas Aquinas
and with Hutchins's refusal to study contemporary science or
philosophy. (Aquinas gets both volumes 19 and 20 of the Great Books of
the Western World, an honor accorded only to him, Aristotle,
Shakespeare, and Gibbon. Galileo -- like Copernicus and Kepler -- has
to share a single volume with two other authors, and Newton has
to share with one other. No theological work by anyone from the Jewish or
Muslim traditions is included, unless you count Spinoza, which I
wouldn't. There is a brief sort-of apology in the first volume for
the omission of Muslims, but none for the omission of, for example,
the Talmud. Even if it took Adler until 1999, you can sort of see
where he was going, as Gardner certainly did. Gardner wonders
whether it could be "that behind the Hutchins-Adler rhetoric for
the Great Books was an unstated motive [and] the motive, especially
in Adler's mind, was not so much to introduce students to the great
ideas as it was to introduce them to the great Roman Catholic ideas".
This is not to suggest that the Great Books series suppresses
critics of these ideas: for example, it prominently features Marx,
Darwin, and Freud, occasional bogeymen of some religious conservative
traditions.)
William F. Buckley, Jr., wondered why Gardner cares so much about
other people's religious beliefs. Many Gardner essays, and the
entire quasiautobiographical Flight of Peter Fromm
(which includes some more Hutchins & Adler material)
deal with Gardner's religious beliefs, other people's religious
beliefs, the logical consistency of Gardner's religious beliefs,
the logical consistency of other people's religious beliefs, the
logical consistency of the negation of Gardner's religious
beliefs, the logical consistency of the negation of other people's
religious beliefs, what can be inferred from famous people's
writings about their religious beliefs, and what various famous
people would think of various pieces of possible evidence against
their religious or other metaphysical beliefs. In fact Gardner
is part of a rare group in the U.S. that actively engages in
nonevangelical religious polemic. He defends this activity,
among other things, in a passage in "The Strange Case of Robert
Maynard Hutchins" where he quotes approvingly from G. K. Chesterton:
But there are some people, nevertheless -- and I am one of
them -- who think that the most practical and important
thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We
think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is
important to know his income, but still more important to
know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to
fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's
numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's
philosophy. We think the question is not whether the
theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the
long run, anything else affects them.
The religious views of Hutchins and Adler and the question of whether
those views empowered or handicapped them (and the vast numbers of
people who came under their intellectual influence) turned into a
major controversy. You might say that many people have seen it as
"the most practical and important thing" about both men. The
New York Times obituary on Adler refers slightly
obliquely to the question of whether he was philosophically backward
or inflexible (for sticking to the straight Aristotelian-Thomist line
against modernism and postmodernism alike), and none other than
William F. Buckley, Jr. (!), criticizes that same obituary for failing
to mention that Adler ended his life as a Roman Catholic.
I'm grateful to Hutchins and Adler for putting together the Great Books
of the Western World, and I'm extremely excited to own the set.
