Monday, September 18, 2006

Philosophywatch, week of Sept. 11-17

Welcome back to Philosophywatch, a weekly look at pointless mentions of important writers and thinkers in newspapers and magazine stories.

Two weeks ago, a Times columnist wedged Camus into a story on rock-climbing. This past week, the Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) shoehorns Nietzsche into a story on Glacier National Park:

Take a few of these hikes, and you may soon be identifying with Friedrich Nietzsche: "In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that you have to have long legs."

Um, I think Nietzsche was speaking metaphorically? Nietzsche also made an appearance in a story about Ohio State receiver Anthony Gonzalez in the Akron Beacon Journal last week:

[Gonzalez] has the speed to blow past defenders, as he did a week ago in the Buckeyes' resounding 24-7 win over Texas. He also has the intellect to huddle up with fellow philosophy majors and discuss why a life unexamined is not worth living. The big Aristotle isn't Shaquille O'Neal in the eyes of Gonzalez. And Nietzsche? Gonzalez knows you won't find his bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Ideas columnist Christopher Shea forwarded me an item which he and I agree isn't so bad, really, since the bathos is self-conscious; a writer can get away with this sort of thing once in a while, as long as they don't make a habit of it. (Besides, in this case the writer seems to be onto something.) It's from Ben Ratliff's profile of the alterna-metal band Mastodon, which ran last week in the Times:

Heavy-metal fans gravitate toward a certain kind of sublimity, to use the term Edmund Burke defined in his book "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." Published in 1757, it was the last word on the subject in its time; Melville owned a copy. Burke's notions about the sublime -- which he seemed to prefer to the beautiful -- could be a checklist of heavy-metal qualities: darkness, largeness, incomprehensibility, repetition, things conducive to loneliness and terror.

Meanwhile, a roundtable on Artifical Intelligence in the Oct. 1 issue of Computer Gaming World yielded this exchange between CGW reporter Matt Peckham, and "[gaming] industry bigwigs" Peter Molyneux, Todd Howard, Brad Wardell, and Warren Spector:

CGW: Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." You say? PM: I play with him, therefore he thinks! TH: I prefer Socrates: "I drank what?" BW: I think beyond a set scope, therefore I am. WS: Wow, Descartes in an interview about games? I'm too blown away even to answer!

Thank you, Warren Spector. If only everyone were more like you...

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Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:30 AM

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