Friday, October 6, 2006

Philosophywatch, Oct. 2 - Oct. 6

I won't be blogging on Monday, or over the weekend, so here's an abbreviated and advance edition of Philosophywatch.

Evan Hughes saw this Nietzsche put-down in the new issue of Commentary, in a review of a book called "Happiness: A History":

The mortifying fact is that we often get better guidance in such matters from Dale Carnegie ("Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get") than from the combined profundity and smart-alecky wit of all the world's Friedrich Nietzsches and Nora Ephrons combined.

Not so fast! Writing on his stock-market tips website Alchemy of Trading this past Monday, Oct. 2, Stephen Vita would seem to disagree. Nietzsche and Carnegie aren't opposites, after all:

If you read any of the best books on trading, from "Reminiscences" to the "Market Wizard" books, what do all of these great traders have in common? Yes, that's right... an open mind. I've mentioned before that Nietzsche's instruction "to kill your convictions" in the realm of philosphy also applies to trading, at least for me.

That same day, another website, the car-fancier blog Jalopnik, invoked Kant for a cheap, anti-intellectual laugh:

Honda released a promotional video clip of its Civic Type R intro in Paris last week. If memory serves, I once heard the video's Euro-chillout sound bed at oxygen bar in Berlin, where, in between sips of a well-turned Batida Garincha, I pointed out to a Portuguese transfer student that we were indeed proving Kant's Theory of Judgment by not just hanging out in a basement listening to AC/DC. She disagreed, saying I was a shallow denyer in the metaphysics of aesthetical choices. Sheesh, Europeans.

Ha! On Wednesday, Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times invoked some classic works of fiction to add color to his coverage of the ongoing investigation of the J. Paul Getty Trust:

Like something out of a Jane Austen novel, California's attorney general on Monday named a chaperon to accompany the J. Paul Getty Trust for two fiscal years. The Getty, headstrong and wayward, apparently requires some adult supervision.

On Thursday, a Houston Chronicle story on the Christian rock band BarlowGirl invoked Austen, but perhaps with more justification:

Although their romantic hopes sound a bit like the plot of a Jane Austen novel, their hard-rocking music and contemplative ballads are in step with the contemporary world.

Now, here's a thinker whose name you don't see dropped too often in newspapers and magazines. In a dispatch from the Copley News Service published today, Lynn O'Shaughnessy got off this bizarre zinger:

The hedge fund kings of Greenwich, Conn., and other tony ZIP codes, however, are no more likely to turn a lead pipe into a gold bar than they were when Thomas Aquinas was preoccupied with his theological writings.

Hedge fund kings and Aquinas?! Wow. Hats off to O'Shaughnessy!

Previous installments: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:30 PM

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