Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy

I just finished Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. It took me about three months to work my way through its 800+ pages. In my (and its) defense, I was doing fine up to Aristotle, when I lost all momentum and started reading Patrick O’Brian instead. I think that’s more Aristotle’s fault than Russell’s.

The book is written for a general audience—apparently, Russell wrote it for the money. Unlike a lot of survey introductions to philosophy, it’s written by a (presumably) card-carrying philosopher rather than a teacher. This allows Russell the freedom to entertain, to be witty and even snarky, to indulge in some professional squabbling. Russell ties philosophy closely to history, which gives the book some structure and the naive reader some signposts.

Apparently, a host of academics complained about omissions, oversimplifications, and dismissals of various philosophers. I’m not competent to judge this, but I think it’s noteworthy that reviewers more familiar with classical philosophy tended to think the modern sections were OK, while reviewers with more of a modern background thought the book was fine until it got to their specialty.

In any case, I enjoyed this once I got over the speed bumps. I might have done better with a primer in the other hand to remind myself of little things like what “idealism” has meant throughout the years. Every now and then there’s a paragraph that repays a few readings. Here’s a few of those, starting with a discussion of the effects of science on philosophical outlooks.

Meanwhile science as technique was building up in practical men a quite different outlook from any that was to be found among theoretical philosophers. Technique conferred a sense of power: man is now much less at the mercy of his environment than he was in former times. But the power conferred by technique is social, not individual; an average individual wrecked on a desert island could have achieved more in the seventeenth century than he could now. Scientific technique requires the co-operation of a large number of individuals organized under a single direction. Its tendency, therefore, is against anarchism and even individualism, since it demands a well-knit social structure. Unlike religion, it is ethically neutral: it assures men that they can perform wonders, but it does not tell them what wonders to perform. In this way it is incomplete. In practice, the purposes to which scientific skill will be devoted depend largely on chance. The men at the head of the vast organizations which it necessitates can, within limits, turn it this way or that as they please. The power impulse thus has a scope which it never had before. The philosophies that have been inspired by scientific technique are power philosophies, and tend to regard everything non-human as mere raw material. Ends are no longer considered; only the skillfulness of the process is valued. This is also a form of madness. It is, in our day, the most dangerous form, and the one against which a sane philosophy should provide an antidote.

(Italics are in the original, and the bold emphasis is mine.)

On society and genius:

The political conditions of the Renaissance favored individual development, but were unstable; the instability and the individualism were closely connected, as in ancient Greece. A stable social system is necessary, but every stable system hitherto devised has hampered the development of exceptional artistic or intellectual merit. How much murder and anarchy are we prepared to endure for the sake of great achievements such as those of the Renaissance? In the past, a great deal; in our own time, much less. No solution of this problem has hitherto been found, although increase of social organization is making it continually more important.

On Rousseau, and heaven:

However ardently I, or all mankind, may desire something, however necessary it may be for human happiness, that is no ground for supposing this something to exist. There is no law of nature guaranteeing that mankind should be happy. Everybody can see that this is true of our life here on earth, but by a curious twist our very sufferings in this life are made into an argument for a better life hereafter. We should not employ such an argument in any other connection. If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet that is the kind of reasoning that “the heart” encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below.

And, finally, a sentence originally written about one bit of history but applicable to many others.

In a hopeful age, great present evils can be endured, because it is thought that they will pass; but in a tired age even real goods lose their savour.

A few months of commonplace

This seems as good a place as any to keep these.

As much as I have high hopes for the future, sometimes it seems that “the future” is just a place where you can buy a wider and weirder range of things more quickly and conveniently than before.

— Paul Raven

It seems like the only way for us to escape our errors is for someone to figure out the solutions, package them and sell them to us.

You say, “I’m great at multitasking.” I hear, “Delusion’s made my carelessness scalable.”

— Merlin Mann

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Scientists might have had a Hippocratic oath of their own. They might have promised their gifts to mankind. But instead, I have fathered a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for anything.

— Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo (version by David Hare)

Eight deaths from 2008

In years past, I’ve written about movies I’ve watched or books I’ve read during the past year. I don’t think I saw any movies last year, and you can see the books I read at one of the links on the right if you’re interested. Instead, I’m going to mention a few of the people who died last year.

Arthur C. Clarke—author of several classic SF novels, including Childhood’s End, which I read when I was seven. The reach of its imagination has stuck with me since. My favorite Clarke novel is Imperial Earth—I can’t say why, but I’ve always admired how he fit so many of his interests into it. He was also a cheerful popularizer of science, especially marine studies, astronomy and space exploration, and an incorrigible optimist. His books always left me with a sense of the vastness of the universe and its wonders.

James Crumley—author of hard-boiled detective novels set in the empty parts of the American west. His books are soaked in booze, drugs, violence, and a dilapidated but defiantly romantic view of honor and manhood. My love of them is wrapped up in my feelings about the west, about right and wrong and honor and duty, and about the power of a good drunk. Crumley somehow managed to write about terrible things and make them sing of the good in life.

Kevin Duckworth—starting center on the Blazers basketball teams of the late 80s and early 90s. I grew up in Portland, and the city loved those teams. I listened to games on the radio at night when I was a kid, and watched them on TV with high school friends or in college dorm rooms. Duckworth was a slow but serviceable center that was miscast on a team that thrived on running, and he was never able to live down not being some other, better center. He loved Portland, though, and he settled in the area, getting involved in a couple of businesses and doing a lot of community work. I have to admit that when he died, I hadn’t thought about him in a while, but hearing about him brought back a lot of good memories of those teams and those times.

Dock Ellis—pitcher who threw a no-hitter while on LSD. This is a terrible thing to have on your figurative tombstone, especially for an intelligent and outspoken man who had a good career outside of his no-hitter, then went on to do a lot of things with his life after sports. However, this sort of mythology is why baseball is my favorite sport. It’s ludicrous to think that a football player would play a game on acid. There’s no way he could compete, and the kind of people who would drop acid don’t generally play football. Maybe a basketball player would, but I can’t see them playing well. For whatever reason, baseball is somewhat more tolerant of characters, whether they’re eccentrics or crusaders or just guys who would take the mound while higher than a kite.

George Macdonald Fraser—author of the Flashman series of novels. These concern Harry Flashman, Victorian cavalryman, unwilling adventurer, womanizer, coward and cad, who manages to end up at many of the pivotal historical events of the 19th century. Fraser was a meticulous researcher, and he could spin a story.

Gary Gygax—inventor and popularizer of Dungeons and Dragons and role-playing games in general (with apologies to Dave Arneson and others). I cannot calculate how much of my youth was spent playing RPGs, either D&D or any of a plethora of other games. Those games passed many hours and introduced me to a lot of my friends, and their worldview shaped my personality. I still reflexively try to explain systems by breaking them into simple rules that can be simulated with random numbers, which has even proven useful at my day job. I also still consider what sort of monsters might live in any sort of hidden space, which is less useful.

Rudy Ray Moore—comedian who recorded raunchy party records that were a huge influence on rap, and movie maker who wrote, directed and starred in Dolemite, one of the seminal blaxploitation movies. It’s hard to explain why Dolemite is so great—the plot is iffy, the acting is bad, and the movie is essentially a showcase for Moore to strut around, mack on women, do bad karate, and act like a bad-ass. Which he does, and it’s glorious.

(Many other people died in 2008. Some of them were more noteworthy to the average person, and each and every one of them was probably noteworthy to someone. The people I mention here were noteworthy to me.)

New digs

Welcome to the new site for Hyperion Court. The good folks at Pushby were kind enough to host the site for more than five years, but they’re closing up shop, so we’re here now.

I’m in the process of restoring the archives. Eventually, most everything will be back the way it was.

Update — I think it’s mostly restored. If you find something that doesn’t work or doesn’t go where it should, please let me know.

The more things change…

Some people think that we keep our rooms too hot for health, others that we keep them too cold. If this were a political question, one party would maintain that the best temperature is the absolute zero, the other that it is the melting point of iron. Those who maintained any intermediate position would be abused as timorous time-servers, concealed agents of the other side, men who ruined the enthusiasm of a sacred cause by tepid appeals to mere reason. Any man who had the courage to say that our rooms ought to be neither very hot nor very cold would be abused by both parties, and probably shot in No Man’s Land. Possibly some day politics may become more rational, but so far there is not the faintest indication of a change in this direction.

Bertrand Russell, Icarus: or, The Future of Science (1924).

Dobzhansky’s most famous essay

In 1973, the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay titled “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution”. It is an explanation of why the concept of evolution is so important to understanding biology, and a defense of the idea that evolution and religion are not necessarily in conflict.

You can find the essay online in several places. Here it is, checked against the original and typeset (PDF).

Apple Airport Extreme and SonicWall VPN

So, I’ve got an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. I used to have an old Netgear, which worked OK, except that it kept dropping the connection to my laptop and couldn’t get a signal upstairs. So, I dropped the money on an Airport Extreme (and an Airport Express to stream music to the stereo), and all was good.

Well, most things were good. The signal strength was very good, and my connection was nice and steady, and streaming the music collection to the stereo was a nice trick. The Airport Extreme has some things I don’t like, though. Unlike most routers, which can be configured through a browser, the Airport Extreme insists that you install an application just to configure it. (Apple doesn’t offer the configuration application for Windows 2000, either.) Once you get the application working, it does fine, except when it doesn’t. (That should be Apple’s slogan — It Just Works, Except When It Doesn’t.) There’s no way to see what devices are connected. Port forwarding (or, as Apple calls it, port mapping) works sometimes, deletes rules randomly, and just refuses to work at other times. I can’t use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client to get to my computer at work any more. Every time you change a setting, the router needs to restart.

But hey, other than having to go to work to work, none of these problems were severe. Except when my wife’s work VPN client comes up dead one fine morning. No VPN equals no work, and no work equals no pay, so she called up the IT staff (that’s me) and told me to figure it out.

It worked fine up until last week, I say. The connection’s fine, her coworkers say the server’s up, her other internet apps are fine. It’s just timing out during login.

I spend the requisite twenty minutes screwing around with settings before doing what one should always start with — heading to Google. Lo and behold, Apple’s newest firmware manages to break VPN connectivity for a number of common VPN clients. Yep, I remember updating the firmware recently. Yep, rolling back the firmware to the previous version fixes things. To Apple’s credit, it’s easy to find a guide explaining how to roll back the firmware.

According to the consensus on the forums, the newest update seems to have broken VPN connectivity with Nortel clients but fixed connectivity with SonicWall clients. My wife uses a SonicWall client. Your guess is as good as mine. As a bonus, I can now remote desktop into my work computer.

Tilla, 1996-2007

Attention Conservation Notice: My dog is dead, and I write about him in some length.

We’re one dog down these days. We had to put Tilla to sleep.

I got Tilla while I was in graduate school, in February of 1997. I had decided I wanted a dog, but I thought I wanted an adult dog, something around fifty pounds, maybe already calmed down. I had gone down to the pound for a couple of Sundays, looking for a dog and not seeing the right one.

Tilla was stuck in a cage with a litter of Labrador puppies that were contentedly gnawing on his ears and feet. He was brown, about eighteen pounds of mostly feet and tail, and timid as can be. I got him untangled from the tangle of puppy, sat him down and tried to ask him what sort of dog he was. He walked over, looked up at me, fell over and peed on my shoes. Despite my better judgement, I decided that he was the sort of dog that I wanted.

I thought he was six months old at the time, which would have probably put him around fifty pounds at adulthood, but the vet took one look at him and decided he was more like four months. He was also handshy, already had a shaky grasp on house training, and had a half-healed broken tail. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that he hadn’t had much of a good life up to that point.

I didn’t know what to name him for a while, so he got tagged with any number of names, many referring to his timidity and fearful peeing. (When he peed on me at the pound, I had no idea that was how he would interact with much of the world.) For reasons that might have made sense at the time, the choice came down to Attila or Clyde, and somehow Attila stuck long enough to get on the paperwork despite its obvious unsuitability. (Attila conquered Rome, he didn’t drown it in urine). We shortened it to Tilla, and that and his timid nature ensured that strangers called him “her” for most of his life.

Tilla was a project. He took to house training fairly well, except that if anything startled him, he peed. We had to tell guests that the dog was friendly, but not to look at him or he would pee on them. Some guests took this better than others, and in retrospect, it was probably a good way to tell who we really wanted in the house. At first I thought he was part boxer because of his big feet and his tendency to lead with his paws (I still have a scar on my arm from one of his paw slaps), but he grew into his feet and turned out to be some sort of brown hound mix. We gave him delusions of proper breeding by telling people he was part Rhodesian ridgeback. It might have been true, if you assume he was a ridgeless runt of the litter. He chewed through everything as a puppy, ripping through rope bones and nylabones at a rate that my grad student paycheck couldn’t support. At one point, I gave serious thought to the idea that he was part hyena. He hated birds, and once snatched an overly obnoxious blue jay out of the air. He was lean, fast, and wait, damn it, grab a towel.

He got better over time, as other dogs moved into the house, then some new people moved into the house, then one of those people moved into my room, then we all moved out of the house together. Through a constant stream of people and dogs coming over for parties and brewing and basketball games, he slowly got used to the idea that people could raise their hands about their head without it meaning that he was about to get hit. He never did get used to riding in a car, and the only way he could handle the excitement was to whine and squeak the entire trip. This made long car rides painful for all concerned. He loved to go to the beach, where he would swim in the ocean as far as the leash would take him (given a big enough leash, he would have swum to Europe), bark hoarsely at jellyfish and grab them in his mouth until they stung him, and get so overwhelmed by the muchness of it all that he would start squeaking at everything until he was so exhausted that we would have to carry him.

After another move or two, we got another dog, who was younger and bigger than Tilla. This seemed to be the final piece of Tilla’s rehabilitation; given a dog to look down on, he seemed happy with his place. He stopped peeing on guests, developed a taste for humping other male dogs in the rib cage, and settled down to a life of being a middle-aged dog. We used to say that he went from a puppy to an old curmudgeon one day, but what we didn’t realize for some years is that his thyroid had stopped working.

When we moved across the country, my wife loaded both dogs into the back of the truck, more than 200 pounds of dog between the two of them, and drove them from North Carolina to California. Tilla yarped the entire breadth of the country. Once we got him on thyroid medication, he regained some of his young dog vigor. He even adjusted reasonably well to the baby, although he never quite knew what to do with a little person who obviously couldn’t walk or talk and kept trying to poke his nose.

About a month ago, he seemed to lose some appetite. We took him to the vet, and it turned out he was anemic. We put him on some drugs, and the drugs worked a little, but last week something broke inside him, and we had to put him to sleep. He went quickly, and I’d like to think it was better than a lingering illness with lots of treatments, but I cried anyway. He was eleven years old.

Tilla wasn’t the smartest dog around, or the bravest. He didn’t really have the tools to deal with the world, but he tried hard. He had the courage of the coward who never stopped trying. He was sweet and friendly, and if people didn’t like him, it was their failing. He was a good dog.

Tilla, in July of 2007, hunting lizards.

Alexandrian archaeology

Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about archaeological efforts in the city of Alexandria. Most of the really noteworthy remains are underwater, but there’s a lot of things worth trying to find.

A couple of links

In which I return to the weblog by posting random entertaining links.

First, we have some odd public art which I don’t know anything about, except that it came up in a search at del.icio.us, and it’s clever.

Second, we have a deconstruction of 300, courtesy of the canonical gay disco anthem and YouTube. (It’s a video, it makes noise, but it’s worth it.)

Third, we have the grand prize winner of a contest to make a CGI trailer for a movie based on Greg Bear’s Eon. (Scroll down slightly for the link to the video.) This looks like an amateur CGI contest, and most of the entries are high-end amateur work, but this one in particular is just a hair under Hollywood professional work. It’s stunning. I would pay money to see this movie, if only it existed. (Found at Making Light.)

Fourth, we have a fascinating article about one of the greatest mega-engineering projects ever constructed, and the profound societal effects it has had. (Again, from Making Light.)

And, last, another YouTube video, this one re-engineering Pantera’s “Fucking Hostile”. It swears and makes noise. (Thanks to Forrest.)