I’ll be in a teeny-tiny efficiency outside of UT, where I’ll have access to the campus library. Sure, it’s great to have books at your fingertips for 3 a.m. use, but while boxing up my books, I’ve begun to wonder if I need so many.

I’ve started a system that I hope will keep the book clutter to a minimum, while not requiring me to sell all of them!

• If I haven’t read/used it in a year and it is not a reference book (dictionary, anthology), I sell it/donate it and write it up in Library Thing as one I’ve owned.
• If I’ve marked it up significantly and it is a text related to my philosophical interests, regardless of whether I’ve looked at it recently, it stays.
• Fiction books I think I would read again (i.e. Hitchhiker’s Guide, Golden Compass, anything by Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson or Umberto Eco), I keep.

Perhaps someday I’ll have a big corner office in my university where I can load as many books as I want into nooks and crannies, and they’ll stay there until my cold, dead emeritus body is taken off campus (I anticipate dying in my office, slouched over a book). Until then, moving books is not fun; feeling overwhelmed by books is not fun; and I’d like to save my book money for plane tickets back to my wife!

How about you? Do you have any rules for book purchases/maintenance?

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Okay, so that’s not true–I’ve heard her name in various feminist blogger conversations. However, I never once read any of her papers during my master’s degree program. I’m in the middle of her article “What Good are Our Intuitions?” in the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume: Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds pages 89-118.

Excellent, clear stuff–what I wish I had read before my series on race and emptiness. It confirms, clarifies and challenges my initial thoughts about social constructionism and concept analysis. Thing is, though her discussion is relevant to feminism, gender, etc., it’s also crucial for meta-philosophy, understanding what we’re doing when we analyze concepts! I think that someone should take aside all of the first-year master’s or PhD philosophy students that are female (though the guys should read her, too) and make them read Haslinger and Nussbuam. If nothing else, it will help your writing style and ability to do clear and subtle philosophy.

I wish someone told me years ago that feminists could write like them (and not Judith Butler).

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In connection, I recommend Jay Garfield, “Nagarjuna’s Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane,” Philosophy East and West, Vol 51, No 4, 507-524. The article discusses just to what extent belief in rebirth is necessary, particularly for bodhicittas. The abstract is below:

Nagarjuna, in Mulamadhyamakakarika, defends the emptiness of causation, and a regularist view of dependent arising implicating a sophisticated view about the nature of explanation not only of individual phenomena but of regularities themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, this view has implications for contemporary philosophy of science, in particular conceptions of the relations between different levels of explanation and description, between phenomena described at distinct levels of analysis and between theories developed at distinct levels of analysis. Less surprisingly, it also has implications for Buddhist soteriological theory. But perhaps most surprisingly, it suggests that the most commonly held view about the necessary conditions for the cultivation of Bodhicittathat defended by Dharmakirti and by rJe Tsong Khapa among others–is incorrect, and in fact represents a subtle form of self-grasping and of the reification of causation. I will argue that in both cases Nagarjuna’s analysis corrects prevalent errors.

I may have more to say later, but at least check out the podcast (third in a series of three).

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Ebooks were going to change the publishing business. It would take a couple of years, but soon we could transmit our texts electronically to users as they wanted to read them. We could even mark up the books using a stylus on the LCD screen and save the notes to another file. For very little overhead, we could make lots of money–a publisher’s dream, since books have to be printed on the hope that they will sell.

Um, yeah. This revolution never happened. For one thing, the technology (dial-up modems, serial ports and black and green screens) was clunky. The ebooks were heavy and there were competing sales models. Almost ten years later, the revolutionaries are back and heavy-hitting academic publishing companies like Yale are testing the waters.

In the last eight years, we’ve improved the technology of eBook readers: no more ucky black and green screens, faster downloads, lighter and more portable units. But will it be enough to take hold? Will academics–setting aside the general reader for a moment–ever look like the picture of Jean-Luc Picard in his study? Okay, some are already balding…

Well, many of us already have the MacBook Picard appears to use, but is there a benefit to having a Kindle as well? The cost of starting your Kindle experience is (right now) $359.99. Although the books don’t cost as much for publishers to create and put into an electronic format, you’re only going to save about $5-$10 compared to a print version.

I checked out the Kindle store at Amazon.com and clicked over to Non-Fiction > Philosophy. The first book that appeared? Wayne Dyer. Ugh. Checking out another level of detail, I browsed Philosophy > Epistemology. Some good classics there–Nagel, Kant, Hume, William James. Dummett’s Thought and Reality for $24.03 (print cost is $35.00); some Blackwell and Routledge texts, etc. Not bad. Of course, the Amazon.com results for the same category in print books returns 5,565 entries, compared to the 215 now on Kindle. So we’re looking at about 4% availability.

And that seems to be the problem–until more books are available, I think people will wait to drop $400 on a new piece of technology. And until there are more readers, publishing houses may be reticent to commit to a deal with Amazon. Further, we have the problem that it seems like Picard may have in the photo above–competing platforms. (Perhaps there’s another Star Trek universe explanation for the multiple eBook readers on the captain’s desk, so fill me in if you know of any!)

I would love to be an early adopter in the eBook market, but since I’ve watched this cycle before, I’m holding back. Not only is the price too high, but the possibility of investing in a platform only to have it be a dead end makes me want to be cautious. Ideally, my eBook reader would also hook up to academic journals and maybe–though I’m sure there would be copyright considerations–have a built-in scanner so I could import documents into it. Until I can share all of my documents between my laptop, bookshelf and eBook reader, these tools are of limited use to me.

The dream of taking my entire library to the coffee shop and working on my dissertation will have to wait.

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If, though, you enjoy what you read here, I suggest you subscribe to my direct feed to keep updated. And, since I don’t have animosity towards the movement, please feel welcome to contribute and comment here.

*The latest Pew Forum survey found that 22% of Unitarian Univeralists attend church a few times a yearr, 24% ”seldom” and 22% never. So I suppose I could remain a de facto participant by virtue of not participating!

**Probably, if pressed, I might identify Unitarian Universalism as the group with which I have the most in common. Still, I don’t have any particular need to “worship” weekly, to join in with the group socially, etc. And I think of myself more as an agnostic “Buddhish” person, anyway.

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“A theoretical value derived from studying neurological cases, therefore, is their potential for dislodging conventional assumptions…Such data seem to me crucially relevant in coming to understand how deficient folk psychology really is and how little we know of the deeper capacities underlying the known cognitive capacities of the brain…”

At the very least, neurological cases ought to be part and parcel of the thought experiments in philosophy of mind (and they are, much more, since the publication of her text). She talks about blindness denial and one philosopher’s argument that if one is conscious, it is impossible to fail to know you are blind. If empirical data seems to contradict this, then we should be perhaps a bit skeptical about arguments from a priori features, even while we continue to examine the data to be sure it’s represented properly.

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