See Disclaimer Below.

Archive for the ‘Academia’ Category

, , , ,

“A Selected Bibliography on the Political and Legal Thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,” by Seth Vannatta

In Academia, American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Politics, Pragmatism, Scholarship on October 7, 2015 at 8:45 am

Seth Vannatta

Seth Vannatta is an Associate Professor and Interim Department Head in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University. He earned a PhD in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2010), where he lived from 2006-2010. Before attending SIUC, Seth taught grades 5 through 12 in the History, English, and Religion Departments at Casady School. He served as head varsity volleyball coach for ten years and head varsity soccer coach for three years. He also served as chair of the history department for two years. He has a BA from Colorado College in History (1995) and a Master’s in Liberal Arts from Oklahoma City University (2002). His wife, Rachel, has a BA from Northwestern University (2006), an Master’s in Counselor Education from Southern Illinois University (2010) and is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education at George Washington University.

Alexander, Tom. “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty toward a Postmodern Ethics.” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society. Vol. XXIX. No. 3. (Summer,1993), 369-400.

Alschuler, Albert. Law without Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Anderson, Douglas. “Peirce’s Agape and the Generality of Concern.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion. (Summer,1995), 103-112.

Anderson, Douglas. “Peirce and the Art of Reasoning.” Studies in Philosophy and Education.  No. 24. (2005), 277-289.

Austin, John. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. New Dehli: Universal Law Publishing Printers, 2008.

Auxier, Randall. “Dewey on Religion and History.” Southwest Philosophy Review. Vo. 6. No. 1. January, (1990), 45-58.

_____________. “Religion and Theology.” for The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Christopher B. Gray (Garland Publishing Co., 1999), 735-738.

_____________. “Foucault, Dewey, and the History of the Present.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Vol. 16. No. 2. (2002), 75-102.

_____________. “The Decline of Evolutionary Naturalism in Later Pragmatism,” Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism. Ed. Hollinger, Robert. (Westport: Praeger, 1995), 135-150.

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad v. Goodman, 275 U.S. 66 (1927).

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books, 1986.

 The Commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, Knt. On the Laws and Constitution of England.  Ed. William Curry. London: Elibron Classics, Adamant Media Corporation, 2005.

Plato Complete Works. Edited by John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.

Dailey, Anne C. “Holmes and the Romantic Mind.” Duke Law Journal. Vol. 48. No. 3 (Dec., 1998), 429-510.

Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct. Middle Works, Volume 14, 1922. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. Experience and Nature. Later Works, Volume 1. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind.” Later Works. Volume 3. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Three Independent Factors in Morals.” Later Works. Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Qualitative Thought.” Later Works, Volume 5. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Later Works, Volume 12, 1938. Edited by Jo Ann     Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “My Philosophy of Law.” Later Works. Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Time and Individuality.” Later Works, Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.   Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

Fisch, Max. “Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 34. No. 4. (February 12, 1942) 85-97.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006.

Gouinlock, James. “Dewey,” in Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy. Edited by James  Gouinlock. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

­­­­­­­­­______________. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.

Grey, Thomas C. “Holmes and Legal Pragmatism.” 41 Stanford Law Review 787 (April 1989), 787-856.

_____________. “Freestanding Legal Pragmatism.”18 Cardozo Law Review 21. (September, 1996), 21-42.

Hantzis, Catharine Wells, “Legal Theory: Legal Innovation within the Wider Intellectual   Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” 82 Northwestern University Law Review. 541. (Spring, 1988), 543-587

Hickman, Larry A. Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism Lessons from John Dewey. New York:    Fordham University Press, 2007.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Holmes-Einstein Letters. Edited by James Bishop Peabody. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964.

“Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism.” The Yale Law Journal. Vol. 84. No. 5. (Apr. 1975), 1123-1140.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Dissent in ABRAMS ET AL. v. UNITED STATES. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 250 U.S. 616. November 10, 1919.

250 U.S. 616 (1919) Espionage Act (§ 3, Title I, of Act approved June 15, 1917, as amended May 16, 1918, 40 Stat. 553).

Hume, David. A Treatise Concerning Human Nature. NuVision Publications, 2007.

Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” in The Philosophy of Kant Immanuel Kant’s Moral    and Political Writings. Edited by Carl Friedrich. New York: The Modern Library, 1949.

_____________. “Of the Relation of Theory to Practice in Constitutional Law” in The Philosophy of Kant Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings. Edited by Carl Friedrich. New York: The Modern Library, 1949.

Kellogg, Frederic R. “Legal Scholarship in the Temple of Doom: Pragmatism’s Response to Critical Legal Studies.” 65 Tulane Law Review 15 (November, 1990), 16-56.

________________. “Holistic Pragmatism and Law: Morton White on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.” Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society. Vol. XL. No. 4. (Fall, 2004), 559-567.

________________. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint, Cambridge: University Press, 2007.

Kronman, Anthony T. “Alexander Bickel’s Philosophy of Jurisprudence.” 94 Yale Law Journal.   (June, 1985), 1567-1616.

Locke, John. Second Treatise on Civil Government. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986.

Luban, David. “The Posner Variations (Twenty-Seven Variations on a Theme by Holmes).” Stanford Law Review. Vol. 48. No. 4 (Apr. 1996), 1001-1036.

___________. “Justice Holmes and the Metaphysics of Judicial Restraint. Duke Law Journal. Vol. 44. No. 3. (December, 1994), 449-523.

___________. Legal Modernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Maine, Sir Henry James. Ancient Law. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1917.

McDermott, John. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. March 17, 2008, East Lansing, Michigan.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.

Pragmatism A Reader. Ed. Louis Menand. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism On Liberty Essay on Bentham together with selected writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. Edited by Mary Warnock. New York: New American      Library, 1974. 

The Essential Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Ed. Edward Moore. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich . “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” in Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. Hollingdale, 1983. 

The Collected Works of Justice Holmes. Vol. I. Edited by Sheldon Novick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 

The Collected Works of Justice Holmes, Vol. 3, ed. Sheldon M. Novick. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1995.

Nussbaum, Martha. “The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in Legal Education.” 45 Stanford Law Review 1627 (1993), 1627-1645.

Peirce, Charles S. “The Fixation of Belief.” in The Essential Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______________. “Questions Concerning Certain Capacities Claimed for Man.” in The Essential  Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998.

______________. “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life.” in Reasoning and the Logic of   Things.  Edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

______________. “Evolutionary Love,” The Essential Peirce, Volume I (1867-1893). Ed.  Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Posner, Richard A. The Economics of Justice. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981. 

_______________. Frontiers of Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

_______________. The Problems of Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

_______________. Overcoming Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

_______________. Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

_______________. The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard     University Press, 1999.

_______________. How Judges Think. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

The Essential Holmes. ed. Richard Posner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

von Savigny, Fredrich Carl. Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence.  North Stratford: Ayer Company Publishers, 2000.

Schedler, George. “Hobbes on the Basis of Political Obligation.” Journal of the History of Philosophy. April (1977), 165-170.

Sullivan, Michael and Solove, Daniel J. “Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism.” Yale Law Journal. Vol. 113. No. 3. (Dec. 2003), 687-741.

Sullivan, Michael. Legal Pragmatism Community, Rights, and Democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

______________. “Pragmatism and Precedent: A Response to Dworkin,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, Vol. 26. No. 2. (Spring 1990), 225-248.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis “A Defense of Abortion,” in Contemporary Moral Problems. Edited by James E. White. Eighth Edition. United States: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006.

Part II

Alexander, Tom. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature The Horizons of Feeling.   Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Anderson, Douglas. Strands of System The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. Purdue University  Press, 1995.

Cardozo, Benjamin. The Nature of the Judicial Process. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

Dworkin, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Fisch, Max. “Was there a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?—Postscript.” Transactions of the       Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. 17 (Spring    1981), 128-130.

Hart, H.L.A. The Concept of Law. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

 The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Ed. Golding and Edmundson.   Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Black’s Law Dictionary. Ed. Bryan A. Garner. St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1996.

The Holmes-Laski Letters. The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski. Ed.    Felix Frankfurter. Vol. I and II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

The Holmes-Pollock Letters The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock 1874-1932. Ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,  1942.

Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes II: The Proving Years, 1870-1882 (1963).

Johnson, Michael. “Posner on the Uses and Disadvantages of Precedents for Law.” 23 Review of Litigation. 144 (2003), 143-156.

Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Kellogg, Frederic R. “Holmes, Common Law Theory, and Judicial Restraint.” 36 Marshal Law Review 457 (Winter, 2003).

Luban, David. “The Bad Man and the Good Lawyer: A Centennial Essay on Holmes’s The Path of the Law.” NYU Law Review. Vol. 72. No. 6, (1997), 1547-83.

___________. “What’s Pragmatic About Legal Pragmatism?” Cardozo Law Review. Vol. 18. No. 1 (1996), 43-73.

Modak-Truran, Mark C. “A Pragmatic Justification of the Judicial Hunch.” 35 University of Richmond Law Review 55 (March, 2001).

Murphey, Murray G. Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.

My Philosophy of Law Sixteen Credos of American Scholars. Boston: Boston Law Book Co., 1941.

Parker, Kunal. “The History of Experience: On the Historical Imagination of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” PoLAR. Vol. 26. No 2.

Oakeshott, Michael. On History. Oxford: Liberty Fund, 1999.

________________. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Oxford: Liberty Fund, 1991.

Posner, Richard A. Cardozo: a Study in Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

_______________. The Economic Analysis of Law. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1977.

_______________. “Symposium on the Renaissance of Pragmatism in American Legal Thought: What has Pragmatism to Offer Law?” 63 S. Cal. Law Review. 1653. September (1990).

Pound, Roscoe. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Rorty, Richard, “Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress.” 74 University of Chicago Law Review 915 (2007).

Tushnet, Mark. “The Logic of Experience: Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Supreme Court.” 63 Virginia Law Review 975 (1977).

Vetter, Jan. “The Evolution of Holmes, Holmes and Evolution.” 72 California Law Review 343  (May, 1984).

Wacks, Raymond. Philosophy of Law A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wells, Catherine Pierce. “Symposium Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Judging Years: Holmes on Legal Method: The Predictive Theory of Law as an Instance of Scientific Method.” 18 S.M.U. Law Review 329 (Winter, 1994).

White, Edward G. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Law and the Inner Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Harold Bloom’s American Sublime

In Academia, America, American Literature, Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Creativity, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Novel, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on August 12, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in the American Conservative.

What can be said about Harold Bloom that hasn’t been said already? The Yale professor is a controversial visionary, a polarizing seer who has been recycling and reformulating parallel theories of creativity and influence, with slightly different foci and inflections, for his entire career, never seeming tiresome or repetitive. He demonstrates what is manifestly true about the best literary critics: they are as much artists as the subjects they undertake.

Bloom’s criticism is characterized by sonorous, cadenced, almost haunting prose, by an exacting judgment and expansive imagination, and by a painful, sagacious sensitivity to the complexities of human behavior and psychology. He is a discerning Romantic in an age of banality and distraction, in a culture of proud illiteracy and historical unawareness. Bloom reminds us that to be faithful to tradition is to rework it, to keep it alive, and that tradition and innovation are yoked pairs, necessarily dependent on one another.

Bloom has been cultivating the image and reputation of a prophet or mystic for decades. His stalwart defense of the Western canon is well known but widely misunderstood. His descriptive account is that the canon is fluid, not fixed—open, not closed. It might be stable, but it’s not unchangeable. The literary canon is the product of evolution, a collection of the fittest works that have been selectively retained, surviving the onslaught of relentless competition.

Bloom’s prescriptive position is that, because human agency is a controllable factor in this agnostic filtering process, serious readers can and should ensure that masterpieces, those stirring products of original, even genius minds, are retained, and that the latest works are held to the highest aesthetic standards, which are themselves established and proven by revisionary struggle. The merit of a work is not found in the identity of its author—his or her race, gender, or sexuality—but in the text proper, in the forms and qualities of the work itself.

Bloom’s latest book, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, examines ambitious and representative American authors, its chapters organized by curious pairings: Whitman with Melville (the “Giant Forms” of American literature), Emerson with Dickinson (the Sage of Concord is Dickinson’s “closest imaginative father”), Hawthorne with Henry James (a relation “of direct influence”), Twain with Frost (“our only great masters with popular audiences”), Stevens with Eliot (“an intricate interlocking” developed through antithetical competition), and Faulkner with Crane (“each forces the American language to its limits”). This mostly male cast, a dozen progenitors of the American sublime, is not meant to constitute a national canon. For that, Bloom avers in his introduction, he envisions alternative selections, including more women: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Marianne Moore, and Flannery O’Connor. Bloom’s chosen 12 represent, instead, “our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” These writers have in common a “receptivity to daemonic influx.” “What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers,” Bloom explains, “is the daemon.”

What is this daemon, you ask. As always, Bloom is short on definition, embracing the constructive obscurity—the aesthetic vagueness—that Richard Poirier celebrated in Emerson and William James and Robert Frost, Bloom’s predecessors. Bloom implies that calling the “daemon” an idea is too limiting; the word defies ready explanation or summation.

The daemon, as I read it, is an amorphous and spiritual source of quasi-divine inspiration and influence, the spark of transitional creative powers; it’s akin to shamanism, and endeavors to transcend, move beyond, and surpass. Its opposite is stasis, repose. “Daemons divide up divine power and are in perpetual movement from their supernal heights to us,” Bloom remarks in one of his more superlative moments. “They bring down messages,” he intones, “each day’s news of the metamorphic meanings of the division between our mundane shell and the upper world.”

What, you might ask in follow up, is the American sublime that it should stand in marked contrast to the European tradition, rupturing the great chain of influence, revealing troublesome textual discontinuities and making gaps of influence that even two poets can pass abreast? “Simplistically,” Bloom submits, “the sublime in literature has been associated with peak experiences that render a secular version of a theophany: a sense of something interfused that transforms a natural moment, landscape, action, or countenance.” This isn’t quite Edmund Burke’s definition, but it does evoke the numinous, what Bloom calls, following Burke, “an excursion into the psychological origins of aesthetic magnificence.”

The Daemon Knows is part memoir, a recounting of a lifetime spent with books. There are accounts of Robert Penn Warren, Leslie Fiedler, and Cleanth Brooks. Bloom’s former students and mentors also make brief appearances: Kenneth Burke, for instance, and Camille Paglia. And Bloom doesn’t just analyze, say, Moby Dick—he narrates about his first encounter with that book back in the summer of 1940. He later asserts, “I began reading Hart Crane in the library on my tenth birthday.” That he remembers these experiences at all speaks volumes to Melville’s and Crane’s bewitching facility and to Bloom’s remarkable receptivity.

Bloom has not shied away from his signature and grandiose ahistorical pronouncements, perhaps because they’re right. Melville, for instance, is “the most Shakespearean of our authors,” an “American High Romantic, a Shelleyan divided between head and heart, who held against Emerson the sage’s supposed deficiency in the region of the heart.” Or, “Emersonian idealism was rejected by Whitman in favor of Lucretian materialism, itself not compatible with Indian speculations.” Or, “Stevens received from Whitman the Emersonian conviction that poetry imparts wisdom as well as pleasure.” These generalizations would seem to service hagiography, but even if they’re overstatement, are they wrong?

My professors in graduate school, many of them anyway, chastised Bloom and dubbed him variously a reactionary, a racist, a misogynist, a bigot, or a simpleton; they discouraged his presence in my essays and papers, laughing him out of classroom conversation and dismissing his theories out-of-hand. Or else, stubbornly refusing to assess his theories on their own terms, they judged the theories in the light of their results: the theories were bad because certain authors, the allegedly privileged ones, came out on top, as they always have. This left little room for newcomers, for egalitarian fads and fashions, and discredited (or at least undermined) the supposedly noble project of literary affirmative action.

They will be forgotten, these dismissive pedants of the academy, having contributed nothing of lasting value to the economy of letters, while Bloom will live on, continuing to shock and upset his readers, forcing them to second-guess their judgments and tastes, their criteria for aesthetic value, challenging their received assumptions and thumping them over the head with inconvenient facts and radical common sense. The school of resentment and amateurish cultural studies, appropriate targets of Bloom’s learned animus, will die an inglorious death, as dogmatic political hermeneutics cannot withstand the test of time.

Bloom, on the other hand, like his subjects, taps his inner daemon, invokes it and rides it where it travels, struggles against the anxiety of influence and displays all of the rhetorical power and play of the strong poets he worships. Dr. Samuel Johnson and Northrop Frye reverberate throughout his capacious tome, and for that matter his entire oeuvre. Bloom’s psychic brooding becomes our own, if we read him pensively, and we are better off for it.

Those who view literary study as a profession requiring specialized and technical training, who chase tenure and peer approval, publishing in academic journals and gaining no wider audience than groveling colleagues, do not possess the originality, the foresight, or the brute imagination necessary to achieve enduring appeal. Reading, done right, is a profoundly personal activity, an exercise in solitary contemplation and possible revelation; writing, done right, is transference: the redirection of complex states of consciousness and knowing from one person to another. A few sentences of Bloom’s contemplative questioning, such as the following, are worth the weight of whole academic articles: “At eighty-four I wonder why poems in particular obsessed me from childhood onward. Because I had an overemotional sensibility, I tended to need more affection from my parents and sisters than even they could sustain. From the age of ten on, I sought from Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Hart Crane, from Shakespeare and Shelley, the strong affect I seemed to need from answering voices.” Here Bloom invites Freudian investigation of himself, summoning the psychoanalytic models he uses on others.

Bloom is now 85. He claims to have another book left in him, making this one his penultimate. His awesome and dedicated engagement with the best that has been thought and known in the world appears to have left him unafraid of the finish, of what comes next, as though literary intimacy and understanding have prepared him, equipped him, for the ultimate. It seems fitting, then, to quote him on this score and to end with a musing on the end: “We are at least bequeathed to an earthly shore and seek memorial inscriptions, fragments heaped against our ruins: an interval and then we are gone. High literature endeavors to augment that span: My twelve authors center, for me, that proliferation of consciousness by which we go on living and finding our own sense of being.”

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Paul H. Fry on “Influence”

In Academia, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, British Literature, Conservatism, Creativity, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy on March 25, 2015 at 8:45 am

Below is the next installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The previous lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

, , , , , , , , , ,

Hayek, Statistics, and Trade-Cycle Theory

In Academia, Austrian Economics, Books, Economics, Essays, Humane Economy, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Western Philosophy on February 11, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This essay first appeared here as a Mises Emerging Scholar article for the Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada.

Austrian economics is often caricatured and criticized because of its approach, or deliberate lack of an approach, to mathematical models, multivariable calculus, and econometrics. Attacks are leveled against Austrians such as Mises, Rothbard, and Kirzner for their failure or refusal to avail themselves of applied empirical research in their scholarship. The Austrian methodology most frequently targeted is praxeology.

It is not the purpose of this short article to refute these attacks or to explore their errors and merits. That has been done ably by others (see, for example, the series of debate-essays available here, here, here, and here). Nor does this article attempt to stand up for the deductive reasoning of praxeology or to defend its claims about a priori truths, a task better suited for a lengthy work of scholarship, not a short article. This piece instead asks one simple question: does Hayek’s early work on trade-cycle theory complicate stereotypes about the methods of Austrian economics or clarify the manner in which Austrians can and do approach economic theory? The answer, of course, is yes.

Hayek proposed that the purpose and function of trade cycle theory was strictly limited: it was “to explain how certain prices are determined” and “to state their influence on production and consumption.” Expanding trade cycle theory beyond that purpose and function was, he believed, fallacious. “Any attempt to forecast the trend of economic development,” he claimed, “or to influence it by measures based on an examination of existing conditions, must presuppose certain quite definite conceptions as to the necessary course of economic phenomena.” But economic development — and the trade cycle in particular — is too important and complex to be guided by mere suppositions regarding matters about which there is much disagreement.

That is precisely what was happening in the 1920s when statistical designs and methods were growing in popularity and replacing general equilibrium theory, away from which Hayek himself moved later in his career. Economists at this time were beginning to treat statistics as conditions or proxies for theory (and even as theories unto themselves) rather than as mechanisms for testing and verifying established theories such as basic deductive inference or feature-by-feature comparison of the natural rate of interest (i.e., “equilibrium”) with the existing market rate.

According to Hayek, empirical research either affirms or discredits given methodologies but does not introduce new theories to explain fluctuating trade cycles. Amassing statistics, he maintained, is not the same as adducing or formulating economic laws. Statistics are nevertheless useful because, he explains, “there can be no doubt that trade cycle theory can only gain full practical importance through exact measurement of the actual course of the phenomena it describes.” Statistics, however, will not cultivate theoretical excellence of a kind that should direct trade-cycle theory or the policies that flow from it.

Statistics are useful in the negative sense: they disprove and discredit theories rather than affirm or prove them. They are corroborative but not ultimate guides; they are useful only to the extent that they enable us to make accurate predictions about future conditions, e.g., “to infer from the comparative movements of certain prices and quantities an imminent change in the direction of those movements.” Once statistics are gathered, a theory must be extracted from them–-they create inferences to be studied and aggregated, not comprehensive theories to be canonized. That is why Hayek declares that the “value of statistical research depends primarily upon the soundness of the theoretical conceptions on which it is based.” Statistics can be made to prove different points, but only a theoretically sound approach to classifying and elucidating statistics will bring about reliable forecasts.

Correct business forecasting depends on correct theorizing; therefore, Hayek propounds, we must labor to attain correct theories, never settling with what we perceive to be complete knowledge. Traditional equilibrium theory is not enough for him because it does not adequately account for money, a commodity or medium of exchange whose very status as such depends on its wide use and general acceptance on the market, not to mention its ability to reflect the subjective values of producers and consumers. The production of money and the often arbitrary increase in its supply by banks distort the natural interest rate and call into question the usefulness of equilibrium theory in a money economy.

Hayek demonstrates in his early work on the trade cycle that statistics and theories can be interactive and participatory so long as the former isn’t treated as a substitute for the latter. Statistics alone aren’t pure math, of course, and the creation of economic simulacra in the form of models and diagrams can lead to the type of scientism — the privileging of data over theory — that Hayek decries. Math is a term for what is done with data already gathered; it refers to many topics of study but in this context to the deductive and systematic study of facts and figures and their observable patterns to arrive at true concepts and accurate measurements regarding the concrete conditions of our phenomenal world. So understood, math is not the ultima ratio but an indispensable tool, not an end but a means to an end. Only from this premise does Hayek’s trade-cycle theory become fully comprehensible, and although his paradigms of trade-cycle theory and equilibrium evolved over time, his foundational approach to the role of statistics and theories remained crucial to his thinking.

_____

Note: Quotations come from F.A. Hayek, Prices and Production and Other Works: F.A. Hayek on Money, the Business Cycle, and the Gold Standard. Edited with an Introduction by Joseph T. Salerno. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008.

, , , , ,

Paul H. Fry on “Jacques Lacan in Theory”

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Books, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Scholarship, Western Civilization on January 14, 2015 at 8:45 am

Below is the next installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The previous lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review of James Seaton’s “Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism”

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Essays, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Postmodernism, Rhetoric, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 31, 2014 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review first appeared here in The University Bookman.

Back when I was a pimple-faced graduate student in English and law, I ordered a book from Amazon titled Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism: From Criticism to Cultural Studies. The book had been out awhile, but I had only recently come across an intriguing piece by its author, James Seaton, a professor of English at Michigan State University. I read my purchase in earnest and then dashed off a complimentary email to Seaton days later. He responded, and we struck up a dialogue that continued for several years. I once visited him at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, where he spoke to a small crowd about George Santayana. He had just edited two of Santayana’s seminal essays for Yale University Press and had recruited Wilfred M. McClay, John Lachs, and Roger Kimball to contribute to the edition. We got along swimmingly, and Annette Kirk ensured that he and I had time alone to discuss whether I should apply to a doctoral program in English or continue down the path of the law.

Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism has all the themes and qualities that first drew me to Seaton. It is a collection of Seaton’s latest essays and reviews revised and synthesized into a comprehensive case for humanistic inquiry. Amplifying his arguments from Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism and reformulating his principles about the value of literature to society, Seaton continues to undercut the discipline of cultural studies, which he decries for its “obligatory leftism.” His leading contribution—the subject about which he stands to forge new directions in the field of literary criticism—is to revitalize old contributions, namely, the humanistic tradition as defined by Irving Babbitt and as represented by Aristotle, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Henry James, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Ralph Ellison. Chapters Two and Four are profitable beginnings of this project because they explain which critics (William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and which schools of criticism (Romanticism, Marxism, and the New Criticism) fall outside the humanistic tradition. These chapters, Four especially, are exciting, provocative, and significant. They supply the basis and much of the substance for the rest of the book and suggest that literature is not an agent of ideology, nor literary theory a master key that unlocks the door to grand solutions for political, scientific, and economic problems.

For those who are uninterested or unversed in literary criticism, however, reading Seaton will be like watching strategic athletic maneuvers—swing! parry! dive!—without a sense of what’s at stake in a sporting match whose tactics and rules are unknown. From the start he frames his argument with Plato and Aristotle, but today’s graduate students in English will be unclear what these men mean for the larger project of humanism or why they matter to contemporary audiences. With the exception of the Norton anthologies, most accounts of literary criticism in popular anthologies begin with Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century or with the New Critics in the early twentieth. The pinnacle of influence for these late critics roughly coincides with the development of English departments as institutions. To begin at the beginning—with the Greeks—will disorient those trained to look back at the literary canon through the prism of “contemporary” theories.

This remark is not a reproach of Seaton but of current literary studies; the chief merit of Seaton’s methodology is to demystify literary studies and to affirm there’s nothing new under the sun: the latest theories have definite antecedents (not necessarily good ones) and can be mapped by their continuity with other methodologies. Marxists of the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse, for example, follow in the wake of Plato: “Just as Plato had insisted on the necessity of censorship in his ideal Republic, Marcuse argued that suppression of free speech was required in the twentieth century for the establishment of what he considered true freedom.”

Seaton’s knack for classification emerges forcefully in the opening chapter. Here he arranges under three heads the whole history of literary criticism: the Platonic, the Neoplatonic, and the Aristotelian. He defines literary criticism as “a continuing conversation” among these three traditions inspired by just two Greek men. Adhering to the third category, the Aristotelian, which he calls humanistic, Seaton rejects the first because it questions the aesthetic value of literature, distrusts the sensory effects of literature, and treats great works as mere symptoms of ideological structures or institutions. “The philosophy of the Republic,” Seaton explains, “leaves no room for judging poetry according to literary excellence; all that counts is its political and social impact.” Seaton rejects the second, the Neoplatonic, for defending literature and poetry on the narrow and quixotic “basis of the moral and spiritual elevation it made possible.”

By contrast, Seaton submits, the “humanistic view of literature” might be “a middle way between the Platonic condemnation of art and literature and the Neoplatonic elevation.” The humanistic view “remains Aristotelian” because it considers “literature as a source of insight about human life” and is willing “to judge grand theory by the norms of common sense.” While Plato would expel poetry and theater from his ideal Republic, segregate poetry from philosophy, and train his Guardians to submit their virtues to the service of the State, Aristotle calls for “individual judgment about the literary merit and relevance to human life of particular works from audiences and certainly from would-be critics.” Neoplatonist overstatement about the manner in which “poetry brings us closer to the divine” also finds no place in Aristotelian humanism, which modestly maintains that literature “can tell us important things about human life but little about the universe.” Humanists write of the person as the person: they turn to literature to learn and to teach how to live well and wisely without fancying transcendental essences or utopian abstraction. The very crux of Aristotelian humanism is that “the importance of literature is linked to the significance of human life itself,” not to the political, ideological, or religious convictions that a work of literature implicates.

The triadic paradigm (Aristotelian, Platonist, Neoplatonist) may seem reductive, and indeed it is, but such reduction establishes recognizable classifications that encompass a diversity of interests and approaches while shaping a vocabulary for arranging distinctive properties into taxonomies to set apart certain authors and texts. Despite his skill for categorizing and simplifying schools of literary criticism, Seaton is steadfast that literary criticism is distinct in function and form from science: the former is as much an art as the art it explicates, whereas the latter is an empirical discipline that ascertains the natural rules of the phenomenal world by gathering and testing concrete data, building consensus among experts, and denominating general propositions to describe observable events. The contrast is not as sharp or essentialist as I have portrayed it—the pragmatic tradition of Peirce, James, and Santayana falls somewhere between art and science—but the fact that literary criticism has splintered into innumerable, contradictory schools suggests that the disparate methods and judgments of literary critics are not derived from shared conditions or by recourse to the same techniques.

Criticism of the humanistic variety championed by Seaton is found today not in academic journals but in popular literary reviews and journals such as this one. It has the important civic function of educating and inspiring mass audiences. Humanism rejects the “implicit promise” of cultural studies “that adepts gain the ability to make authoritative pronouncements about all aspects of human life without going to the trouble of learning the rudiments of any particular discipline.” Humanism, instead, engages in public debate without resorting to naked polemics; its practitioners understand or at least appreciate the complexity of the cultural norms and standards of readers outside the ivory tower. Professors in the academy, on the other hand, disconnected from the lifestyles and manners and conventions of the general public, tend to write themselves into little corners, retreating from the potential scrutiny of educated laypeople and insisting that true scholarship “requires specialization on topics specific enough to allow for the production of new knowledge, not open-ended conversation about questions to which no definitive answer is possible.” Seaton’s model of humanism advocates a different errand: “to make available to the larger culture the testimony of literature on human life … by accurately assessing the literary merit of the witness.”

They waste it that do state it with no style. Seaton, accordingly, makes short work of the “dominant theorizing” that lacks “literary distinction,” and he does so with his own unique style that remains as accessible to the educated layperson as it is to professional scholars of literature. His is not the delightfully repetitious, grandstanding prose of a Harold Bloom or Richard Poirier—the type of prose that, in its very makeup, shouts down the technical writing of hyper-professionalized humanities scholarship. Yet Seaton can turn a phrase with the best of them. Although it is a subsidiary point, the notion that a critic should write in a mode many people will enjoy is the literary equivalent to popular sovereignty: the common reader, not the expert, ought to determine which works continue to be read and therefore which become canonized. Like his guides Ralph Ellison and Dwight Macdonald, Seaton, mindful of his audience, takes pains to avoid jargon even as he discusses such theorists as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno whose writing is riddled with esoterica.

Seaton ends with a hopeful note: “Although the task of addressing the arguments of the dominant contemporary theories is important, the decisive answer [to the question what to do now that the dominant theories dismiss the importance of literature to life and thought] will come from the literary criticism of the twenty-first century that conveys to the general public the pleasures and insights that poems, plays, and fiction continue to make available to all those willing to attend.” Let’s hope the coming decades yield critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, who were “members of a humanistic tradition capacious enough to study the connections between literature and society while also insisting that poems, plays, and novels should be judged on their own merits as works of art.”

It isn’t that the political and social sphere should be off-limits to critics, only that critics should, as Seaton does, subordinate their political and social presuppositions to aesthetic judgments, the most discerning of which account for the value of imaginative literature to plain living and high thinking. The best criticism helps us to understand how literature makes life better, more meaningful, and more fulfilling. Simple as it sounds, this proposition is tremendously complex because of the tremendous complexity of life itself. Held to his own high standards, Seaton succeeds: his chapters force you to consider what role literature has played in your own development, and how that role might play out in the lives of others. Good literature is more than a material object; it’s a way of living, a crucial check on those who purport to know it all with utter certainty.

, , , ,

Paul H. Fry on “Freud and Fiction”

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Books, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 26, 2014 at 8:45 am

Below is the next installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The previous lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

 

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review of “Cheating Lessons,” by James M. Lang

In Academia, America, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Humanities, Pedagogy, Teaching on September 24, 2014 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared in Academic Questions (2014).

A few years ago, when I was teaching composition courses at Auburn University, I had a freshman from Harlem in my class. He had traveled from New York to Alabama to accept a scholarship and become the first person in his family to attend college. He was kind and thoughtful, and I liked him very much, but he was woefully unprepared for higher education; he had trouble comprehending more than a few paragraphs and could not write basic sentences. The university, however, was proud of this recruit, who contributed both geographic and racial diversity to the otherwise (relatively) non-diverse student body.

Encouraged by his tenacity, I met with this student regularly to teach him sentence structure and to help him turn his spoken words into written sentences. Although he improved by degrees over the course of the semester, he was never able to write a complete coherent paragraph.

During the last weeks of class, I informed him that he needed to earn at least a C+ on his final paper to avoid repeating the course. He was conspicuously absent from class whenever preliminary drafts were due, and he never responded to my prodding emails. Shortly before the due date, he materialized in my office and presented a piece of paper that contained several sentences. He asked me questions and attempted to record my responses on his paper. I reminded him that although I was happy to offer guidance, he needed to submit original work. He nodded and left my office. When, at last, he submitted his final paper, it consisted of roughly four intelligible paragraphs that regrettably had nothing to do with the assignment. I inserted these paragraphs into a Google search and discovered that they were lifted, verbatim, from a Wikipedia article unrelated to the assignment. I failed the student but showed him mercy—and spared the university embarrassment—by not reporting him to the administration for disciplinary action.

To this day I wonder if there was something I could have done differently to prevent this student from plagiarizing, or whether his cheating was the inevitable consequence of being unprepared for university study. Many teachers have similar stories.

Academic dishonesty, a topic now admirably undertaken by James M. Lang, has received more scholarly treatment than I was aware of before reading Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty. Like many of us, Lang grew interested in the subject because of his experiences with students who cheated in his classes. The more research he did on academic dishonesty, the more frustrated he became with “the same basic prescriptions” that were either quixotic or impracticable for one faculty member to undertake alone. One day, Lang realized that if he “looked through the lens of cognitive theory and tried to understand cheating as an inappropriate response to a learning environment that wasn’t working for the student,” he could “empower individual faculty members to respond more effectively to academic dishonesty by modifying the learning environments they constructed.”

Lang’s goal is not to score points or court confrontation, but simply to help teachers and administrators to reduce cheating by restructuring the content and configuration of their courses and classrooms.

Lang divides Cheating Lessons into three parts. The first is a synthesis of the existing scholarly literature on academic dishonesty that concludes with four case studies, about which little needs to be said here. The second part consists of practical guidance to teachers who wish to structure their classrooms to minimize cheating and to cultivate the exchange of ideas. And the third, which is an extension of the second, considers speculations about potential changes to curricula and pedagogy to promote academic integrity not just in the classroom, but across campus.

Most original are parts two and three, which are premised on the structuralist assumption that systems shape and inform the production of knowledge. The treatment of academic dishonesty as a symptom of deterministic models and paradigms makes this book unique. If the models and paradigms can be changed, Lang’s argument runs, then academic dishonesty might decline: the shift needs to be away from the “dispositional factors that influence cheating—such as the student’s gender, or membership in a fraternity or sorority, and so on”—toward “contextual factors,” the most significant of which is “the classroom environment in which students engage in a cheating behavior” (emphases in original). What’s exciting about the structuralist paradigm—if it’s accurate—is that teachers and administrators have the power and agency to facilitate constructive change.

But what if the structuralist paradigm isn’t correct? What if dispositional factors are more determinative than contextual factors in generating academic dishonesty? Lang’s argument depends upon a profound assumption that he expects his readers to share. It’s most likely that dispositional and contextual factors are interactive, not mutually exclusive: consider the student who is not as intelligent as his peers and who resorts to cheating because of his insecurity and the pressure on him to succeed. Lang is onto something, though: students are less likely to learn in an environment that compels them “to complete a difficult task with the promise of an extrinsic reward or the threat of punishment” than they are in an environment that inspires them “with appeals to the intrinsic joy or beauty or utility of the task itself” (emphasis in original). In other words, “in an environment characterized by extrinsic motivation, the learners or competitors care about what happens after the performance rather than relishing or enjoying the performance itself” (emphasis in original).

How does Lang propose that teachers and administrators structure their courses and curricula to foster what he calls “intrinsic motivation” (as against “extrinsic rewards”) among students? For starters, he urges professors to help students learn for mastery and not for grades, to lower the stakes per assignment by multiplying the options for students to earn points or credit, and to instill self-efficacy by challenging students and by affording them increased opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. In the abstract, these suggestions seem obvious and unhelpful, so Lang backs them up with interviews with accomplished teachers as well as anecdotes about successful classroom experiments: the improvising by Andy Kaufman as he taught Russian literature to prison inmates, for instance, or the unique grading system implemented by John Boyer at Virginia Tech. All the tactics and approaches discussed and promoted by Lang can be traced back to the premise that “the best means we have to reduce cheating is to increase motivation and learning.”

Teachers and administrators are forever trying to motivate their students to learn. It’s easier to conceive of this goal, however, than to achieve it. Teachers everywhere seek to inspire their students to love and pursue knowledge, and despite a plethora of opinions about how best to do so, no general consensus has arisen to establish a definitive course of action for all students and disciplines. Many teachers chose their profession and discipline because they relished their own education and wanted to pass on their knowledge and love of learning to others. Lang’s insistence that teachers inspire a passion for learning is hardly novel; rather, it is the touchstone and stands in contradistinction to the utilitarian, standardized, test-centered, and results-oriented educational strategies that politicians, bureaucrats, and policy wonks now sponsor and defend. In this respect, Cheating Lessons is a refreshing alternative; it’s written by an educator for educators and not, thank goodness, for semiliterate politicians and their sycophantic advisers.

One thing this book is not: a template or checklist that you can follow to construct your own productive learning environment for students. Each learning environment is contextual; one model will not suit every setting and purpose. Because Lang cannot and does not provide step-by-step how-to instructions, Cheating Lessons borders on the self-help genre and is more inspirational and aspirational than it is informational. And Lang’s meandering style—for example, his digressions about Robert Burns and coaching youth sports teams—are disarming enough not only to charm but also to contribute to the impression that Cheating Lessons is “light” reading.

Lang can overdo the playfulness and make exaggerated claims. Early on he quotes a Harvard administrator complaining in 1928 about the problem of cheating among students, an example that’s meant to refute the assumption that “we are in the midst of a cheating epidemic, and that the problem is much worse now than it was in the idyllic past.” Lang adds that he hopes to convince us that “cheating and higher education in America have enjoyed a long and robust history together.” But it’s not as if 1928 is ancient history. Data about academic dishonesty since that time will not convince most readers that there were as many cheating students in the one-room schoolhouses of the nineteenth century, when fewer people had access to formal education, as there are today. Perhaps anticipating such criticism, Lang invites us to “hop in our time machine and leap across centuries” to consider the cheating cultures of the ancient Greeks and of Imperial China “over the course of [a] fourteen-hundred-year history.” But surely the substantial data we have gathered on the twentieth- and twenty-first-century academy cannot be compared to the limited and circumstantial data garnered about these early cultures; surely “illicit communication” by “cell phones” is not comparable to the use of cheat sheets in nineteenth-century China. It seems preposterous to suggest that academic dishonesty in contemporary America exists to the same extent it did centuries ago on different continents and among different peoples with different principles and priorities.

Nevertheless, even readers skeptical of Lang’s structuralist premise and apparent optimism will find much in Cheating Lessons to contemplate and to amuse. Unfortunately, however, even after having read the book I’m still not sure what I could have done differently to prevent my student from cheating.

 

 

 

, ,

Paul H. Fry on “Linguistics and Literature”

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics, Teaching, The Academy on August 6, 2014 at 8:45 am

Below is the seventh installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The three two lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Paul H. Fry’s “The New Criticism and Other Western Formalisms”

In Academia, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Communication, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on May 28, 2014 at 8:45 am

Below is the sixth installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The three two lectures are here, here, here, here, and here.