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Archive | February 13, 2008

Weirdness on Amazon

By on February 13, 2008 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

There’s a book of mine titled The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann that’s listed on Amazon, Google Books, and Worldcat.

Ludwig Boltzmann I know it’s a book because Worldcat says so. But it’s really an 11-page paper I wrote for a course in college back in 1983. (Google Books calls it “22 pages,” but that’s because they’re counting the blank back sides.) So how did it get listed in these various venues?

Initially I saw only the Amazon listing, and was mightily puzzled; but I eventually figured it out. (I would have figured it out sooner if I’d seen the Worldcat listing.) This paper (a fictional dramatisation of the implications of Boltzmann’s views on probability) was submitted by my professor (astrophysicist David Layzer) to an undergraduate essay contest called the James Bryant Conant Competition in Natural Science that year; it won, which I’m guessing caused a bound copy of it to be shelved in the Harvard library archives, which in turn caused it to be listed as a book in various databases. But it’s just an undergraduate paper, and it’s never been available for sale anywhere. Weird.

If I come across my copy (no doubt buried in a box somewhere) I’ll post the thing.

In vaguely related news, I also stumbled across the existence of an I Love Roderick Long t-shirt. I am not responsible for this and have no idea who is! Double weird.

Nothing’s the Matter With Anarchy

By on February 13, 2008 0

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

On Thursday through Saturday I and several of my colleagues will be attending SEASECS, an interdisciplinary conference on 18th-century thought. The paper I plan to present is titled “No Matter, No Master: Godwin’s Humean Anarchism.” Here’s an abstract:

William Godwin is often regarded as essentially a Berkeleyan in his metaphysics and a Rousseauvian in his social philosophy. I argue that in both areas the influence of David Hume is far more fundamental than is ordinarily recognised, and ultimately more decisive than that of Berkeley or Rousseau – though the relation is more one of Godwin’s creative repurposing of Hume’s ideas than of his passive receptivity to them.

William Godwin With regard to metaphysics, although immaterialism is a Berkeleyan rather than a Humean thesis, Godwin’s version of immaterialism is flatly incompatible with Berkeley’s, and in both its epistemological foundations and its role in our reflective life owes far more to Hume than to Berkeley.

With regard to social philosophy, while Hume might seem an unlikely precursor for Godwin’s socialist anarchism, in fact Godwin, in his Enquiry and other writings, takes precisely Humean arguments for the rule of law and prevailing institutions of property and turns them in the opposite direction; and inasmuch as Hume’s account of the role of public opinion in sustaining social order inadvertently provides Godwin with grounds for the present-day feasibility of anarchism (by contrast with Rousseau’s relegation of anarchism to an irretrievable golden age), it is actually Hume, not Rousseau, who proves the most useful source for Godwin’s political program.

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