Ah, I missed a week. My reason? I was very tired. The past few months have been quite difficult for me. This is maybe a bad reason, but this is a personal blog that is kept for fun and read by nobody. But I’m trying to get back at it, I want to start trying to knock out a few notes more regularly throughout the week to make it easier to type it all up on a Sunday.
What’s been going on in reading? Lots of philosophy and I am definitely starting to need a bit of a break from it! I read Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event (which I am loosely fitting into the philosophy category) and also Brook Ziporyn’s collection and translation of Zhuangzi over the past few weeks. They are both excellent and work surprisingly well together, I realise in retrospect.
There’s this notion of engaged1 becoming that is really central to both texts that is really very attractive to me. I will need to think more on this, I’d like to read more Chinese philosophy and some Buddhist texts. That’s largely because I have a ‘professional’ interest in scepticism and quietism and my reading of Zhuangzi was an exercise in trying to quieten the internal alarms that kept going off that were yelling: Sextus says this! Sextus says this!
It would be interesting to do some comparative work on, using these terms loosely, the sort of quietism that the Pyrrhonists urged and the sort of flexible engagement that Zhuangzi urged.
I’ve also been reading Michael Williams’s Unnatural Doubts. That’s a book, shockingly enough, on the foundations of scepticism. It’s really quite good. Very challenging, but, unlike many academic books, its difficulty comes from how thorough it is, rather than any major deficits in style…
I’ve also been reading David Marr’s Killing for Country which is also excellent. He’s a very good writer and the relevance of the book has been really hammered home recently, given that Australia is currently grappling with open neo-Nazis trying to take control of the streets. The pathetic response from our politicians has awful resonances with Marr’s description of the response of colonial politicians to settler massacres. These ‘leaders’ claim to condemn moral atrocities, but they never act. The simplest explanation really would seem to be that they don’t really disagree that much: they are comfortable with what’s happening.
1 As in, engaged in the social world