Carroil
On 5/11/2011 1:12 PM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
> Yes, I would say my real education began when I started reading
> original sources.
>
> Joanna
> -----------
>
> There is a kind of equivalent to this not reading but lots of opinion
> on something in
> art history and criticism by people who don't know how to make art.
> They get their phd without picking up a bush where they have to make
> something.
>
> I reconfronted this problem the minute I read Shadia Dury's take down
> of LS. I had to read LS which turned out to be his opinion of what a
> long list of other philosophers had written. So then I had to read
> them and see what LS was doing. He had read them alright, but he had
> written mostly bad interpretations, making their original arguments
> into straw men. I finally got him in a direct contradiction in Hobbes,
> Leviathan Thank god LS had footnoted similar passages in De Cive.
> Well so I didn't have to go through the whole tedious Hobbes.
>
> Bad scholarship or a lie, I couldn't tell. When LS turned to Calvin, I
> stopped. I am not going to read and analyze Calvin, period, unless
> somebody pays me. And I was only working on LS's first book on
> Spinzoa----another fascinating character in an intensely interesting
> time and place, Amsterdam 1660s. Strauss hated him on some
> twisted principle I could never figure out. But this gave me a lot of
> insights into the
> current push pull battle with Israel and US Jews, and the
> enlightenment principle of
> freedom of speech for intellectuals like Kushner.
>
> Nobody I know could understand why I found LS fascinating and he was
> such a
> rightwing pig anyhow... It was the fun of doing scholarship, like I
> had never done
> in school against an intellectual enemy. Catch him out. LS had
> footnoted his own passage, which directly contradicted what Hobbes and
> written when you track back to the source. There's is a reward somehow
> in that.
>
> CG
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