I was all hopped up to read to the end of the essay tonight & dip back into the convo but my isp went and had an outage.My phones too too tiny to read an essay so i am cast out of the ethical pale until the utilities resume.

final stanza:

out of night the token emerges
its leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree
taken up and shaken again
put down in weak rage
knowing as the brain does it can never come about
not here not yesterday in the past
only in the gap of today filling itself
as emptiness is distributed
in the idea of what time it is
when that time is already past

Stranza three :

remember you are free to wander away
as from other times other scenes that were taking place
the history of someone who came too late
the time is ripe now and the adage
is hatching as the seasons change and tremble
it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it

Missed last night.

Stanza two:

you reading there so accurately
sitting not wanting to be disturbed
as you came from that holy land
what other signs of earth’s dependency were upon you
what fixed sign at the crossroads
what lethargy in the avenues
where all is said in a whisper
what tone of voice among the hedges
what tone under the apple trees
the numbered land stretches away
and your house is built in tomorrow
but surely not before the examination
of what is right and will befall
not before the census
and the writing down of names

New Poem (the title also serves as the first line)

As You Came From the Holy Land
(stanza 1)
of western New York state
were the graves all right in their brushings
was there a note of panic in the late August air
because the old man had peed in his pants again
was there turning away from the late afternoon glare
as though it too could be wished away
was any of this present
and how could this be
the magic solution to what you are in now
whatever has held you motionless
like this so long through the dark season
until now the women come out in navy blue
and the worms come out of the compost to die
it is the end of any season

Anscombe thinks that it would be better if we moved from 'wrong' or 'what-you-ought-not-to-do' to a cluster of things like 'injust' 'untruthful' and 'unchaste'. If you're going to expel God, you have to expel 'wrong' as some absolute.

This brings us to the major villain, Sedgwick (a perfect member of an unsung class of philosophical figures: the forgotten, remembered only through being ripped by a Big Name. There's always hope, though, through some unanticipated Revival )

I'll leave it there. This is where the argument gets especially thickety and its too late for me to follow.

I think it might even be fair to say that in some of her other work, Anscombe saw herself as supplying at least part of what she claims is needed in order to properly account for ethics. Especially this bit:

"That an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a "virtue." This part of the subject-matter of ethics is, however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is - a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis - and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced ... For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as "doing such-and such" is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required" - her book Intention can be read as an attempt to provide exactly such an account, or at least part of — StreetlightX

You added this part after I responded, but I want to respond to this too. I've only read the essay once through so far, and my first read-through of any paper, or at least papers for the forum, is often rushed because I want to get to talking and commenting.

That said, my sense regarding her focus on intention, at least in this essay (I haven't read 'Intention' so I welcome correction here) is that she wants to move the scope of ethics from a removed image of actions in a matrix of action and consequence, already seen by the actor in a removed, calculating way - to action as it occurs in life. Again, I think this fits the space-clearing view. (If you want a contemporary example, you can set Anscombe against Effective Altruism). Of course any neat division is too neat. Actual ethical action usually has wrapped up in it both immediate intention and some sense of how things will ripple out. She's trying to counterballast a tendency to take one half of that and elevate it. &, to that end, she has some good psychological insights about how rationalization of bad actions often involves taking a broader perspective. I'll have to come back to that though, because I don't think I've digested this enough to fully approach those arguments.

Perhaps; but even that would need a philosophical account of why virtue functions extraphilosophically (a meditation on philosophy and its limits, from within philosophy). Which I don't doubt can be done, but I don't think that at least that project is being pursued in this paper — StreetlightX

That's fair. I think this paper does a good job of laying much of the groundwork for what that account would look like, but I agree that that does not appear to be her aim.

Next part:

What seems to have happened, according to Anscombe, is that we've carried forth a whole ethical machinery involving obligation, while jettisoning the idea of divine legislation which contextualizes and grounds it.

Let's consider flourishing : It's simply a fact that a plant needs x to flourish. But what we're really after is something like the idea of a good, such that that idea bears on our actions. This doesn't apply to plants. When it comes to us, the idea of what we need influences what we want. But this is ccomplicated. When we bring in 'wanting' [we can just say 'desire' here, no?], we can want stuff even if it goes against our needs. And this 'want' brings us to a next step. We can admit things like 'owing' as facts. And we can admit things like need in relation to flourishing. But there still remains, left over, our 'wanting' [desiring]. The moral 'ought' still remains outside all of this.

Anscombe describes this ought as having a 'mesmeric' force, even though divorced from its religious origins.

It's not unlike the kabbalistic idea of 'reshimu':

'The reshimu is compared to the fragrance of the wine which remains in the glass after having been poured out of it.'

It contains a hint of what used to sustain it, though what sustained it has since evaporated.

I think, at its limit, virtue ethics just is clearing space so that you can understand how what matters in terms of ethics and virtue is extraphilosophical. I don't know if the fly-in-bottle approach works for every field of philosophy, but in terms of virtue and ethics, I think it does.

I'm struck by the similarity to an argument I have used elsewhere. You take your car to a mechanic to have a clunking noise in the engine looked at, and being of a sceptical disposition the mechanic proceeds to explain that there need be no link between the phenomenology of the clunk you seem to hear and the mooted existence of a problem in your engine. You go to another mechanic who has a better understanding of what it is you want. — Banno

I like that. Maybe the first mechanic was almost touching on something - only he hamfistedly applied a by-the-numbers version of the teachings of a disciple of a disciple of a legitimate master mechanic, for whom the theoretical stuff was just his reflections after mastering the pragmatic aspects, and practicing for a long time. Though, as someone who needs to get your car fixed, all that matters is who gets what's actually going on, right now. And whoever can do that, probably is closer to the car-guru, then the disciple of his disciple.

I don't much care about Paul's soul, though. — Banno

Have to agree with you there- Paul was a real piece of work. On a prolonged bible kick though, & can't help myself with the religious digressions - no point in learning all this stuff if I can't peacock it a little.

So a standard analysis would be something like:

The butcher delivered the meat
If the butcher delivered the meat then you ought pay for the meat
You ought pay for the meat

...with the second premise justified by some universal law about paying one's debts or seeking the greater happiness of the butcher or whatever.

Anscombe would have us avoid this by our comprehending what is implicit in the transaction involving the delivery from the butcher, perhaps together with an appreciation of the virtue of integrity.

And actually I think that at the least a sufficiently interesting approach to be worthy of discussion. It bypasses a part of ethics that seems - well - almost autistic; lacking in a theory of mind. — Banno

I think so, only I'd flip the first two. 'If the butcher delivered the meat then you ought pay for the meat' seems to be the major premise. And it seems like the major premise, in some way, 'carries' the whole background 'form of life' that brings us to the 'higher level'. 'The butcher delivered meat' can only get to 'you ought pay for the meat' by jumping up a level, and the major premise contains that. (and of course it's not always the case that if he delivers the meat, you ought pay him. Maybe it's thanksgiving & the butcher is your uncle, and butcher-uncles, at thanksgiving, deliver without obligating you to pay. The major premise is sort of like a crude way of representing a higher level in a lower-level, and so doesn't always work exactly.)

What counts as a brute fact seems ot Anscombe to depend on what one is doing - think of Wittgenstein's discussion of what counts as simple. That's very different form, say, Searle, who talks in terms of a hierarchy, brute facts giving way to institutional facts. So the brute fact of a bunch of people running around on a field are insufficient to explain your football game; Searle would invoke brute facts, then individual and then group intent in his explanation. But it seems Anscombe would simply accept that there are different sorts of explanations for what is gong on. — Banno

Yes, I think we're on the same page here (& I do think Anscombe is right.) To take her idea of exceptions: we can imagine something that looks exactly like a football game, only it's entirely choreographed, perhaps as part of some avant-garde performance piece about Masculinity & Sport. In that case, all the brute facts would appear to be there, yet there's still not a football game being played. I feel like there's tons to be said about exceptions like this, and why we can recognize them as exceptions, even those though the brute facts are present, but in any case, we're always already 'in' the level we're in, and our 'high-level' descriptions are as much facts as anything at a lower level.



Next step:

Owing - and so bilking - can thus be understood on a factual level. What about justice? For now all we can say is that justice is a family-resemblances sort of category. We recognize a cluster of things as being injust. We'll let that lay for now.

Now are injust men bad? That depends on whether justice is a virtue. Anscombe thinks we can't understand this without turning to motive and intent.

She takes the example of a machine that 'ought' to be oiled. I think it's fair to say that, in this case, she's talking about something like a Kantian 'hypothetical' ought. You ought to do x, if you want y. If you want the machine to run welll, you ought to oil it. This, of course, is not an 'ought' in the 'special, moral sense.'

Anscombe thinks this special moral sense happens when Law enters the picture. Now, this hypothetical ought gets linked up with an Absolute Law and becomes an 'obligation' that one is 'bound' by. And this happens through Abrahamic religion

[ Aside: she focuses on christianity but I think this is historically and theologically incorrect. She does mention the Torah, but seems not to take into account what I think is a rather glaring fact: Paul, the author of Christianity, systematically replaces law with grace. She does sort of address this, but describes it as a protestant development. Though, maybe, in an ultimate historical sense, she's right that Paul's subtle theological developments in Romans etc were bulldozed over by the church fathers and only reemerged through Luther. Maybe.]

tldr; of my post: If 'the butcher delivered meat' can be taken as an 'is', then so can 'I owe the butcher".

that’s what I’m doing. I’m enjoying her humour, although it is stuck-up, stifling English. — Banno

Yeah, I do like how openly frustrated she is with her contemporaries. Her prose is clunky. I don't get the sense that she's constitutionally incapable of good prose (i dunno haven't read her before); it just seems like she has some holistic sense of what she wants to say, but is having trouble laying out all the nuances serially. Slightly constipated. & so you get sections like the brute fact one. I've now forged (sometimes impatiently) through the essay and think I have a vague understanding of what she's trying to say, but I'm going to go back to the step-by-step approach to see if I can make it clearer to myself. I left off at the brute fact section.


I'm going to try to put it in my own words, and I think I stand a good chance of erring, but here goes:

Almost all 'facts' are high-level ways to 'wrap up' lower level of facts. They are descriptions that add something to the concatenation of these lower-level facts. I might say 'a football game is happening'. If we break this down analytically, we might say e.g., 'there are two teams on the field, both trying to get a football into the endzone.' But all of these facts are themselves higher-level 'wrap-ups'. What are we calling a team, or a ball or and endzone? And we can do this endlessly, just as philosophers used to talk about the indefinite division of matter. For that reason, it doesn't make sense to 'cut off' this progression at some arbitrary level and say : everything above this level is illegitimately deriving an description from some set of facts which don't, in-and-of-themselves lead to it. That I owe the butcher for the meat he delivered is equally description and brute fact, depending on what level you look at it. ('The butcher is vengefully pursuing his debtors' would take [owing the butcher] as a brute fact.) As humans we occupy the level on which 'owing the butcher' is itself a kind of brute fact. It doesn't really work to push one level back [He delivered me meat] as though that were some incorruptible pure 'is-not-ought' level, and everything above it goes an unsanctioned step. The next level-back, by that logic, could have the same charges levied against it: 'He delivered meat' breaks down to [ he picked up meat, and dropped it here] and so on indefinitely.

In addition, there are certain cases where all the usual 'brute level' facts that usually imply a certain high-level description are present, but, because of extenuating circumstances, the situation is different. There's no foolproof way around it - some art is required to make sense of these border cases.

Anscombe things Hume is wrong, but that his analysis has the virtue of opening a space for this more subtle exploration.
(That may be even clunkier than Anscombe, but that's my best stab so far.)

Nice start. It'd be best to keep an eye on the big picture while examining the detail. — Banno

Good call. I'll read it through, then circle back

2nd, final stanza :

Why must it always end this way?
A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair
And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her
Into the silence that night alone can’t explain.
Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad,
But we didn’t have to reinvent these either:
They had gone away into the plot of a story,
The “art” part—knowing what important details to leave out
And the way character is developed. Things too real
To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page,
The indoors with the outside becoming part of you
As you find you had never left off laughing at death,
The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch.

Continuing:
Anscombe draws the conclusion that we can't look to Aristotle for elucidation of moralty as we think of it. What about other thinkers?

- Butler: He appeals to conscience. But what about things like that show 'You' where the hero thinks he's doing good, but is actually doing really bad stuff? [BROKE]

- Hume : Defines truth in a way that excludes ethical judgment. He defines passion in a way that any aim at anything suggests a passion is at play. The is/ought distinction is equally an is/owes and
an is/needs distinction (?). She says she'll return to this (which is good! I'm not sure what she's getting at to be honest.)

-Kant. Anscombe focuses on Kant's metaphor of 'legislating for oneself.' She shows how this silly - What? Is 'legislation' a one-man vote? Her approach seems to be that all legislation is parliamentary, and any idea about legislation has to be framed in a parliamentary context in order to determine whether or not it is absurd. She explains that legislation needs a power superior to the legislator. She says deontology doesn't take into account context.

I'm interested. I'm up late after the superbowl with nothing to do. (background : I'm coming into the essay knowing nothing about it, and little about moral philosophy)

So to begin.

Paragraph one

Anscombe beings with three theses :

1. It's not profitable, at present, to do moral philosophy. That should be laid aside until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology.

2. The concepts of moral obligation and moral duty are atavistic - they come to us from a time when survival was of prime importance.

3. The differences between moral philosophers like Sedgwick (who I don't know) and everyone else up to the present day aren't of much importance

[commentary : When she said she had three theses, I expected them to be something different. I can't tell if they're tongue-in-cheek or not. (1) Seems to be almost behaviorist. (2) Seems to be Nietzschean (3) seems to hinge on Sedgwick, who, i don't know who is that. But it seems, more broadly, to say : the nuances of moral philosophy to this point doesn't much matter. As a whole the three theses she suggests, [i]feels[/i] to me like she's stage-setting by rhetorically playing the role of a decadent philosopher, who doesn't really understand the purpose of moral philosophy. I don't know if that's right. Maybe she means them. Have to keep reading]

Paragraph two

Difference between Aristotle's Ethics and modern moral philosophy. Aristotle doesn't seem to focus on what the moderns focus on. What we mean by 'moral' today doesn't even seem to have a place in Aristotle.

Aristotle breaks up virtues in two ways

1. Moral
2. Intellectual

Do his intellectual virtues have a moral aspect? Tentatively, yes. A failure in intellectual virtue is blameworthy, like in government. [For example, we might blame economists for the 2008 finanical crisis, in a way that is both intellectual and moral]

But we can't 'blame' someone for any sort of failure? Is being blameworthy always a moral matter? Like, what if you just program an app wrong? Is that a moral failure?

Ok, so some failures are morally blameworthy, some are not. Does Aristotle understand this distinction?If he does, why doesn't he focus more on this distinction?

Another Aristotelian distinction:

'Involuntariness in Action'
vs
Scoundrelism

A man can be blamed for the latter. [It seems like 'scoundrelism' maybe just means 'doing stuff in bad way such that you can be blamed for it']

But if we make this distinction, does it not follow that there is a moral obligation not to make certain intellectual mistakes? Next Anscombe asks [ & I don't quite follow why] Why doesn't Aristotle discuss obligation in general versus obligation in particular?]

She then goes on to do a very post-wittgenstein british thing : If anyone modern discusses Aristotle and doesn't feel like [example from daily life], they must be very imperceptive indeed.

[commentary: I think what Anscombe is trying to say is that Aristotle confuses Intellectual and moral failings, as we understand them. He runs the two together. She's not very clear on what she means, but it has something to do with blame. Presumably we think a moral failing is blameworthy, while an intellectual one is not. I think there's a lot more to unpack here. Blame and responsibility are a big topic, and I think empirically things don't filter out quite in the scheme she wants to set up, but I get her point and whatever the case may be, it's certaintly true that what Anscombe wants to talk about when she talks about morality doesn't seem to be quite what Aristotle was talking about. Whether that's a failure of Aristotle or a confusion of Anscombe is irrelevant to that fact being true.]

Late on account of the Superbowl, but new poem, name of

Forties Flick

Stanza 1:

The shadows of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.
In bra and panties she sidles to the window:
Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself,
With wafer-thin pedestrians who know where they are going.
The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly titled up.

Second, final, stanza:


One day a man called while I was out
And left this message: “You got the whole thing wrong
From start to finish. Luckily, there’s still time
To correct the situation, but you must act fast.
See me at your earliest convenience. And please,
Tell no one of this. Much besides your life depends on it.”
I thought nothing of it at the time. Lately
I’ve been looking at old-fashioned plaids, fingering
Starched white collars, wondering whether there’s a way
To get them really white again. My wife
Thinks I’m in Oslo—Oslo, France, that is.

Hit me up on direct messenger. For various reasons, I've decided not to comment on the poems on this thread (I did break that rule once, but I'm trying to stick to it in general.) But I'm down to talk about this stuff through direct messenging.

I can't speak for Ashbery, I'm just posting the poems.

Poem 2 : "Worsening Situation"

Stanza 1:

Like a rainstorm, he said, the braided colors
Wash over me and are no help. Or like one
At a feast who eats not, for he cannot choose
From among the smoking dishes. This severed hand
Stand for life, and wander as it will,
East or west, north or south, it is ever
A stranger who walks beside me. O seasons,
Booths, chaleur, dark-hatted charlatans
On the outskirts of some rural fete,
The name you drop and never say is mine, mine!
Some day I'll claim to you how all used up
I am because of you but in the meantime the ride
Continues. Everyone is along for the ride,
It seems. Besides, what else is there?
The annual games? True, there are occasions
For white uniforms and a special language
Kept secret from the others. The limes
Are duly sliced. I know all this
But can't seem to keep it from affecting me,
Every day, all day. I've tried recreation,
Reading until late at night, train rides
And romance.

I'm breaking my own rule a little bit, but just a quick note on the first poem. The poem's title, I've learned from the internet, is also the first line of another, much older, poem - Tom May's Death, by Andrew Marvell. There, it's a metaphor for death. (I believe he's talking about shanghaing, when vulnerable (e.g. drunk) people would be kidnapped and brought out to a ship, forced to serve as sailors. So the metaphor is a major transition that one is unconscious for. In one realm, then suddenly waking up in another.) I think it's interesting that this poem can be read as about 1. artistic creation 2. love 3. ego or 4. death and each one seems to work.

final stanza:

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor
Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,
Finally involved with the business of darkness.
And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,
The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons
Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower
Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.
The summer demands and takes away too much,
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

Hey man. I get the sense from your posts that you're dealing with some hard shit, that maybe goes beyond what ' the philosophy forum' can handle. I feel like I *may* understand what you're talking about with natural spirits and hijacking, but that it might be too real , and shoot beyond philosophy.

A lot of what you're saying makes sense to me, but may get some resistance on here. Are you in a good spot?

So more like theory over direct experience/creativity? Are you talking about the creative process as an artist, or as the experience as an audience member? — Noble Dust

Both. I really think there's a point at which those two things converge. Now it's rare for me to experience either immersion in the work of others, or creative immersion (I'm certainly not a natural artist, or aesthete), but if I look back at the few times I have been immersed, in either, they seem similar. My experience has been that when you're really in the flow, creatively, it's like you're following something that's directing you, and uncovering things. When you're really immersed experiencing another's art, it's like you're following whatever they're following, and also seeing something uncovered.

@Noble Dust

I think what he means is that, for example, if you are a philosopher, or a writer of theory, you end up with a whole lot of internal dialogues going round in your head, or positions, opinions, arguments. So when you want to get creative you have to muscle your way past them to find a quiet place in which to explore a creative process.

For a painter, for example, this not usually an issue, as your mind might be quite clear. But it comes from different places in the subconscious instead. For me it is easy to become immersed in a creative process with a pallet knife and some paint, but somewhere along the process, something happens subconsciously which distracts me, leads me down a creative dead end, I get hung up on a technical difficulty in something I wanted to follow, I find myself trying to copy something I saw another artist doing. So I have to stop, contemplate all these things, identify them, use them in a constructive way, or throw them out. Sometimes they are persistent like ear worms.

You might find that in order to simply be creative you have to resolve to just go with it whatever happens, ignore anything which comes into your head. Decide not to want anyone to see it, who might have a critical eye. — Punshhh

Yes, perfectly put, that's what I was trying to get at.

For me (drawing/poetry/short stories) I'm wildly blocked up creatively, and I'm lucky if I can go a minute without getting distracted, and trapped in thought. Sometimes, it's theory/philosophy stuff which pulls me out of it; more often, I imagine this person or that person and I either criticize myself through their eyes, or, in this weird mechanical way, I start to try to mold whatever I'm doing to something I think they (or my mental construct of who they are) would approve of. It's pretty hard to shake.

4th, penultimate, stanza:

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?
They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun
Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wise for it.
Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door
But it was only her come to ask once more
If i was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

By "muck" are you talking about personal baggage, etc? I would say that certainly has to play an integral role, and it doesn't have to be the stereotype of a super introspective, personal, almost private expression. It's easier said than done, but personal issues are reflected universally as well; so reflecting them in the work can be a universal expression. If that's not what you meant, then let me know. — Noble Dust

Not necessarily personal baggage, though that can be part of it, or it. I think I just mean whatever seems to be in the way of a pure aesthetic experience. There's probably a neat conceptual paradox that's something like : the universal experience is always the failure to reach the universal. Or something like that. ick. But it's too late and I gotta go to sleep!

Ok yeah, we're on the same page. It's really hard to separate what you want to express from the muck you've accumulated, while still finding the proper place for that muck. That's what I struggle with. Like there's so much I want to say, but I can't figure out how to disentangle it from the obscuring theory dialogue I've accumulated - and to add to that, I have to recognize that accumulation is part of it, and also needs its place (but its proper place, not as the directing impulse, but as one element among others) - I noticed you switched your avatar to a still from Stalker - I think Tarkovsky handled this well with that long shot with all the debris in the water. But easier seen than done.

The question to be asked first is, where are we going, because that’s where art goes. — Brett

If you know where you're going, though, you can just punch it into the gps, and get the route sketched out.

I think this is related to what I'm trying to say about art being a reflection of the human situation; that meaningful aesthetic experience is certainly individual and personal, but as a human participating in the human situation, your response is a reflection of where you are in that situation. And if you then react to trends you don't like by, for instance, trying to create an aesthetic you do like, then you're one individual contributing to that process of art reflecting the human situation. If you're a hobbyist, you may not influence it much, but if you become successful, you might. — Noble Dust

I think I'm following. Let me test that:

I understand you to be saying something like this : art is created in a shared environment. It's a broad, bigger world, in which artists are embedded. If that broader world is dim and bombed-out, or otherwise dark, but that's a massive part of your lived individual experience, it's part of your reality, it's part of what you're trying to express. If you're in a 'bombed-out world' of Jeff Koontz bubble statues, then that's part of it. And a reaction against it, is still linked back to the world. If there's a full aesthetic experience to be had, it has to take into account the landscape it emerges from?

a couple quick thoughts

(1)Art has been commodified for a long time. Botticelli, for example, was directing a workshop of lesser-artists,in order to complete commissions, for patrons, for money.

(2) There is, without a doubt, a human capacity to approach pure aesthetic experience, something that borders on the mystical.

(3) It's hard to reach this. For most of us, we usually fall short, even if we can understand where the aesthetic experience is tending. Or maybe we have a few peak experiences, we try to repeat, or understand.

(4). It's probably the case that art has always been torn between these two impulses, commercial and aesthetic. Maybe not always commodification, per se - but certainly producing art for social purposes has been there for a long time, probably since the beginning.

(5) Aesthetic creation probably always takes place within a differentiated milieu. I mean this : You remember a very meaningful aesthetic experience. You see trends in the art world that don't reach that. You set yourself against those trends. That probably goes on forever.

Dooo eeeeet.

One thing I think I'd stand by is saying that while rigor and clarity are defining features of analytic philosophy -- even values commonly agreed upon -- that doesn't mean that these values are exclusively analytical, just definitive for analytic philosophers.

The page is kinda a spaghetti mess and I'm trying to untangle it bit-by-bit as I go about all my things in life, but I was going with the approach that analytic philosophy can be characterized without reference to other traditions since I don't think there's a good distinction to be made between the usual suspects -- i.e. continental or existential, etc. — Moliere

A wiki project would be a lot of fun- but I just plum don't have enough expertise in this area to offer any edits (my previous post was unadulterated late-night bluster.) I agree with the rest of what you've said. for sure.

Stanza 3 :

A look of glass stops you
And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?
Did they notice me, this time, as I am,
Or is it postponed again? The children
Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift
Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate
As limpid, dense twilight comes.
Only in that tooting of a horn
Down there, for a moment, I thought
The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,
Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade
That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,
Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

stanza two :

So this was all, but obscurely
I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages
Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.
New Sentences were starting up. But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

@BannoI suppose a good intro would contextualize everything. . Frege, I'm told, is foundational. But Wittgenstein plunks down in the middle like a roswell ufo. I don't know AP that well, but I know he had an eerie effect on the field. Certainly, it would flatter the AP crowd to see their tradition wrapped in solemn logic garb, in contrast to Continental hysterics. And that would be true, except for Wittgenstein - if only he didn't have the otherworldly charismatic effect he did, and he did. Rigor & reflection are good, but get out of town if you don't think kant was rigorous and reflective. What characterizes AP, in my opinion, is a pronounced caution, which is ballasted with cocktail wit, chessboard wit. You can *smell* the university in Quine & even Kripke. Davidson & Sellars, lost in drink, protest, but quietly. It's new scholasticism in its soul of souls. Look at Lewis.

Sellars is a special exception for me. if anyone does anything on wiki about AP, make Sellars the major saint.