10 Philosophical Texts I'd Bring to a Desert Island

A bit over a year ago, a longstanding friend and colleague -- someone I actually went to college with -- asked me a question so intriguing that I ended up sitting down and recording a 20-minute YouTube video answering it in detail.

He wrote me:  If you could bring ten philosophical works to be stranded with on the proverbial desert island, which ten would they be, and why? 

Kicking off my Book Tour in National Library Week

Nearly a week and a half of busily packed days have passed since I officially started the tour for my book Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France  at our own Charles Chesnutt Library at Fayetteville State University.  I didn't realize until I started putting my presentation together precisely how appropriate an occasion and location that was.  The story that I'm going to tell, reflect upon, draw some implications from, and conclude with an argument about resources and policies - - the story of my research and the book that eventually emerged from is also the story of a library, the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, a library of a certain type that unfortunately seems to be at risk for gradually dwindling away, faced with the twin pressures of a digital age and the costs of maintaining library stacks.

I'm not going to talk much about my book in this entry, other than to say that I'll be adding a video (to My New Book) discussing how it is intended to make contributions to scholarship in several respects somewhat different than and complementary the volumes of secondary literature -- or even original groundbreaking work in Philosophy, Religion, History, Political Theory, or Rhetoric -- the disciplinary circles in which I move and appreciate the works of my peers.  What I will note first about Reason Fulfilled By Revelation is that were it not for the existence nearby of a certain kind of library, a certain form of repository of human knowledge, of intellectual striving and dialogue, the research that I carried out would have been. . . . well, not entirely inconceivable, but practically speaking rendered impossible

Wisdom Literature and Philosophy

Already indulging in one digression from the discussion about the value of translations and original languages in studying philosophy -- since I really ought to follow up with a post setting out my probably eccentric views on which criteria can be given, explained, and defended for what constitutes a good translation -- I'm going to take a different tack and blog about a topic which more than tangentially coincides with a long-time obsession of mine, the complicated question of Christian philosophy.  And, since I like to break up my perhaps overly long and dense entries from time to time with an image, here's the cover I ended up choosing for my volume coming out soon with Catholic University of America Press.
So, after that shameless plug. . . on with the digression! 

I noted that I was happy engaging an interlocutor who shared a lack of a typically modern assumption, namely that philosophy was in some way strictly separated from theology or religion.  This was not an assumption commonly made in antiquity, nor in the medieval period (at least until the fields of philosophy and theology not only came to be distinguished from each other but were often separated from and opposed to each other).  For my part, I don't think that this simply represented a confusion or lack of development on the part of those earlier thinkers, as many scholars seem to -- though I am willing to concede that some figures may have blurred these together.

Departure: Technogeek in place of Philosogeek

Back now for several days from a grueling month of attending conferences, preparing and providing workshops, seemingly interminable committee meetings, web-design, a few job applications, and . . .  oh, yeah, how could I forget, regular web-enhanced Critical Thinking classes for my students -- back and almost fully up to speed, it's time to get the blogging back into gear.  I've got a few started and then parked posts which I hope to finish, polish, and bring to light in the next several days.  But today, instead, a short, technogeeky (as opposed to philosogeeky) post.

One of our webmaster-IT gurus at FSU, Bill Gibson sent out an interesting email, which linked to his blog, which linked then to Odiogo, a site which takes blog posts and "reads" them as near-human quality speech to anyone who clicks on the newly-enabled buttons on one's blog, in this case my own little site of ramblings and ruminations.

Why It's Been Quiet

A short post, just to wiggle my toe in the blogging waters (actually have a few posts currently parked and waiting the time and energy to be finished).  In addition to CLA matters aplenty, committee work, teaching classes, and readying presentations, this month has been given over to finishing one stage of what has been so far a 6 year project, and starting another stage.

About six years ago, two years into teaching Philosophy and Religious Studies classes at Indiana State Prison, just two years out of grad school, Adrian Papst, a young, earnest English Catholic guy who was studying at the Institut Catholique de Paris (and whom I'd met at the stimulating Continental Philosophy of Religion conference in Lancaster, where the Radical Orthodoxy types squared off against the Pomos / Derridians), sent me a packet of photocopied documents.

He knew of my love for Maurice Blondel's thought and (largely still untranslated) works, and he mailed me several accounts of meetings of the Société Française de Philosophie, in which Blondel had been involved, accompanied by some other Blondel documents from the early 1930s.  These turned out to be key writings of Blondel during the 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates, which ran roughly from 1931-35 or 36 (depending on how you want to draw the historical boundaries), but I did not know it at the time, until I started reading through the pieces he had sent, and following up with some research and photocopying of my own.