Nerd Industries: Stuart Robinson's blog

Steve Pyke has taken black and white photos of a number of contemporary philosophers and made them available on his web site here

Nicholson Baker has written a nice review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. There's a link from the review to his his author page, which lists the books that he has written. Interestingly, it omits the controversial novel Checkpoint. It wasn't very well received (or reviewed), but was quality or controversy the reason for its omission? One wonders...

I've always been fond of Searle's dictum: "If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself." Even if it's not strictly true, it's a very useful operating principle (a useful fiction). Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that I'm very sympathetic to his criticisms of "deconstruction". The following quote (from The New York Review of Books) is pure gold:

"At bottom Mackey's real objection to my discussion of deconstruction is that I am not sympathetic to it. But there are reasons for my lack of sympathy. I believe that anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial. In my review, I gave examples of all these phenomena. There is an atmosphere of bluff and fakery that pervades much (not all, of course) deconstructive writing. What becomes even more surprising is that the authors seem to think it is all right to engage in these practices, because they hold a theory to the effect that pretentions to objective truth and rationality in science, philosophy, and common sense can be deconstructed as logocentric subterfuges. To put it crudely, they think that since everything is phony anyway, the phoniness of deconstruction is somehow acceptable, indeed commendable, since it lies right on the surface ready for further deconstruction. Thus, the general weaknesses of the deconstructive enterprise become self-justifying. With such an approach I am indeed not sympathetic."