Comments on: [2b2k] Total rewrite of Chapters 1 and 2

By: davidw

davidw — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:21:27 +0000

Interesting point, Carsten. Do you happen to have any examples handy?

By: Jeremy Price

Jeremy Price — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:41:24 +0000

Nefarious books and their authors! Thanks for the further explanation, David, and I now understand what you are getting at. I look forward to more posts for the work-in-progress and to reading your arguments when they are all done in the book.

By: Carsten Boettjer

Carsten Boettjer — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:44:38 +0000

Don’t know whether or not you’ve been considering, David. But knowledge also keeps people away from more research and also inquiring an issue. Often enough people looking in databases to find any solution for a certain problem. Once they’ve found something like that, it keeps them away from guessing, whether or not there’s another way of doing the same thing different.

Best, Carsten

By: davidw

davidw — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:14:50 +0000

Jeremy, I actually already quote that very remark about Tolstoy. But Berlin in that essay does put forward the two categories as conceptual opposites. He obviously doesn’t believe that you have to be one or the other with no shades of gray and no hybridism. But, I think he does mean them conceptually to be two alternative ways of making sense of the world. They are a conceptual dualism that in practice wisely allows for hybrids.

For my nefarious book purposes, though, I’m not interested in dividing experts into types. I use the fox-hedgehog idea as a device to say, “See? The argument over foxes and hedgehogs betrays that we’re still following the same old strategy of mastering the world by limiting what we have to deal with.” My aim is to get the reader to look one level up from the arena in which we apply Berlin’s conceptual duality.

By: Jeremy Price

Jeremy Price — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:54:53 +0000

Sorry, the parenthesis got mixed up with the link to Berlin’s essay on Tolstoy, hedgehogs, and foxes:

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/rt/HF.pdf

By: Flow » Blog Archive » Daily Digest for January 28th - The zeitgeist daily

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:53:35 +0000

[...] Shared [2b2k] Total rewrite of Chapters 1 and 2. [...]

By: Frank Paynter

Frank Paynter — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:28:10 +0000

The berlin.wolf.ox url seems to be broken. My superficial understanding of all this has me thinking I’m a fox who believes in hedgehogism too.

By: Jeremy Price

Jeremy Price — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:19:22 +0000

I for one am enjoying the goulash, especially since I am about to start my own writing project, that of my dissertation. It’s comforting, to be honest, to see that you scrap huge chunks of things as you move forward in your thinking and research.

I do disagree with you on your take on Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog-fox idea though. Granted, I’m not a philosopher (even though I am occasionally called upon to play one in class), but you seem to be hinting at a dualism (depth vs. breadth) that seems very un-Berlin-like. Berlin seems to be pointing at something else, and the key may be in his hypothesis on his analysis of Tolstoy, “…that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog” (http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/rt/HF.pdf).

I may just be adding to the goulash, but I like to see myself as a fox who believes in being a hedgehog and I have to believe that there are others like me….

By: davidw

davidw — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:52:45 +0000

Keep up the cogent analysis, Bileg. You’re really making yourself look good!

By: Bileg

Bileg — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:24:27 +0000

More Insipid Goulash.