A Worthwhile Question

Sat, Apr 8, 2006

Comes to us from Michael Saler’s “Modernity, Disenchantment, and the Ironic Imagination”: “Why can’t I find a single copy of my own monograph in any bookstore, but I can find many copies of Hamlet translated into Klingon?”

I appreciate Saler’s citation of Vaihinger there. A review of C. K. Ogden’s translation from The Journal of Philosophy, hoping that the Germans will become acquainted with American pragmatist thought, notes “the existence of intellectual pursuits in America other than suppressing of the theory of evolution and the consumption of beer,” on which latter point I should note how amused I was by Habermas’s example in Theory of Communicative Action of the Bavarian workers taking their mid-morning (9:00 AM) beer break.