1010G【fish】COMMENTS

agnes2010UID: 2794922

The Education of Diane Ravitch教育史学家戴安娜拉维奇

By ALAN WOLFE

Published: May 6, 2010 by The New York Time

Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.

unyielding: refuse to give way or compromise;"unyielding determination"

Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.

segregated: separated or isolated from others or a main group;"a segragated school system";"a segregated neighborhood"

grapple: comme to terms or deal successfully with

Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society. “Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.”

come with a catch:也有条件

along the way 1事情正在发生或你正在做某件是的那段时间2随着时间的推移

cast a skeptical eye on

skeptical: marked by or given to doubt;"a skeptical attitude";

damning criticism：强烈的批评

philanthropic institution: 慈善机构

entity:实体，独立存在体，实际存在物。

The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Reagan administration 里根政府

before long 在不久之后，在短时间里

bipartisan 两党的，代表两党的

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong

federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

dismay: the feeling of despair in the face of  obstacles

Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice. “At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation通过放松管制.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea万灵药, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.

Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum. But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school.

at the expense of 以……为代价

cyniciam:讥笑 a cynical feeling of distrust

evaporated: drawn off in the form of vapor

Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry 强烈抗议similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”)

ideologue:意识形态的拥护者 an advocate of some ideology

touchy-feely 露骨地表达情感的 openly expressing love and affection (especially through physical contact)

vociferous:conspicuously and offensively loud

denounce:speak out against;to accuse or condemn or openly or formally or brand as disgraceful

I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question?. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day.

polosongruiUID: 2595436

The China model
The Beijing consensus is to keep quiet
In the West people worry that developing countries want to copy “the China model”. Such talk makes people in China uncomfortable
May 6th 2010 | BEIJING | From The Economist print edition
CHINESE officials said the opening of the World Expo in Shanghai on April 30th would be simple and frugal(节俭的). It wasn’t. The display of fireworks, laser beams, fountains and dancers rivalled the extravagance（奢侈、极端） of Beijing’s Olympic ceremonies in 2008. The government’s urge to show off Chinese dynamism proved irresistible. For many, the razzmatazz lit up the China model for all the world to admire.
The multi-billion-dollar expo embodies this supposed model, which has won China many admirers（win sb sth为某人赢得） in developing countries and beyond. A survey by the Pew Research Centre, an American polling（民意测验） organisation, found that 85% of Nigerians viewed China favourably last year (compared with 79% in 2008), as did 50% of Americans (up from 39% in 2008) and 26% of Japanese (up from 14%,). China’s ability to organise the largest ever World Expo, including a massive upgrade to Shanghai’s infrastructure（结构，基础设施）, with an apparent minimum of the bickering that plagues（使痛苦，造成麻烦） democracies, is part of what dazzles.
Scholars and officials in China itself, however, are divided over whether there is a China model (or “Beijing consensus” as it was dubbed in 2004 by Joshua Cooper Ramo, an American consultant, playing on the idea of a declining “Washington consensus”), and if so what the model is and whether it is wise to talk about it. The Communist Party is diffident（羞怯的） about laying claim to any development model that other countries might copy. Official websites widely noted a report by a pro-Party newspaper in Hong Kong, Ta Kung Pao, calling the expo “a display platform for the China model”. But Chinese leaders avoid using the term and in public describe the expo in less China-centred language.（这句不是很懂）
Not so China’s publishing industry, which in recent months has been cashing in on an upsurge of debate in China about the notion of a China model (one-party rule, an eclectic approach to free markets and a big role for state enterprise being among its commonly identified ingredients)（括号里没有懂）. In November a prominent Party-run publisher produced a 630-page tome（大本书） titled “China Model: A New Development Model from the Sixty Years of the People’s Republic”. In January came the more modest “China Model: Experiences and Difficulties”. Another China-model book was launched in April and debated at an expo-related forum（论坛） in Shanghai. Its enthusiastic authors include Zhao Qizheng, a former top Party propaganda（宣传） official, and John Naisbitt, an American futurologist.  
Western publishers have been no less enthused by China’s continued rapid growth. The most recent entry in the field is “The Beijing Consensus, How China’s Authoritarian Model Will Dominate（占有主要地位，有优势） the Twenty-First Century” by Stefan Halper, an American academic. Mr Halper, who has served as an official in various Republican administrations, argues that “just as globalisation is shrinking（使起皱，使收缩） the world, China is shrinking the West” by quietly limiting the projection of its values. （limiting the projection of its values没懂）
But despite China’s status as “the world’s largest billboard advertisement for the new alternative” of going capitalist（资本主义的，资本家） and staying autocratic（独裁的，专制的）, Party leaders are, as Mr Halper describes it, gripped（握紧，抓牢；引起注意） by a fear of losing control and of China descending into chaos. It is this fear, he says, that is a driving force behind China’s worrying external behaviour. Party rule, the argument runs, depends on economic growth, which in turn depends on resources supplied by unsavoury countries. Politicians in Africa in fact rarely talk about following a “Beijing consensus”. But they love the flow of aid from China that comes without Western lectures about governance and human rights.
The same fear makes Chinese leaders reluctant to wax lyrical about（to talk about something with a lot of enthusiasm） a China model. They are acutely aware of American sensitivity to any talk suggesting the emergence of a rival power and ideology（思想(体系)，思想意识）—and conflict with America could wreck（毁坏） China’s economic growth.
In 2003 Chinese officials began talking of the country’s “peaceful rise”, only to drop the term a few months later amid（在…中间，在…之中，被…围绕） worries that even the word “rise” would upset the flighty（反复无常的） Americans. Zhao Qizheng, the former propaganda official, writes that he prefers “China case” to “China model”. Li Junru, a senior Party theorist, said in December that talk of a China model was “very dangerous” because complacency（自满，自得） might set in that would sap（耗尽） enthusiasm for further reforms.（because之后的这句，句子结构不是很明确）
Some Chinese lament（哀悼；为…而遗憾） that this is already happening. Political reform, which the late architect of China’s developmental model, Deng Xiaoping, once argued was essential for economic liberalisation, has barely progressed since he crushed the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Liu Yawei of the Carter Centre, an American human-rights group wrote last month that efforts by Chinese scholars to promote the idea of a China model have become “so intense and effective” that political reform has been “swept aside”.
Chinese leaders’ fear of chaos suggests they themselves are not convinced that they have found the right path. Talk of a model is made all the harder by the stability-threatening problems that breakneck（极危险的） growth engenders（产生）, from environmental destruction to rampant（猖獗的，肆虐的；过于繁茂的） corruption（腐化；贪污；贿赂） and a growing gap between rich and poor. One of China’s more outspoken（直言不讳的） media organisations, Caixin, this week published an article by Joseph Nye, an American academic. In it Mr Nye writes of the risks posed by China’s uncertain political trajectory（弹道轨道）. “Generations change, power often creates hubris（过份自傲，目中无人） and appetites sometimes grow with eating,” he says. （没有太理解这句话的意思，感觉Mr Nye想要说明的是中国快速发展所带来的越来越膨胀的欲望或者说是“ambition”，可是前面的内容都是在说中国现在发展存在一大堆的问题，中国领导人担心这些问题会造成混乱，他们有这么多问题要解决，担心还来不及呢，怎么还有功夫去向未来的ambition啊，高手们给我指点一下迷津吧）
One Western diplomat, using the term made famous by Mr Nye, describes the expo as a “competition between soft powers”. But if China’s soft power is in the ascendant and America’s declining—as many Chinese commentators write—the event, which is due to end on October 31st, hardly shows it. True, China succeeded in persuading a record number of countries to take part. But visitor turnout has been far lower than organisers had anticipated. And queues outside America’s dour（阴沉的; 冷峻的,难以取悦的） pavilion（大帐篷；亭子） have been among the longest.
终于把这篇做完了，可是随之产生了一大堆的问题，先就文章说吧，整篇文章的核心是“china model”，作者并没有明确的表露自己的观点（不知道是不是我没看出来），大部分在介绍这个model所引发的讨论和现象。开篇拿世博开刀，就算你中国政府不承认你的china model,可是这次世博会的庞大阵势也足以dazzle出来了。第二段从一堆数字上看出中国在世界上的形象还是想好的一面发展的。第三段指出在中国的leader眼里，china model是绝对的敏感词。第四段指出了china model这个话题的狂热程度。第五段介绍了西方的观点，不过最后一点没看懂。第六段觉得很深刻，the world’s largest billboard advertisement for the new alternative” of going capitalist（资本主义的，资本家） and staying autocratic（独裁的，专制的）这个地方提出了大家所共同关注的。两种发展模式，中国的崛起是否就以为这一党专政好。第七段又提到了china case,这个词，中国政府心里比较能承受。第八段，提到了邓小平，提到了89。第十段没懂，最后一段回到世博，确实今天在新周刊上看到的数字，售出的票不到4000万，比计划的7000万少了近一半，但愿最后别赔了，要不，纳税人的钱有打水漂了！
我不知道大家看完这篇文章什么感觉，我看完了以后感觉超级乱！

lty900301UID: 2715509

Rewarding American bosses
Nay on pay
America’s shareholders find a voice to condemn undeserved compensation
May 13th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition

IT IS too soon to call it a trend, but the fact that America’s normally passive shareholders have voted against executive pay packages at two big companies within a week suggests that something is going on. The 54% of votes cast against the remuneration(报酬，酬劳) of Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s chief executive(执行者), at the phonemaker’s annual meeting on May 3rd, marked the first time that American shareholders had ever rejected a boss’s pay. Four days later they did it again, voting against the wages of Ray Irani, boss of Occidental Petroleum.

Such expressions of discontent（不满） are unprecedented（空前的） in America, not least because until recently no one bothered to ask shareholders to approve executive pay. Last year was the first time a significant number of American firms gave shareholders a “say on pay”（求解）, although the votes are usually not binding（捆绑的）, and many of the firms that have adopted them were forced to do so as a condition of a government bail-out（以优先发给股东作为红利之行为）. This year around 300 big companies are giving shareholders a vote. If certain proposals in the financial-reform bill now before Congress become law, say on pay will become the norm for American public companies, as it already is in Britain.

In 2003 Jean-Pierre Garnier, the chief executive at the time of GlaxoSmithKline, became the first boss to lose a shareholder vote under the say-on-pay rules adopted in Britain a year earlier. The first two Americans to suffer the indignity of defeat made obvious targets. The $52.2m that Occidental paid Mr Irani for his services in 2009 not only made him the highest-paid boss at America’s 200 biggest firms; it also made him one of the most overpaid, once the performance of his firm’s shares is taken into account. Graef Crystal, a veteran analyst of undeserved executive pay, had singled out（挑出） Mr Irani’s package for criticism on the grounds that the payment was in cash and that Mr Irani’s performance targets had been lowered.

As for Mr Jha, Motorola’s board seems to have ignored the shot fired across its bow（求解） by shareholders last year, when over one-third of them opposed his pay package. The board’s decision to give him a stake of up to 3% in the company he will run if Motorola is split in two, or a guaranteed payment if the planned break-up does not happen by June 2011, seems to have provoked the No vote.

One test of the significance of the two reversals（逆转） will be how the boards of Motorola and Occidental respond. So far they have only issued boilerplate （n.样板文件，引用）comments, promising to engage with shareholders “to get a better understanding of any specific concerns they may have” (Motorola) and to use their input to “re-evaluate the company’s compensation philosophy, objectives and policies” (Occidental).

Another test will be how widespread shareholder activism（n.行动主义；激进主义） on pay becomes. Saying no to the greediest outliers may have little impact on remuneration at the average firm. “I’d have liked to see more No votes at other companies,” says Nell Minow of the Corporate Library, which conducts research on corporate governance. She had expected pay at firms bailed out by the government to come under close scrutiny（详细审查） from shareholders, but so far that particular dog has failed to bark（很形象的比喻）.

In Britain, No votes have remained a rarity since shareholders snubbed（vt.冷落） Mr Garnier. Indeed, it was not until last year that another pay package got a majority of No votes—that of Royal Dutch Shell’s senior executives. However, activists argue that the right to vote on pay has led to far more consultation of shareholders by boards seeking to ensure that pay packages will not be controversial（有争议的）.

Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School argues that shareholder rights in general are less strong in America than Britain, “so there may be less pressure on boards to react to signals sent by shareholders.” It is much harder for American shareholders, for example, to force out recalcitrant(反抗的，反对的) directors. So much will depend on two other reforms currently under consideration in Congress. The first would require would-be directors to win a majority of votes cast to secure seats on a board. At present at many American firms, directors can be elected despite overwhelming opposition if no other candidates win more votes—something that is quite common because it is hard to get onto the ballot in the first place. For that reason, the second reform would make it easier for shareholders to nominate candidates.

Thus empowered（获得授权的）, shareholders should be able to sling off（离开） the board members of compensation committees who ignore their advice on pay. In particular, they would be likely to target the chair of the compensation committee—people such as Spencer Abraham, a former energy secretary and senator who holds the position at Occidental, and Samuel Scott, a former boss of Corn Products International, at Motorola—who are arguably more to blame for excessive pay packages than the bosses who receive them.

azure9UID: 2789030

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
What Is a Philosopher?
By Simon Critchley

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.

The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.
By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

azure9UID: 2789030

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
What Is a Philosopher?
By Simon Critchley

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

milennia: A millennium is a period of one thousand consecutive years.

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices(人家不說enough) for all those who engage in philosophy.”

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently(不注意的) presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for(分配給) the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra(漏壺，水時鐘), which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler(盜用公款者). The pettifogger(騙人的律師), the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.

implication: something that is inferred (deduced or entailed or implied);
                 a charge that implicates someone (usually of wrongdoing).
                 a relation implicated by virtue of involvement or close connection (especially an incriminating involvement);

The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

deceptive: causing one to believe what is not true or fail to believe what is true
                tending to deceive or mislead either deliberately or inadvertently

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize(進行哲學探討) is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

salute: an act of honor or courteous recognition
           an act of greeting with friendly words and gestures like bowing or lifting the hat

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.
這段貌似托福裡面某類題可以用。ISSUE里應該也有類似問題需要討論

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

impiety: unrighteousness by virtue of lacking respect for a god

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism(无神论), philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious(我想到敏感詞，哈~), even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.

blasphemous: grossly irreverent toward what is held to be sacred

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters(口吃).”

obsesse:haunt like a ghost; pursue
             be preoccupied with something
eloquent:expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively
perplexed: full or difficulty or confusion or bewilderment

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】6-1

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm What Is a Philosopher? By Simon Critchley There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（千年期） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus（达成一致）, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（好句）. What I’d like to do in the opening column（类似写作栏目的开篇之作？？） in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（solve the problem?） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.” What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（滑稽剧演员）, the butt（笑柄） of countless jokes from Aristophanes（阿里斯托芬，古希腊诗人）’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty（必定的事物） Pythonesque（滑稽的） definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly. But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim. But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off（原意为剥皮，这里为一层一层剥开） more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them（remind me of a sentence: Freedom is a wide and risky river; it can drown the person who does not know how to swim across it.）. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity(混乱), fascination and curiosity. By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression（离题，脱轨）” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further（可用于更深一层分析）, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked（坏事情） things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster（奸诈的人）.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness（另一个世界的）, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly. Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores（风俗习惯） and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth（没搞懂这是啥玩意儿？）. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere. This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（无信仰的） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life. A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks（可以用来取来various people have various opinions 哈！）. Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.” Of course, one might object（反对）, that ridiculing someone’s stammer（结巴） isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time（描述生活环境可用）, there is something dreadfully uncanny（神秘的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

azure9UID: 2789030

high or low birth只出生的高低貴賤

lty900301UID: 2715509

Comments 6-1 [学习]

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm
What Is a Philosopher（哲学:funk: ）?
By Simon Critchley

There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（千年） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off（开始，不错的短语！） by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression（离题，脱轨）, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does.

Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts（据说，挺好的用法！） the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant（女仆） girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.”（可以应用）

What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock（笑柄）, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly.

But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists（讽刺家，讽刺作家）. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim.

But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off（剥去） more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted（拨给，为。。。分配） for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them.、
//这一段写到了时间对于律师的重要性。。可以借鉴


The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity（困惑，混乱）, fascination and curiosity.
By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor（对话者，谈话者）, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity.

Pushing this a little further, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute（致敬） each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder.

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.（excellent sentence.）

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety(不虔诚) towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin（犯罪） twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness（理想世界，空想） and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent（雄辩的，有口才的）, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

agnes2010UID: 2794922

【COMMENT】6-1studied by Agnes

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm What Is a Philosopher? By Simon Critchley There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia 三千年of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing（这里是比喻，可以背下来以后用）. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. provocative:煽动性的；引诱的 digression: a message that departs from the main subject; wandering from the main path of a journey Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest suffices for all those who engage in philosophy.” intently: with strained or eager attention;"listened intently""stood watching intently" witty:“褒" combining clever conception and facetious expression suffice: be sufficient;be adequate, either in quality or quantity What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon, the butt of countless jokes from Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly. compel: force or compel somebody to do something clumsiness: unskillfulness resulting from a lack of training; the carriage of someon whose movements and posture are ungainly or inelegant; the inelegance of someone stiff and unrelaxed worldly:世俗的 But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim. inadvertently: without knowledge or intention 不经意地 But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor对话者, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. deceptive：可欺骗的 Pushing this a little further进一步推进这一点, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder. salute: an act of honor or courteous recognition; a formal military gesture of respect; an act of greeting with friendly words and gestures like bowing or lifting the hat. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued甜言蜜语的, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd精明狡猾的 and a shyster狡猾的律师.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly. Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions习俗和公约 that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank不求名利头衔 and inherited privilege和继承的特权 and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth不在乎任何人的出身. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere. This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life. impiety: 不孝 不敬 in defense of 为……辩护 A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks. Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher.也许笑到最后的人是…… Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of 叙述 说明 justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed 困惑and stutters结巴.” obsess： haunt like a ghost maintaining the status quo: 保持现状 eloquent: expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge. redicule：language or behavior intended to mock or humiliate

azure9UID: 2789030

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm
Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving
By Stanley Fish

The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash between two bad paradigms.

The first paradigm is embedded in and configures the bill’s targeted program, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic curriculum” and “a pedagogy based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny have been internalized by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical effort to liberate yourself from them.

That effort is education, properly reconceived not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”

To say that this view of education is political is to understate the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherents as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude so that they can join the effort to topple it. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.”

If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra in the world of educational theory.)

It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction.

This is one case, however, where the remedy is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandates the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial tone, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred.

This would be a great surprise to those communitarian theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence.

But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious purposes must be banished from public education.

The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize history and social studies.”

Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

azure9UID: 2789030

Death of advertising greatly exaggerated
By: Contributed Content, Malaysia
Published: May 13, 2010

As I read yet another article about the impending death of advertising and how trust is the new social slayer of all things one-way, I couldn't help but wonder if any of these dissenting voices were going anywhere. Or if they were relevant to begin with.

On one end, you have many people claiming advertising is dead, simply because the nature of social opinion has negated its impact. On the other, we know that despite how trust and peer advice is king, advertising still works. There is simply more to the hyperbole behind trust and influence than is superficially perceived.

The argument against advertising is simple: trust versus spam.
For all its purported ability to reach a large volume of consumers it suffers from one fundamental flaw - it is disruptive.

Simply put, you would not tolerate a stranger butting into your conversation in a face-to-face situation, and that interruption is also deemed as being equally rude online.
This inevitably leads pundits to the conclusion that content, for the most part, needs to be free.

Any aversion to this belief is often met with some rather heated exchanges, as was the case of
Jaron Lanier, who received death threats after suggesting that authors deserved to be paid for their content,.
It has also been consistently demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source carry a much lower credibility rating than those from peers with no identifiable vested interest.
In short, I trust my friends or, at the very least, anyone who seems to be like me.
If you're on the side of the client, then you're the enemy, and everything you say is questionable hype. Hardly anyone will argue this point with you, as forums, social networks and public relations practitioners will tell you that trust is the new brand and marketing holy grail.
However, as we huff and puff about how traditional advertising is the anti-hero of the social trust movement, online advertising, now a USD59 billion global industry, continues to disprove what the numbers are showing.
Yes, we have seen and will continue to see a precipitous drop in online newspaper ad revenue, but we seem to be distracted by the misfortunes of news sites to notice that advertising has and always will continue to work in other channels.
Spending on advertising using digital media channels makes up more than 10% of overall worldwide advertising spending. And while the recent economic downturn has somewhat dampened that growth, the advent of digital marketers saw the rapid migration from traditional media to new media, potentially at the expense of the former.
Digital marketers will continue to grow smarter as well, employing targeted advertising based on an individual's specific profiles and habits, allowing future marketers to charge a premium on potentially high-yield campaigns.
As much as we'd like to think the web has changed the way we perceive value, there is the undeniable truth that all of the content you're enjoying online is monetized in some way, whether you would want to acknowledge it or not.
Advertising helps keep quality content alive on your favorite website and, while its machinations may not be immediately transparent to you, the few who click on banner ads and participate in online quizzes and contests help in some way to provide administrators the ability to float their operations.
Speak to any blogger about advertising revenue if you need further convincing. As much as we'd like to slam advertising as being irrelevant and intrusive, it significantly helps to keep the internet alive, for no real content creation can survive on the warm approvals of fans alone.
People say that the problem isn't so much about advertising and its importance to a website's survival, but how it reaches them.
However, as marketers move towards targeted advertising, we will continue to see placements which are more relevant to your needs, and when they become relevant, they stop becoming noise.
We may see an age when advertising finds its place among reputation management as the prevailing form of consumer engagement and, as they continue to figure out how to become more effective in a less annoying manner, it will soon become hard to tell PR from sell.
We should all hope that by that time, we will be smart enough to know the difference.

polosongruiUID: 2595436

Innovation in history
Getting better all the time
The biological, cultural and economic forces behind human progress
May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
THIRTY years ago, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous bet. Mr Simon, a libertarian, was sceptical(持怀疑态度的) of the gloomy claims made by Mr Ehrlich, an ecologist best known for his predictions of environmental chaos and human suffering that would result from the supposed “population bomb”. Thumbing his nose at such notions as resource scarcity（缺乏，不足）, Mr Simon wagered（赌注，打赌） that the price of any five commodities chosen by Mr Ehrlich would go down over the following decade. The population bomb was defused, and Mr Simon handily won the bet.
Now, Matt Ridley has a similarly audacious（无畏的，胆大的） bet in mind. A well-known British science writer (and former Economist journalist), Mr Ridley has taken on the mantle（继承） of rational（理性的） optimism from the late Mr Simon. In his new book, he challenges those nabobs （大人物，富豪）of negativity who argue that the world cannot possibly feed 9 billion mouths, that Africa is destined（注定） to fail and that the planet is heading for a climate disaster. He boldly predicts that in 2110, a much bigger world population could enjoy more and better food produced on less land than is used by farming today—and even return lots of farmland to wilderness.
However, mankind cannot hope to achieve this if it turns its back on（对...不理不睬） innovation. Feeding another 2 billion people or more will, of course, mean producing much more food. Genetically modified (GM) agriculture could play an important role, as this technology can greatly increase yields（产量） while using smaller inputs of fertiliser, insecticide and water. Many years of field experience in the Americas and Asia have shown GM crops to be safe, but, Mr Ridley rightly complains, the Luddites of（惟恐失业而反对用机器生产者） the green and organic movements continue to obstruct progress.
The progress (and occasional retardation（迟缓）) of innovation is the central theme of Mr Ridley’s sweeping work. He starts by observing that humans are the only species capable of innovation. Other animals use tools, and some ants, for example, do specialise at certain tasks. But these skills are not cumulative, and the animals in question（有关动物） do not improve their technologies from generation to generation. Only man innovates continuously.
Why should that be? Some have suggested that perhaps it is the chemistry of big brains that leads us to tinker. Others that man’s mastery of language or his capacity for imitation and social learning hold the key. Mr Ridley, a zoologist by training, weighs up（权衡，估量） these arguments but insists, in the end, that the explanation lies not within man’s brain but outside: innovation is a collective phenomenon. The way man’s collective brain grows, he says cheekily, is by “ideas having sex”.
His own theory is, in a way, the glorious offspring that would result if Charles Darwin’s ideas were mated with those of Adam Smith. Trade, Mr Ridley insists, is the spark that lit the fire of human imagination, as it made possible not only the exchange of goods, but also the exchange of ideas. Trade also encouraged specialisation, since it rewarded individuals and communities who focus on areas of comparative advantage. Such specialists, in contrast with their generalist rivals（竞争对手） or ancestors, had the time and the incentive（刺激，鼓励） to develop better methods and technologies to do their tasks.
It is this culture of continuous improvement, which was only accelerated by the industrial revolution, that explains the astonishing improvements in the human condition over time. Through most of history, most people lived lives of quiet desperation（铤而走险，拼命）, humiliating（使蒙羞，羞辱，使丢脸） servitude（奴隶状态；苦役） and grinding（磨(碎)；折磨） poverty. And yet, despite the pessimistic proclamations of Mr Ehrlich and many other pundits（权威人士，专家）, economic growth and technological progress have come to the rescue over and over again.
The visible hand
As Mr Simon did in his classic work, “It’s Getting Better all the Time” (2000), Mr Ridley provides ample（足够的；宽敞的，面积大的） statistical（统计的，统计学的） evidence here to show that life has indeed got better for most people in most places on most measures. Whether one counts air and water pollution in California or vaccination（预防注射） rates in Bangladesh or life expectancy（the average life span of an individual） in Japan, his conclusion is indisputable（无可辩驳的；不容置疑的）. It does, however, highlight one of the book’s minor flaws（较小的瑕疵）: an over-anxious cramming（塞进；塞满） in of too many obscure（不著名的；费解的） statistics and calculations that should have been relegated（使降级，使降职） to footnotes or an annex（附属建筑物）.
Another is the author’s slightly unfair attitude towards government. Mr Ridley makes it abundantly clear that he is a free marketeer, and he provides ample evidence from history that governments are often incompetent and anti-innovation: “The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs（法老） is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.” He is particularly suspicious of strong governments, which he equates with monopolies（垄断，专卖）—and those, he insists, “always grow complacent, stagnant（停滞的；萧条的 ）and self-serving.”
He is right that the leaden hand of the state has often suppressed individual freedom and creativity. However, he does not fully acknowledge that some problems do, in fact, require government intervention（介入，干涉，干预）—especially because markets themselves can sometimes fail spectacularly. Mr Ridley surely knows this, as he was forced to resign as non-executive chairman of Northern Rock, the first British bank to be rescued by the government during the financial crisis. Yet the most he will say about that affair is that he is now mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, but unflinchingly（不妥协地） in favour of markets in goods and services.
Mr Ridley is also generally sceptical about global warming, and worries that government policies advocated by greens today will be like treating a nosebleed by putting a tourniquet（止血带 ） around one’s neck. He argues that the problem, if it exists, will be solved by bottom-up innovation in energy technologies. But to accomplish that, he wants governments to “enact a heavy carbon tax, and cut payroll taxes.”
That is a sensible prescription (often advocated by this newspaper), but surely a “heavy” tax suggests there is a role for government in fixing market failures? He glosses too over the vital role that air-quality regulations played in cleaning up smog in California, choosing to focus instead on the inventions—like the catalytic converter（催化式排气净化器） and low-sulphur（硫） fuel—that arose as a result of those technology-forcing measures.
Still, he is on the mark with the big things. “The bottom-up world is to be the great theme of this century,” declares Mr Ridley in the closing pages of this sunny book. He is surely right. Thanks to the liberating forces of globalisation and Googlisation, innovation is no longer the preserve of technocratic（技术专家统治论的） elites in ivory towers. It is increasingly an open, networked and democratic endeavour.
If man really can find a way of harnessing（治理，利用） the innovative capacity of 9 billion bright sparks, then the audacious prediction about feeding the much hungrier world of 2110 using less land than today may very well be proven right too. After all, man’s greatest asset is his ability to harness that one natural resource that remains infinite in quantity: human ingenuity（独创性，巧妙）.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

【COMMENT】7-1

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving By Stanley Fish The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash（破坏） between two bad paradigms.（好句） The first paradigm is embedded in and configures the bill’s targeted program（“组成”还可以这样表达撒）, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic（支配，霸权） curriculum” and “a pedagogy（教育学） based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed（压迫）.” Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst（？？） when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny（暴政） have been internalized by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical effort（比 great 好多了） to liberate yourself from them. underwrite: 签在。。。之下，给。。。保险，支付承诺 They underwrote the coal mine's bond.他们同意买下该煤矿仍未认购的股票。 That effort is education, properly reconceived（重新构思） not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.”（这一段用在Issue 130 最恰当不过了） To say that this view of education is political is to understate the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherents（追随者，可以取代followers） as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy labors to occlude（闭塞，封住） so that they can join the effort to topple it（没用turn upside down）. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site) pledges(抵押，誓言，保证) to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.” If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse（假马，引申为借口） or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra（颂歌，咒语） in the world of educational theory.) It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization（忽视，互斥，边缘化，排斥） and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic（导致。。）, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction. This is one case, however, where the remedy is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it（用来比喻用ethnic course来解决hegemonic的问题）. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandates the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial tone（定调）, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship（确定了。。的关系） between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred. This would be a great surprise to those communitarian theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie（比喻普通的美国人？？）, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence（法学体系）. But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate（审问） it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious（邪恶的） purposes must be banished from public education. The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric（有点偏比喻的意味，用得好，照应了前面的treatment跟disease）. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize（消毒，去毒措施） history and social studies.” Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing（改变宗教信仰）; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】6-1 【学习】

May 16, 2010, 5:00 pm What Is a Philosopher?By Simon Critchley There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia（(millennium的复数)千年的意思） of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher? As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes（注脚） to Plato（柏拉图）. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative（挑衅的） definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression（离题）.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. Socrates tells the story of Thales, who was by some accounts the first philosopher. He was looking so intently at the stars that he fell into a well. Some witty Thracian servant girl is said to have made a joke at Thales’ expense — that in his eagerness to know what went on in the sky he was unaware of the things in front of him and at his feet. Socrates adds, in Seth Benardete’s translation, “The same jest（玩笑） suffices for（足以） all those who engage in philosophy.” What is a philosopher, then? The answer is clear: a laughing stock, an absent-minded buffoon（健忘的滑稽的人）, the butt of（受到……的嘲讽） countless jokes from Aristophanes（古希腊诗人）’ “The Clouds” to Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, part one.” Whenever the philosopher is compelled to talk about the things at his feet, he gives not only the Thracian girl but the rest of the crowd a belly laugh. The philosopher’s clumsiness（笨拙） in worldly affairs makes him appear stupid or, “gives the impression of plain silliness.” We are left with a rather Monty Pythonesque definition of the philosopher: the one who is silly. But as always with Plato, things are not necessarily as they first appear, and Socrates is the greatest of ironists. First, we should recall that Thales believed that water was the universal substance out of which all things were composed. Water was Thales’ philosophers’ stone, as it were. Therefore, by falling into a well, he inadvertently presses his basic philosophical claim. But there is a deeper and more troubling layer of irony here that I would like peel off more slowly. Socrates introduces the “digression” by making a distinction between the philosopher and the lawyer, or what Benardete nicely renders as the “pettifogger.” The lawyer is compelled to present a case in court and time is of the essence（非常必要，实质精华）. In Greek legal proceedings, a strictly limited amount of time was allotted for the presentation of cases. Time was measured with a water clock or clepsydra, which literally steals time, as in the Greek kleptes, a thief or embezzler. The pettifogger, the jury, and by implication the whole society, live with the constant pressure of time. The water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity（困惑）, fascination and curiosity. By contrast, we might say, the philosopher is the person who has time or who takes time. Theodorus, Socrates’ interlocutor, introduces the “digression” with the words, “Aren’t we at leisure, Socrates?” The latter’s response is interesting. He says, “It appears we are.” As we know, in philosophy appearances can be deceptive（欺骗性的）. But the basic contrast here is that between the lawyer, who has no time, or for whom time is money, and the philosopher, who takes time. The freedom of the philosopher consists in either moving freely from topic to topic or simply spending years returning to the same topic out of perplexity, fascination and curiosity. Pushing this a little further（可以学习使用）, we might say that to philosophize is to take your time, even when you have no time, when time is constantly pressing at our backs. The busy readers of The New York Times will doubtless understand this sentiment（基于情感的观点看法）. It is our hope that some of them will make the time to read The Stone. As Wittgenstein says, “This is how philosophers should salute（敬礼） each other: ‘Take your time.’ ” Indeed, it might tell you something about the nature of philosophical dialogue to confess that my attention was recently drawn to this passage from Theaetetus in leisurely discussions with a doctoral student at the New School, Charles Snyder. Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted（弯曲和发育不良）” and they are compelled “to do crook（弯曲）ed things.” The pettifogger（讼棍;骗人的律师） is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly. Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere. This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety（无信仰） towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to（不得不） speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life. A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy（亵渎神明） against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness（来世） and lack of respect social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks. Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with（迷恋） maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent（有口才的）, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.” Of course, one might object, that ridiculing someone’s stammer isn’t a very nice thing to do. Benardete rightly points out that Socrates assigns every kind of virtue to the philosopher apart from moderation. Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny（难以理解的） about the philosopher, something either monstrous（丑恶的） or god-like or indeed both at once. This is why many sensible people continue to think the Athenians had a point in condemning Socrates to death. I leave it for you to decide. I couldn’t possibly judge.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【COMMENT】7-1【学习】

May 17, 2010, 6:15 pm Arizona: The Gift That Keeps On Giving By Stanley Fish The loud debate over the recently passed Arizona House Bill 2281, which bans from the public schools ethnic studies courses that promote race consciousness, is a clash（撞击） between two bad paradigms(样式，模范). The first paradigm is embedded in and configure（使成形）s the bill’s targeted program, the Mexican American Studies Department of the Tucson Unified School District, which, its Web site tells us, adheres to the Social Justice Education Project model. That model includes “a counter-hegemonic（反霸权主义） curriculum” and “a pedagogy（教育学） based on the theories of Paulo Freire.” Freire, a Brazilian educator, is the author of the widely influential book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed（受压迫的）.” Freire argues that the structures of domination and oppression in a society are at their successful worst（？？？） when the assumptions and ways of thinking that underwrite their tyranny（承担他们的暴政） have been internalized（使内在化） by their victims: “The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.” If the ideas and values of the oppressor are all you ever hear, they will be yours — that is what hegemony means — and it will take a special and radical（完全的，彻底的） effort to liberate yourself from them. That effort is education, properly reconceived（重述） not as the delivery of pre-packaged knowledge to passive students, but as the active dismantling（分解）, by teachers and students together, of the world view that sustains the powers that be and insulates（与……隔绝） them from deep challenge. Only when this is done, says Freire, will students cease to “adapt to the word as it is” and become “transformers of that world.” To say that this view of education is political is to understate（少说） the point, although that descriptive will not be heard by its adherent（支持者）s as a criticism. The Social Justice Education Project means what its title says: students are to be brought to see what the prevailing orthodoxy（正统观点） labors to occlude（堵塞） so that they can join the effort to topple（打到） it. To this end the Department of Mexican American Studies (I quote again from its Web site)（在作文时如有引用也应如此） pledge（保证）s to “work toward the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student” and “promote and advocate for social and educational transformation.” If the department is serious about this (and we must assume that it is), then there is something for the citizens of Arizona to be concerned about. The concern is not ethnic studies per se（本质上）(好词！) — a perfectly respectable topic of discussion and research involving the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, medicine, economics, literature, public policy and art, among others. The concern is ethnic studies as a stalking horse（？？） or Trojan horse of a political agenda, even if the agenda bears the high-sounding name of social justice. (“Teaching for Social Justice” is a pervasive and powerful mantra（颂歌） in the world of educational theory.) It is certainly possible to teach the literature and history (including the history of marginalization and discrimination) of ethnic traditions without turning students into culture warriors ready to man (and woman) the barriers. To be sure, the knowledge a student acquires in an ethnic studies course that stays clear of indoctrination may lead down the road to counter-hegemonic, even revolutionary, activity; you can’t control what students do with the ideas they are exposed to. But that is quite different from setting out deliberately（故意地） to produce that activity as the goal of classroom instruction. This is one case, however, where the remedy（治疗法） is worse than the disease, or rather is a form of it. Rather than removing politics from the classroom, House Bill 2281 mandate（授权）s the politics of its authors, who, in the bill’s declaration of policy, set themselves up as educational philosophers and public moralists, and even, given the magisterial（权威的） tone, as gods: “The Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or other classes of people.” The declaration tendentiously, and without support either of argument or evidence, affirms a relationship between critically questioning the ideology of individual rights — and make no mistake, it is an ideology — and the production of racism and hatred. This would be a great surprise to those communitarian（共产主义） theorists like Robert Bellah, Michael Sandel and Robert Putnam, generally as American as apple pie（典型美国式的；好！）, who contend that an excessive focus on the individual results in an unhealthy atomization and tends to loosen and even undo the ties that bind society together. The idea of treating people as individuals is certainly central to the project of Enlightenment liberalism, and functions powerfully in much of the nation’s jurisprudence（法学）. But it is an idea, not a commandment handed down from on high, and as such it deserves to be studied, not worshipped. The authors of House Bill 2281 don’t want students to learn about the ethic of treating people equally; they want them to believe in it (as you might believe in the resurrection（耶稣复活）), and therefore to believe, as they do, that those who interrogate（询问） it and show how it has sometimes been invoked in the service of nefarious（极坏的） purposes must be banished from public education. The moral is simple: you don’t cure (what I consider) the virus of a politicized classroom by politicizing it in a different direction, even if that direction corresponds to the notions of civic virtue that animate much of our national rhetoric（修辞学）. The political scientist James Bernard Murphy has been arguing for years that teaching civic virtue is not an appropriate academic activity, both because schools are not equipped to do it and because the effort undermines the true function of education — “enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge” — and even corrupts it. Teaching students either to love or criticize their nation, Murphy wrote in The Times in 2002, “has all too often prompted textbook authors and teachers to falsify, distort and sanitize history and social studies.” Lots of evidence of that in Arizona on all sides of the dispute. Teach ethnic studies by all means, but lay off the recruiting and proselytizing（改变宗教信仰）; for if you don’t you merely put a weapon in the hands of ignorant and grandstanding（看台） state legislators who, as the example of Arizona shows, will always be eager to use it.