Albert B Fernandez's List: Academic material

• The Eliot Way—a stultifying compulsion to weigh the details of everything from pajamas to the PhD—was something Eliot himself knew all too well. In an uncollected essay about Henry Adams, to whom Eliot was distantly related (Adams having been the great-grandson of the second president), he referred to the Eliot Way more generally as the Boston Doubt, “a scepticism which is difficult to explain to those who are not born to it.” Eliot’s ancestor Andrew Eliot had settled in Massachusetts around 1670, and there the family remained until William Greenleaf Eliot, Eliot’s grandfather, moved to St. Louis to establish the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. “This scepticism,” Eliot went on, “is a product, or a cause, or a concomitant, of Unitarianism.” Wherever someone infected with the Eliot Way stepped, “the ground did not simply give way, it flew into particles.” S
• uch people “want to do somet
• ing great,” said Eliot, but “they are predestined failures.”
• Eliot’s first great artistic success grew from an effort to distance himself from the threat of such failure by dramatizing it. Not only the voice but the very linguistic texture of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” embodies the typically Eliotic stalemate between fortitude and inertia (“There will be time…yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred
• Before the taking of a toast and tea”),
• nd revisions
• visions a

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• Philosophy, Étienne Gilson observed, “always buries its undertakers.”
• Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe [that is, ours] can and will create itself from nothing.”
• What of spontaneous creation? When Aquinas and others in the Western natural-theology tradition argued from the character of the universe to the existence of its transcendent cause, they were acute enough to describe that original source of the being and character of things as an uncaused cause and not as the cause of itself. That was a matter of logical coherence, since the idea that something could create itself from nothing simply makes no sense—be that something God or the Universe. In order to create, one first has to exist.
  
• Hawking and Mlodinow write that the “multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning.” Whether or not it was invented as such, its deployment in this context appears ad hoc, introduced only to avoid the conclusion that the general regularities and particular fine-tuning are due to the agency of a creator.
• Science cannot provide an ultimate explanation of order.
  
• it is not only philosophy but also natural theology that is alive and ready to bury its latest would-be undertakers.
  

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• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
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• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Pragmatism Cybrary
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• Peirce's foundational papers for pragmatism as "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878).
• Peirce's foundational papers for pragmatism as "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878).
• Nature and Exp
• The Quest for Certainty:
• Dewey.
• James. Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy. 1907.
• Peirce, C.S. (1877), "How to Make Our Ideas Clear",
• Lectures on Ethics 1900–1901,
• Dewey, John (1929), The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, Minton,
• Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy
• James, William (1907), Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy
• The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings,
• C.S. Peirce, The Fixation of Belief (
• Pragmatism
• James
• Dewey, A short catechism concerning trut
• Pragmatism Cybrary
• Arisbe: The Peirce Gatewa
• Charles S. Peirce Studies

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• ost squarely behind the neoliberal push of the last thirty years, changed the Anglo-American tune and, this past winter, begged their European colleagues to
• their European colleagues to stimulate the Continental economy with borrowed money
• countercyclical spending
• There are at least two Keyneses: the tinkering inspiration for the so-called neo-classical synthesis, who demonstrates the ultimate viability of capitalism in spite of bouts of crisis; and the suave radical whose call for the “the euthanasia of the rentier” doesn’t stop far short of taking the rentier out to be shot.
• This second Keynes lives next door to the Marx who in the Manifesto insisted on the “centralization of credit in the banks of the state,”
• the ideological rout that Marxism began to suffer in the ’70s did what periods in the wilderness are supposed to do: it discouraged bandwagon-jumpers and enforced a new seriousness on those who stuck around.
• David Harvey’s abstract and categorical Limits to Capital (1982),
• analysis of the postwar American, German, and Japanese economies, the idea Marx took from David Ricardo and made his own: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in a situation of free competition.
• from Paul Krugman’s Return of Depression Economics: “In the early 1970s, for reasons that are still somewhat mysterious, growth slowed throughout the advanced world
• The global rate of economic growth has declined from about 3.5 percent annually in the ’60s, to 2.4 percent in the ’70s, to 1.4 percent and 1 percent in the ’80s and ’90s, to 1 percent in this decade—much of which single paltry percentage turns out to have been illusory.
• Meanwhile, financial services, starting in the early ’80s, took a larger and larger share of total income and total profits in the world’s largest economy, until finally finance had become, by last fall, the largest American industry, accruing to itself a quarter of all US prof
• This combination of declining overall growth with burgeoning finance suggests that the connection between finance and investment can’t have been the alleged one: the direction of capital to its most productive uses.
• So there must be a better way to characterize a situation—that of the last decades—in which vast quantities of overaccumulated capital (the neo-Keynesian’s “excess of desired savings”) circle the globe in search of profits, while the vitality of capitalism as a whole steadily diminishes.
• The so-called Golden Age of postwar capitalism from 1950–70—a time of rising wages, profits, and investment—was the product of special and perishable circumstances. The wartime destruction of the Japanese and German productive base meant that, with the resumption of peace and renewed growth in demand for non-military goods, all the major industrial economies could for a time thrive without threat to one another.
• But the maturation of European and Japanese industry toward the end of the ’60s spelled the return of mutually destructive competition. Firms producing internationally tradable goods (cars, electronics, et cetera) could only survive by reducing prices, which in turn reduced profitability.
• The orthodox story blames declining profitability (and price inflation) during the ’70s on the excessive demands of labor—a plausible enough explanation until you consider that the worldwide defeat of labor since the ’80s has failed to restore prior levels of growth.
• What has endured and intensified since then is a systemic bias in favor of short-term financial speculation over longer-term productive investment.
• The replacement of the gold standard by floating currencies encouraged capital to flit from country to country in search of returns magnified by any temporary overvaluation of this or that national fiat money. At th
• e same time, information technology sped transactions along at a new rate and volume.
• 130 billion by 2001. Only about 2 percent of the same sum would be necessary to maintain international trade and productive investment.
• Meanwhile production is guided by the search for low wages. The export-led growth of first Germany and Japan, then the “Asian Tigers,” then China with its endless reserve army of labor has flooded the world with cheapening goods; and between 1985 and 1995 the US itself staged a manufacturing revival through the exporter’s proven formula of cowed labor and an undervalued currency. But this is supply: what about demand?
• The fundamental problem with workers (to whom as much money as possible should be denied if commodities are to be affordable) is that they are also consumers (to whom as much money as possible should be supplied if they are to buy commodities). Marxists aren’t kidding when they talk about the contradictions of capitalism. In the end, as Marx wrote, “the ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.” The result of declining or stagnant real wages since the ’80s has been global industrial overcapacity: too much plant turning out too much stuff for not enough buyers. 
• The structural solution to this dilemma was as ingenious as it was unsustainable. If the global wage-bill couldn’t cover all the world’s gimcrack goods and coastal vacation properties, then consumers—especially American, but also European—had to be extended a new line of credit.
• They would borrow money to buy houses, and then borrow more money, to buy other stuff, against the rising value of these houses!
• rse many new home-buyers plainly couldn’t pay their mortgages; the mortgages were granted on the assumption that someone else ultimately could and would. So present consumer demand was leveraged against a future demand for which there was no plausible source.
• For mortgage brokers operating under the originate-and-distribute model this didn’t matter; they had already pocketed their commissions. And those bundling iffy mortgages into securities comforted themselves with a rhetorical question: What was the likelihood of homeowners defaulting en masse? 
• Harvey completes his thought: “Land price must be realized as future rental appropriation, which rests on future labor” (our italics). The big risk, naturally, is that you will attribute to real estate far more present-day value than can later on be returned to it by labor (in the form of the portion of total income devoted to housing).
• In the world at large, if not always in the bubble-addicted US, recessions have been deeper and longer a
• recoveries ever more feeble since 1973. Already the recovery after the recession of 2001–02 was the weakest on record
• The main stimulus to consumption was the confection of fantastic, improbable, and finally fictitious paper assets.
• Economists of all kinds have pinned their hopes on the transformation of laboring and saving Chinese into hardy consumers.
• In any case, the US consumer—a ravening appetite in a paper house—appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort

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• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course on General
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropolo
• Roland Barthes, Mythologie
• Michel Foucault, The Archeology of K

• Edmund Husserl, Ideas.

  3. Immanuel Kant, Transcendental Aesthetic.
• Stanley Fish, Interpretive Communities.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Se
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
• Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference.
• Georges Bataille, Heterolog
• Jacques Derrida, Differance.
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.
• Jacques Derrida, Semiology and Grammatology.
• Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.
• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations.
• Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of
• Jacques Lacan, The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.
• Frantz Fanon, The Negro and Psychopathology.
• Raymond Williams, The Country and the City.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment.
• Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare and the Exorcists.
• G. W. F. Hegel, Dialectics.
• Karl Marx, Grundrisse.
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology.
• Karl Marx, Wage Labor and Capital.
• Karl Marx, Capital.
• Antonio Gramsci, Hegemony.
• Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel.
• . Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Appa
• Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
• Luce Irigaray, The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of th
• Luce Irigaray, Women on the Market.
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality.
• Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
• Ian Haney-López, The Social Construction of Race.
• . Edward Said, Austen and Empire.
• Walter Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductio
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,The Culture Industry as M
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
• John Fiske, Television Culture.

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