“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, October 6, 2011

Harman Interview

I like all of it, of course, but this gives you a strong sense of his view of his project, compressed into a vivid metaphor:

Looking a few years down the line, I plan to do what everyone in philosophy hopes to do at some point: put all of my best ideas in one book and weave them together in an especially convincing way. This project has gone through several provisional titles, but the current one is Infrastructure. It’s a metaphor I like a great deal. A “system” of philosophy tries to cover the entire world with a gridwork from the start. But an infrastructure, as in the case of light rail or subway systems, starts by serving major population centers and builds slowly outward as budget constraints and engineering breakthroughs allow.

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