Against Readings

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Inspiring, and it does indeed apply very well to philosophy (as it was suggested by Steve Clark on philos-l): "This is a paper by Mark Edmunson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's about literary texts, but with some clear relevance to philosophical texts as well."

One may have reservations: what happens to literature (or indeed philosophy), once you're no longer young? Becoming who you are is an endless work in progress, but the point of the article seems to be that there is a stage when most of this work in progress is actually done and that then is when literature/philosophy can play a role. It seems like a Gaussian: texts begin by being irrelevant and end by being irrelevant, peaking in your youth. This is notthe case, or the common practice of re-reading would be meaningless.

And why listening to the professors, when you can read the masters? It is not true that they own the keys to the warehouse.

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