. . . is here.

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Damn, this is well done.

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This semester, I’m having my students read some of Peter Singer’s work in my biomedical ethics class. Singer, in case you don’t keep up with the world of outrageous philosophers, is a very controversial philosopher at Princeton. His support of a very strong version of animal rights, of infanticide, of “desanctifying” human life, and other controversial views has got him a lot of attention. (I find Singer’s views simplistic and wrong-headed, but his writings are also interesting and provocative. All of these qualities have their advantages if you’re trying to generate discussion in the classroom.)

Singer likes to say and write outrageous things. Back in 2001, he wrote a review of a book on the history of bestiality for Nerve.com in which he challenged readers to explain what makes bestiality so bad. Typical Singer. This happened around the time that Singer was appointed to Princeton, a move that was controversial enough to inspire Steve Forbes to stop donating his millions to Princeton, his alma mater. This led to the following exchange between a hapless reporter and Scott McClellan on March 30, 2001:
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Howls of outrage (2)

There are so many things to blog about, and so little time to do it. I’m afraid that I often end up writing short, reactive pieces for this blog instead of ever really working up the more substantive posts I dream up from time to time. Anyway, back a while ago when Jonah Goldberg wrote a monstrously silly post comparing conservatives and liberals on their respective attitudes to their intellectual roots, I thought that I – a raving liberal writing a dissertation on Aristotle – might try to write a reply. Alas, I was too lazy. Also, Goldberg was being so stupid, I wasn’t sure it was worth my time. But John Holbo isn’t lazy – or, at least, isn’t as lazy as me – and apparently it was worth his time. And so he has written this fine response to Goldberg.
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My dissertation is on Aristotle’s view of pleasure, but part of my work requires me to get clear on Aristotle’s main interlocutors on the subject, these being Plato, Speusippus and Eudoxus. Speusippus was Plato’s nephew, and his successor in the Academy¹. Nothing of Speusippus’ actual writings survive. What we have are fragmentary reports of his views, mostly from hostile sources. It is from these fragments that we try to reconstruct what he might have thought about pleasure, among other things.

In my fantasy thesis, which is not the same as my real thesis, I introduce the problem in this way:
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A single voice crying in the wilderness (1)

Although I shudder to think of what it will do to the Google ads at the top of the page, I can’t resist quoting the first paragraph of a response to a review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Just read it and try to tell me that the Greeks weren’t having fun.

Ruden on Clayton on Ruden. Response to BMCR 2003.12.25

Response by Sarah Ruden (sarah@zingsolutions.com)
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Barbara Clayton’s judgment (31 December 2003) of my Lysistrata translation is not harsh all through. I appreciate her words of praise, but I feel I must challenge her decision not to recommend the book for classroom use (in favor of Jeffrey Henderson’s Loeb?). She objects first of all to my obscenity, but she does not fairly represent the amount added over that in the Greek. To consider her initial, charily presented list of words in the translation that struck her: all but three (one being the mild “nookie,” at which a footnote of mine gives a literal translation of the whole relevant phrase) are close renderings of words in the text that the ancient Greeks considered crude (at least when in figurative use in Aristophanes)–and this is according to decades of studies by Henderson, not according to me. Looking at the list, we don’t even need Henderson to tell us, for example, that PANKATAPYGOS, which I translate as “fit for boning up the butt,” is a compound of “all” or “completely,” “down,” and “butt,” “ass,” or “rear end.” The compound is literally about anal intercourse and connotes shamelessness. A more genteel translation than mine would simply not do
justice to Aristophanes. I can’t see how, in context, my use of naughty
slang could rightly be called “excessive,” “extensive” or “going too
far.”

I enjoy the contrast here between icy scholarly tone and the actual content. Can you imagine spending your days arguing over how to capture the nuances of such words?

Myself, I work on Aristotle. He has his moments, but I’m afraid it just isn’t as wild as Aristophanes.

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