Cottingham Festschrift

Today, in the University Library, I had a look (in the West Room) at John Cottingham's very recent Festschrift in the hope of some enlightenment about his philosophy of religion, a critique of which presently comprises a chapter of my thesis. Both happily and frustratingly, his work was not criticized along my lines. Cottingham's own contribution to this volume, however, furnished me with some interesting ideas and pleasing quotations. I cannot resist reproducing my favourite. Cottingham is discussing the difference in style between 'analytic' and 'continential' philosophy; analytic philosophers behave, he says,

as if locutions like 'it seems to me as if I may now be being appeared to red-ly' must automatically trump declarations like 'the conceptuality of rednees posits itself phenomenologically in the domain of subjectivity'. Both sorts of jargon tend to make me see red.

[Reference: 'The Self, the Good Life and the Transcendent' in N. Athanassoulis and S. Vice (eds.) The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 231-274, 233.]

If any of my coterie of readers has an overbearing interest in soft furnishings, they should look out for tomorrow's post. 'tis the Eve of the Curtain Saga!