Just a quick word of apology for the lack of blogging of late. I had to hit the ground running on my return from Christmas break. I think I mentioned it, but I need to submit 20,000 words by the end of March. I've probably got half of that done, but there is always editing and revision to think of. Luckily I'm pegging away at it nicely.
In other academic related news, I am really quite thrilled that I am going to Florence to give a paper at the end of the month. There will be some senior academics there and plenty of graduate students as well. And unlike some other conferences, it will just be about the history of political thought. How's that for focus.
I'll be giving a paper with Rob Lamb again, this time on a new subject. Disinterestedness (or the lack of personal interest) and virtue in the thought of Fenelon (my favorite ecclesiastic for the moment), Rousseau, and Godwin. The aim is to show that the kind of disinterestedness in the now much neglected Fenelon is historically important and in different ways makes crucial appearances in the thought of Rousseau and Fenelon.
The notion is that true virtue and virtuous activity must never proceed from any motivation of self interest. The motivation must be totally disconnected with the self in almost every regard. Instead a disinterested love of order, beauty, and God, a kind of rational benevolence, should inform and motivate virtuous action.
But things get better. Not only do I get to go to Florence, I get to stay a whole week, and the whole trip is paid for. How did I become so lucky. We'll I am going to be giving a talk for Early English Books Online. Its a pretty powerful resource, and in it one can read and download pretty much every extant book published in English between 1473 and 1700. This resource has done a great deal of work to evaporate many of the limitations that smaller universities have. I no longer have to go to the Bodleian or to the British Library to access these published texts.
Of course there are shortcomings. Sometimes I can download the full text, it is going to be in a modern lame html format. PDF files are available, but only as individual pages. This is clearly an aesthetic concern more than anything else, but in a real sense, I think, contemporary internet based documents of this kind lack much of the character of the original presentation. In some sense this makes it more difficult to develop a rapport with the original text.
But there is also a less aesthetic reason for highlighting this as a limitation. This is, in understanding the history of ideas, it might be important to have an idea what someone actually read. Knowing what the pages actually looked like, could, conceivably (if not always) be important.
Other times the full text is not available in one document. That means I have to stay at the computer and read at the computer, or download one PDF file after other and print 30, 50, 100 etc. Individual files. Clearly not a workable option. I personally prefer to work with paper copies because I can annotate them. This is something I clearly just can't do with some works.
Anyway, it is exactly this kind of critical exposition that they are expecting. Hopefully it is mainly praise, but a good look at the limitations and shortcomings can help scholars use EEBO more effectively and hopeful convince the people at EEBO to make a few improvements when they are able.
Until then, I'll try to keep the blog updated.
Once more into the breach,
Ben
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