Experiments in Ethics

Experiments in Ethics (by Kwame Anthony Appiah) was an amazing book. It was a fast read--it's not too long--but very engaging, complex, and like a piece of art, better the more you applied from the outside world to the text. I just finished it now during work (instead of looking up information on Uruguay...well, while looking up information on Uruguay...). I did extend my coffee break, and read it on the Metro, but no matter! It is finished, so all my intense reading today was totally worth it.

The entire time I referred to Appiah as a she, and I could never figure out why, and it turns out he's gay (looked him up on Wiki!), so, as Alyssa puts it, "That's probably why you thought he was a girl." Now I'll be connecting him to Michael in my mind all the time, because I miss Michael very much, but that will make my appreciation of his work even more awesome, so it's a good thing. I was very moved by the book as a whole, and was almost moved to tears this morning, but it's not a very appropriate thing to do during a coffee break, especially in front of a cafeteria full of employees. It felt like a mix of philosophy, very fun journalism (a la Freakonomics, a la The Omnivore's Dilemma), and literary criticism.

The entire book centered around ethics, but did so in such a way that it would show the faults in many ways we look at ethics, and then show that these faults, once we are aware of them, allows us to better our ethical views. The way he played around with ethics was absolutely wonderful, and it makes more sense now to know that, other than being affiliated with philosophy, he's affiliated with comparative literature and translation. I'm considering e-mailing him and letting him know I'm a fan, and that I'd love to talk about the criss-cross between comp lit and philosophy. This is especially important because many consider the two to be quite opposite one another (i.e.- East v. West dichotomy), but once you bring cosmopolitanism into the picture, the exact opposite happens, and there are many things the two subjects have in common with one another. (Come on. Everything relates back to philosophy.) I'm also apparently, for a while, the only person at school to double major in Philosophy and Comp Lit, so it'd be good to talk to someone who's a big fan of both (even though, Prof Deppman is big into philosophy and literature--but he focuses on continental philosophy, mostly).

This book, and George Michael's song 'I want your sex,' have made work today quite wonderful.