6/30/2023 0 Comments Buzz kill by beth fantaskey![]() ![]() I love how excited she can get about pie, ugly dogs and the prospect of becoming “Sir Millie” at Sir Loin’s Steakhouse for consuming a 60 oz porterhouse in one sitting. ![]() She was just so refreshing and un-self-consciously quirky, with her love of philosophy and social awkwardness and habit of speaking her mind. I can’t remember the last time I was this charmed by a character. ![]() My favorite part of this book, hands-down, was Millie Ostermeyer. Here’s what goes down: when head coach Hollerin’ Hank turns up murdered and her father is implicated, high school senior Millie Ostermeyer taps into her journalistic skills and goes on the hunt for a killer. Reviewed by Melissa Rader (Library Staff) ![]()
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![]() ![]() The staff at Monticello has not forgotten him either. I’ll never forget the ride down the mountain that night with Christopher flying along the winding road cut out of deep forest, a road that is treacherous even in the daytime. So, he was well pleased, as was I to be able to show off my friend in that setting. Christopher got into an argument with a devout Catholic at dinner. Lots of people showed up and bought books. ![]() Almost before I knew it, the book was done, and we were on our way to the Mountain. fest over an early lunch in the East Village that stretched throughout the afternoon until we ordered dinner and continued talking until he had to go teach his class at the New School. ![]() So, it meant a great deal to me when he got the Jefferson bug (much to his delight, he and the Sage shared a birth date), and I was able to talk to him about a subject that was to become my life’s work. ![]() When I published my first book on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, he sometimes managed to work me, and the title, into his writings and public appearances when he did not have to. Over the years Christopher was (it hurts so to write that) unfailingly supportive as I made the transition from lawyer to writer/professor. ![]() ![]() ![]() The task of the philosopher is to undertake this kind of scientific inquiry with respect to reason itself. Kant’s task is to put metaphysics on the same “secure course of a science” as mathematics and physics. ![]() Metaphysics, by contrast, “has to deal with objects too,” and therefore “logic as a propaedeutic constitutes only the outer courtyard, as it were, to the sciences” (B ix). The path of logic has been relatively easy, though, since it “has to do with nothing further than itself and its own form” (B ix). Logic has “travelled the secure course of a science” since Aristotle (B vii). Kant puts this point more strongly still in the preface to the second edition, where he compares the path of metaphysics to other sciences. Kant notes that Locke had attempted but failed to “put an end to all these controversies … through a certain physiology of the human understanding” (A ix). He traces a path between the dogmatism (despotic tyranny) and skepticism (complete anarchy) that he says have characterized most previous metaphysics. ![]() Kant famously calls metaphysics “the queen of all the sciences” (A viii). For the purposes of this essay, I will limit my discussion to metaphysics, which is also the subject of this first Critique. In his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sketches his vision of philosophy’s task after the transcendental turn. ![]() |