Saturday, July 03, 2004

'Enervating Miasma' Does Not Include the Blogs or My Explanations

Well, the gremlins at Blogger have, as far as I can tell, surrounded Siris and every other site hosted on Blog*Spot with an enervating miasma defeating not only the attempts of people to link with the site but also my own attempts to post; the Berkeley post just prior to this one was whisked off into no-man's land for three hours before it returned without apology. Sorry to anyone who might have been struggling under any deep Siris withdrawals.

Some blogosphere neighborliness is in order. "Early Modern Resources" linked to Siris in reciprocation for a prior link of my own. It's great to have a good neighbor, particularly since I decided a few days ago (but haven't reached the actual point of doing so) to put the Early Modern Resources sites under the Resources section of Houyhnhnm Land. I also find (and this is a result of the other, I believe) that Siris has been given a place under "Blogs of History" at "The Elfin Ethicist," a well-designed, diverse-content, and, in short, high-quality weblog. I should resent his showing in a quarter of the posts he writes that he has a better English writing style than I do, but I just can't bring myself to dislike someone who titles his weblog "The Elfin Ethicist" and puts up a G. K. Chesterton quote.

A note of clarification for those coming to Siris with a perspective from another discipline. History of philosophy, being more philosophy than history, possibly divides its historical labels along slightly different lines than other historical disciplines. (I say 'possibly' because I don't keep up on how other historical disciplines draw their lines.) Plus, some people aren't historians at all, and so might not have any inkling what is meant when I talk about 'early modern philosophy'. The paradigmatic 'early modern philosophy' is done in the 17th and 18th centuries ('Descartes to Kant' is the standard model), and outside those two centuries assignment to 'early modern philosophy' usually has more to do with continuity with the 17th and 18th centuries than the century in which it is found. Thus, in the sixteenth century, and even into the seventeenth century both 'early modern philosophy' and 'medieval philosophy' are being done; and, in Britain at least, 'early modern philosophy' includes much of the first half of the 19th century. Siris covers all this period along with everything else (as noted in the description, Siris covers everything in its own little way); but since different disciplines use the same labels differently, I thought I would clarify my usage of the label 'early modern philosophy' for anyone who might be browsing my posts. I've found lots of people who do not dabble at all in history tend to be confused by the label, although it's better than the label under which it went in the first undergraduate course I took on it: Modern Philosophy, concerned, of course, almost entirely with the 17th century.