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Nov. 7th, 2008 12:45 pmI haven't posted here in quite a long time, and after all the excitement of the election, getting back to work is somewhat slow going, so this might not be the worst time for a status report.
"The Gods and Being in Proclus" will appear in Dionysius 26 and "The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus" will appear in Méthexis 21. "Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion" will be in the next Pomegranate (Vol. 10, no. 2?). No word yet on when "Plato's Gods and the Way of Ideas" will appear in Diotima. "Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzean Humanism and Deep Ecology" will eventually appear as part of An (Un)Easy Alliance: Thinking the Environment with Deleuze/Guattari.
I haven't had any word on the ABC-CLIO encyclopedia project after the e-mail I had from the former editor, Shelley Rabinovitch. I e-mailed her again recently to get the address of someone who I might contact about where the project is going and have had no response. All I can find on the web about it is a couple of other contributors who have put it on their CVs as "forthcoming 2009".
For the first time since I defended my dissertation, I don't have any articles under review anywhere, and so I'm confronted for the first time with a real question as to how to proceed. I've spent most of this year reading up on Plato, that is, finding my way in the (recent) secondary literature on the whole cluster of related issues that interest me. It's really like a whole new education for me, because I'm trying to free myself somewhat from a Neoplatonist's view of Plato. This isn't as hard for me as it might be for some other Neoplatonically-influenced readers, because my reading of Neoplatonic texts is nonstandard anyhow. Since I don't necessarily agree with the so-called "traditionalist" interpretation of Plato, which is in part influenced by what I regard as bad readings of Neoplatonism, I'm not troubled by many of the current tendencies in the field, which have shaken things up and made the literature on Plato a lot more philosophically relevant.
I've decided to pursue this in-depth study of Plato, and hopefully lay the foundation in this way for future articles accessible to a broader philosophical audience, rather than try to crank out articles based on the rest of the dissertation for now. I've gotten about half of the dissertation material out there in one form or another, but some of the material from the second half is so dependent upon what came before that I don't know if it can be well presented in article form; the time may have come to propose the whole thing as a book again. The problem is that I don't really feel like interrupting my work on Plato just as it's about to bear fruit in order to write a book proposal, and should someone accept it, produce the book. Perhaps when I feel that I have reached a comfortable plateau with my present researches, I can start pulling smaller topics out of the remaining dissertation material and working it up, but the main point I think is that I'm not going to press myself to do that prematurely. Since it's difficult to make the transition from reading and taking notes to writing real essays, maybe I'll use this space from time to time to think through some of the issues in Plato.
"The Gods and Being in Proclus" will appear in Dionysius 26 and "The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus" will appear in Méthexis 21. "Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion" will be in the next Pomegranate (Vol. 10, no. 2?). No word yet on when "Plato's Gods and the Way of Ideas" will appear in Diotima. "Hercules of the Surface: Deleuzean Humanism and Deep Ecology" will eventually appear as part of An (Un)Easy Alliance: Thinking the Environment with Deleuze/Guattari.
I haven't had any word on the ABC-CLIO encyclopedia project after the e-mail I had from the former editor, Shelley Rabinovitch. I e-mailed her again recently to get the address of someone who I might contact about where the project is going and have had no response. All I can find on the web about it is a couple of other contributors who have put it on their CVs as "forthcoming 2009".
For the first time since I defended my dissertation, I don't have any articles under review anywhere, and so I'm confronted for the first time with a real question as to how to proceed. I've spent most of this year reading up on Plato, that is, finding my way in the (recent) secondary literature on the whole cluster of related issues that interest me. It's really like a whole new education for me, because I'm trying to free myself somewhat from a Neoplatonist's view of Plato. This isn't as hard for me as it might be for some other Neoplatonically-influenced readers, because my reading of Neoplatonic texts is nonstandard anyhow. Since I don't necessarily agree with the so-called "traditionalist" interpretation of Plato, which is in part influenced by what I regard as bad readings of Neoplatonism, I'm not troubled by many of the current tendencies in the field, which have shaken things up and made the literature on Plato a lot more philosophically relevant.
I've decided to pursue this in-depth study of Plato, and hopefully lay the foundation in this way for future articles accessible to a broader philosophical audience, rather than try to crank out articles based on the rest of the dissertation for now. I've gotten about half of the dissertation material out there in one form or another, but some of the material from the second half is so dependent upon what came before that I don't know if it can be well presented in article form; the time may have come to propose the whole thing as a book again. The problem is that I don't really feel like interrupting my work on Plato just as it's about to bear fruit in order to write a book proposal, and should someone accept it, produce the book. Perhaps when I feel that I have reached a comfortable plateau with my present researches, I can start pulling smaller topics out of the remaining dissertation material and working it up, but the main point I think is that I'm not going to press myself to do that prematurely. Since it's difficult to make the transition from reading and taking notes to writing real essays, maybe I'll use this space from time to time to think through some of the issues in Plato.
