Author: Marc Stier

Philip Roth’s novels were very important to the early thinking that eventually led to the book I’m writing Civilization and Its Discontents, mostly because I disagreed with so much of what his works seemed to imply about the tension between sexual desire and family life. (In making that argument, Roth was, of course, carrying on in the long Augustinian tradition I criticize, particularly in it’s Freudian version, although Roth is in many ways a critic of Freud.) It occurred to me to re-read some of Roth’s books, as I near the end of this project and I’ve discovered two things. One is that there are many more voices in Roth’s work than I saw when I first read him. The second is something that I’ve always known, reading Roth is an immense pleasure–so many wonderful lines, carefully constructed and beautiful sentences and paragraphs, clever but not obtrusive plots, and a… Continue reading

The liquor store privatization issue is really a good test of whether you know what you are talking about when it comes to progressive politics in our state. If you support privatization then you don’t understand that: 1. There is no progressive power in this country that isn’t based in a strong labor movement. A middle class highly educated person who tells you he is a progressive but doesn’t understand what UFCW has meant to the politics of this state needs a graduate degree from the school of real politics. 2. That there is no middle class that doesn’t require government action to increase the wages of working people and that well paid public sector workers benefits all workers. 3. That our unique system means that PA’s take from liquor and wine sales is at least double that of any other state in the country and that we can’t end… Continue reading

An earlier and very different version of this paper appears under this title in Craig de Paulo, Patrick Messina, and Marc Stier, eds. Ambiguity in the Western Mind(Peter Lang, Inc. International Academic Publishers, 2005). The current text is a substantial revision that brings out some themes that were only implicit in the early version.  The original text was written to be delivered as a talk at conference sponsored by the Intellectual Heritage Program of Temple University entitled “Ambiguity in the Western Tradition.” It was directed not to specialists on Plato but to anyone interested in the issues raised by the text. As such, my argument does not turn on any disputes about the meaning or translation of particular passages. So, it has not seemed necessary to point the reader to the particular passages I paraphrase. Continue reading

Trump tweeted this first thing in the morning. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!” The Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted in response: “We Agree.” #notmypresident #whichsideareyouon? Continue reading

How much of what we put on Facebook is the life we would like to be having, vs the one we are having? Continue reading