Maggie's Farm

Light Blogging through the Weekend

Many of us at Maggie's are on well-deserved vacation breaks, but we will pre-post some archival items.

First, however, apropos of blogging, I will leave you with a piece in the New Yorker by Holt, concerning the quiddity of bullshit:

Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.

Read the whole thing.