Crispin Sartwell
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Crispin Sartwell (born 1958) is an American philosophy professor and journalist. He received his B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia - where his dissertation supervisor was Richard Rorty - and is currently a member of the faculty of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Born in Washington, D.C., he is the son of the late Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, a reporter, editor, and photographer with the Washington Star and several magazines. His grandfather, also Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Washington Times-Herald. His great-grandfather, Herman Bernstein broke the story of a secret alliance between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas during World War I in The New York Times. Sartwell himself worked as a copy boy at the Washington Star and later as a freelance rock critic for many publications, including Record Magazine and Melody Maker. He has taught philosophy, communication and political science at a number of schools, including Vanderbilt University, The University of Alabama, Penn State, The Maryland Institute College of Art, and Dickinson College.
He is married to the writer Marion Winik, and has two daughters, Emma Sartwell and Jane Winik Sartwell, and three sons, Samuel Sartwell, Hayes Winik, and Vincent Winik. He lives in rural Pennsylvania.
Sartwell's syndicated column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appeared in numerous newspapers through the 1990s and 2000s, including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. Among the most idiosyncratic newspaper columnists of the period, he is a self-described adherent of anarchism. He is the author of such books as Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality and Six Names of Beauty.
Sartwell's philosophy, influenced by such diverse figures as Chuang Tzu, Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Georges Bataille has been the subject of much debate. In particular, his assertion that "knowledge is merely true belief" - that no condition is necessary in order for a belief to count as knowledge other than that it is true (and hence that no justification or other conditions are necessary) - has provoked contemporary discussion in analytic epistemology. This position is has been called epistemic minimalism.
[edit] Quotations
Assembled on the blog Hammer of Truth by Stephen P. Gordon
On fairie dust: "Jane [his five year old daughter] says of her 7-year-old friend, Emma, that she used to believe in fairies but that she doesn’t anymore. She has asked me whether she herself, when she grows up, will stop believing. I hope not. And I hope so. I don’t have a great deal of respect for adults who believe in fairies. Sane adulthood is entrapment in a world without magic, in a real world."
On terrorism, rule of law and Gitmo: "The Washington Post reports that there have been several suicide attempts among detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where dozens of prisoners are on hunger strikes. You might be suicidal too if you were arrested secretly and held without charge, without trial, without representation, without recourse, for years on end, perhaps for the rest of your life, in solitary confinement. Terrorists, of course, deserve no better. But calling these people terrorists when no evidence has been or has to be produced is idiotic. And if you simply believe it on the basis of a sheer assertion by the administration, then you are an enthusiast for tyranny. You do not deserve to live in a democracy. Certainly, you are an enemy of the Constitution in its details and in its essence. "One basis of our Constitutional system is what is quaintly termed “the rule of law.” This involves public promulgation of laws that apply equally to all persons, and adjudication by known judges in public proceedings. The Guantanamo prison - and the Bush administration’s domestic and international system of secret detention facilities as a whole - is as clear a violation of the rule of law as anything could possibly be: it is rule by arbitrary decree."
Current events: "First, a quick bracing dip in utter evil: the administration edited and distorted intelligence and exploited September 11 to manipulate the country into war. Then it asserted its right to imprison anyone it pleased, American citizen or not, secretly, without trial, representation, or charge. Then it opened up a worldwide system of secret internment facilities, while frying the citizens of Fallujah with phosphorus incendiaries. Then the Vice President of the United States declared his frank enthusiasm for torture. "Indeed, one might wonder whether the Bush administration is torturing people in order to fight terrorism, or fighting terrorism in order to torture people."
On rap music: "If Thomas Paine or Karl Marx were [here] today, they might be issuing records rather than pamphlets."
The cult of the state: "usually the first argument for the legitimacy of state power goes something like this: people (other than me and my friends) are fundamentally selfish and destructive. so they must be constrained from doing terrible things by force. they need a code enforced by an authority. this whole thing makes no sense if the state itself is a group of people."
Not quite the end (as we know it, but I feel fine): "if there is any idea that has been demonstrated to be a bad one in the course of human history, it is the political state. take just the twentieth century. the incredible bloodlettings of the world wars are inconceivable without the political state, without the taxation and coercion that make possible gigantic military machines and vast armies. the culmination of these activities is nuclear weapons and the possibility of the complete annihilation of life on the planet earth. only the political state has the motivation or the resources to make such things and the idiocy to believe that it’s in its own interests to do so. the twentieth century will be looked upon as the age of genocide. begin with armenians in turkey, forced collectivization of agriculture in ussr, Japanese occupation of china, the holocaust, the killing fields, rwanda, chechnya, darfur: every single one of them requiring and deploying and driven by the incomparable resources and incomparable power and incomprehensible evil of the political state."
Democrats and Republicans: "The position on the war of Kerry and Edwards and Billary has been an exquisite barometer of the polling, from clearly pro, to sheer confusion, to bold opposition. It is worth pointing out that as these folks gaze mesmerized at the polls, people have been dying. "If you put your position on war at the mercy of polling numbers, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that you actually believe. Their advocacy of the war was meaningless; their hemming and hawing through the election was meaningless; their opposition now is meaningless. If murder polled well, these people would tax you to have you hit. When the murder numbers went south, they’d mutate into beatific Gandhian pacifists. That is not a hypothetical assertion. "By comparison, the Republican position is clear, consistent, principled, honest. It would be altogether admirable if it weren’t absolutely abominable. Thus, American politics presents us with an interesting dilemma, a kind of pointed cosmic test. Satanism or nihilism? Hell or the void? Eternal damnation or perfect extinction? Evil or nothingness? "Before I cast my vote, I have one question: how are Satan’s job approval numbers?"
Not quite the meaning of life, but almost: "Perhaps the deepest, most vexing question of human life is this: How can fallible creatures such as ourselves find the truth? "I am pleased to announce that after years of exhaustive research, I can answer this question, once and for all and unanswerably, with absolute deductive rigor. The probability that X is true is inversely proportional to the number of people who believe it. I term this The Principle of Inverted Consensus."
[edit] Partial bibliography
- The Art of Living. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.
- Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
- Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1998.
- End of Story: Toaward an Annihilation of Language and History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
- Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003 .
- Six Names of Beauty. New York: Routledge, 2004.
- Knowledge Without Justification. www.crispinsartwell.com/know.htm
