Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

Tim Cooney in New York in the 50s. Just posted on YouTube today is an hour-long talk with Timothy J. Cooney (1929-1999), author of the book Telling Right from Wrong: What is Moral, What is Immoral, and What is Neither One Nor the Other . The blurb says: An important contribution to the field of moral philosophy, this book provides an objective and precise answer to the question, “What is morality?” Moral philosophers, the author claims, have gotten bogged down in meta-ethical questions and now find themselves in a hopelessly relativistic position. Cooney develops a unique moral theory and isolates and explores the core of morality, separating actual moral issues from apparent ones. It’s a slim book, only 158 pages, published in 1985 by the small press Prometheus Books after Random House rescinded their contract when Cooney admittedly forged a letter from the chairman of the philosophy department at Harvard that attested to its brilliance. And that not insignificant anecdote po...

While doing the washing up after dinner last night I got to reflecting on Ed Gyllenhaal’s latest posting over at New Church History , which led to a train of thought that ended with the odious TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live! I should explain: Around last Christmas a young woman who claimed to be one of Kimmel’s producers contacted me to ask if I had in my possession, of all things, an original (!) copy of Swedenborgian entomologist Leonard Gyllenhaal’s 200-year-old masterwork Insecta Suecica that the show could borrow for an upcoming appearance by Jake. I could only wonder how my interest in the history of Swedenborgianism had gotten around, but I was pretty damn sure that Kimmel was planning to bring up Jake’s great-great-great-great grandfather in order to crack a few “bug man” jokes—the same way he tried, not coincidentally, to crack a few cheap jokes about the Gyllenhaal noble line when Maggie was on. Of course I don’t possess a copy of such a precious volume, and I really wante...