James Wilberding

David Foster Wallace on dumb jocks and athletic genius

Abstract David Foster Wallace was genuinely troubled by what he perceived to be a serious incongruity in the mental lives of elite athletes. To perform with grace and beauty, elite athletes must be ‘geniuses,’ yet in conversation and prose these same athletes often exhibit such vapidity and banality that he was tempted to simply write them off as unintelligent or worse. In response to this puzzle, Wallace developed different philosophical conceptions of the elite athlete aimed at bridging the gap between genius and dumb jock. For Wallace, this was an exercise designed to help him live a more compassionate life.

Teratology in Neoplatonism

Teratogenesis poses a real problem for all those who wish to see the natural world as a success story, and this includes the Neoplatonists. On their view even ordinary biological reproduction is governed by principles ultimately derived from intelligible Forms. Thus, the generation of terata would seem to call into question the very efficacy of these intelligible principles in the sensible world, since these would seem to be cases in which matter has gotten the upper hand over the intelligible. Although the corpus of surviving Neoplatonic works offers no systematic discussion of the problems surrounding teratology, it is possible to find a number of passages which deal with the explanation of terata. In this article these passages are collected and discussed. It is argued inter alia that, far from capitulating in the face of this putative evidence against the full efficacy of intelligible causes in the world, the Neoplatonists managed to use these phenomena to the advantage of their own views.

Intelligible Kinds and Natural Kinds in Plotinus

Plotinus repeatedly emphasizes that the sensible world is the best possible world. This is supposed to follow from his etiological account of the world’s perpetual generation: As the automatic product of higher principles, the sensible world is simply another instantiation of intelligible principles, albeit embedded at a lower level in matter. This is meant to apply above all to the biological activity of nature, as each kind of living thing in the sensible world is supposed by Plotinus to co...