I did what?

8 July 2006, 0234 EDT

I’m becoming a fan of Amazon’s “search inside” feature. Much like Google’s variant, it provides a quick way to check the accuracy of citations. But it also can turn up some rather random stuff.

Forgotten stuff.

Here’s Martin Gardner in his collection, Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience:

The Skeptical Inquirer published in its March/April 1997 issue two angry letters from readers who accused me of unfair attacks on John Dewey and Thomas Kuhn. One of them, Daniel Nexon, was so furious that he cancelled his subscription as a protest against my “crossing over the line” from what he considered “acceptable discourse.” I replied that of course my columns are polemical, and not intended to be polite technical arguments. I said that anyone interested in my views about truth and reality will find them carefully expressed in The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener where I include a discussion of the famous conflict between Dewey and Bertrand Russell over how to define truth.

I’m also named in the index. The book is copyrighted from way back in 2001, so I can only guess that someone must have realized what an important person I would one day become :-).

Filed as: random

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.