Social science supper snippets

For no very good reason, a couple of strange pieces of philosophy news that came up over supper:

• LSE has a rather nice plaza named in honour of John Watkins, philosopher and keen yawl sailor.
• A friend of my mothers was most impressed when, while visiting the Sorbonne Library in the 1960s, he found himself in the lavatory, emptying his bladder next to his intellectual hero, Lucien Goldmann.

In other news, Pater reported that he has a plan to deal with the Death of World Capitalism. Unfortunately, it involves letting all the banks go bankrupt to write off all their toxic debts, followed immediately by forced nationalisation, allowing the government to start issuing new credit notes. I suggested that this might not be the best solution to the crisis, since it would, (a) destroy almost all existing capital, and (b) undermine the normative functions of capitalism by destroying trust between individuals, I didn't make much headway. Rather, my father simply pretended that he didn't understand what I was trying to say. All things considered, I'm rather glad he didn't go for a career in the Treasury...