Spreading The Word

Normally I refuse to buy books with pen or pencil marks in them, but tonight I bought a second-hand copy of Simon Blackburn's Spreading the Word from Gleebooks which has pen marks and notes in the margins all through it—and indeed, Gleebooks had it marked down to next to nothing, presumably for that reason. But, as the inscription inside the front cover revealed, the notes are those of one Neil Tennant, former Professor of Philosophy at the ANU and now Humanities Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of the Center for Cognitive Science at Ohio State University, not to mention the editor of the journal American Philosophical Quarterly. So I would have paid more for this penned copy, not less… One amusing example: next to the sentence "But in the restaurant is it really plausible to say that when our eyes meet in full mutual awareness, I (and she) have an endless stock of wants?" (p. 115), Neil has written, "Only an Oxford don could write this".