Potpourri (Nov. 5, 09)

This photo is from the Life Magazine archive (highly recommended for quality browsing)

Margaret Atwood, Duchess of Wit

Kermode on Golding: "Matty, as Golding himself said, was the character who binds together so many of his concerns: sanctity, the uncanny, the numinous."

'Her fascination with mysticism, math, and Spinoza' -- podcast of an interview with Clarice Lispector's biographer

A look back at Ford's Good Soldier in The Hindu: "The Good Soldier is a novel about brittle social graces that mask savage hatreds"

Someone's starting a group discussion of Gaddis' Recognitions. "The plan ... is to read between 75-100 pages per week. Each week there will be one post or open thread...."

A reminiscence of Claude Levi-Strauss

Review of The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem

Aussie radio posts a tribute to (and an old interview with) Sir Isaiah Berlin

Forthcoming Thomas Bernhard books

Mr. Waggish and Kleist on speech and thought

A timely study of timeless myths (Plato's myths)

Pics of Bela Lugosi as Jesus

More police blogs (and another that was shut down), and paramedic blogs, and a magistrate's blog, and a bit from The Times (UK) on career bloggers

British career bloggers seem more bitter, esp. about intrusive, nannyish bureaucracy ('creeping managerialism' is the vice du jour), and you hear a similarly resentful tone even in the musings of British philosophers

Retrospectives of the past 40-100 years in brain studies, in physics, and in psychology

Appearance (curve-ball illusion) and reality (e.g., a ribosome's relative tiny-ness)

The Wellcome Library posts 1917 footage of British shell-shock victims. (Also available on YouTube.)

Potpourri

This is not a post about Schopenhauer -- well, it's only a bit about Schopy. I just love the photos of him. He always looks like he's on the verge of hurling a string of obscenities.

I've fixed up some old posts, esp. the ones on Vienna, mainly by replacing or deleting broken links. I've also added these blog scans in the right margin. What a neat tool!

Here are a few interesting web catches of late:

A tribute site for 20th-Century neo-Platonist stalwart, J. N. Findlay;

Marco Roth on (and against) the rise of the neuro-novel;

Pierce & Bekoff on something like morality in beasts;

An interview with Amartya Sen;

A review of a translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's book (I had to copy & paste that name);

Top ten ghostwritten books;

An old Guardian list of best authors (they shouldn't have believed the hype -- or maybe it's we who shouldn't);

A 1917 German propaganda film about a U-boat mission -- they sink ships, always evacuating the crews first, and take five British captains as POW's; shortly after the 30-minute mark: "Filming interrupted by the appearance of an English destroyer";

Wow! Olivia Newton John is Max Born's granddaughter (Born was a Nobel laureate);

Interesting new activity -- reading police blogs, some with disturbing titles, some quite thoughtful and into theory, some about life on the job, some about life on and off the job, some that had to be shut down due to pressure from on high, etc. etc.

Macabre photo

Life.com has put on-line the photos from the Life and Getty Archives. It's a nice collection through which to browse, but I've stumbled across one macabre, disturbing image, a photo of the bodies of Stefan Zweig and his wife, Charlotte Zweig, after they took their own lives. The picture is pathos incarnate.

On-line philosophy works

In my philosophy classes I try to use on-line readings when possible. It saves students some money and it provides one with a searchable text. There are many sites where these philosophical texts can be found, but they vary in quality (esp. when the texts are translated).

I'm listing here some of the sites with classic texts in philosophy that I like to consult. I won't link to Episteme since, though it has been an excellent resource, that site became corrupted and I haven't heard that it has recovered.

A. Early Modern
First, it appears that the more important philosophical texts in the early modern era are the most widely available on-line. Here are some of the relevant sites:

1. This Marxist site has lots of texts by Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. (They also have works by Heidegger, Carnap, Godel, etc.).

2. This Idaho site has many early modern works, including lots of Locke, Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Latta's translation of Leibniz's Monadology, and works by several of the lesser figures of that period. In fact, the list of texts runs into the 1800's (ending with Schelling). Translations tend to be older, but respectable. I noticed, though, that some of the links are broken.

3. Jonathan Bennett's early modern texts are very helpful, especially for students. Bennett has posted several texts on-line "with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought." Works by the six big early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) are included, as are works by Adam Smith, Richard Price, Newton, Thomas Reid, Hobbes, Malebranche, Anne Conway, Jonathan Edwards, etc. There are even excerpts from Kant's first Critique and a few texts by John Stuart Mill.

4. Finally, here are the complete works of David Hume.

B. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard & Nietzsche
As mentioned, some of Immanuel Kant's works are available at the above sites. One can also find a recent translation of the Critique of Pure Reason by George Macdonald Ross. Here is the orginal German version, and here's another copy of Kemp Smith's 1929 translation; this last version includes a "PERL driven search engine." Stephen Palmquist has put together a glossary for this work.

For Hegel, here is a recent translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard.

Here are some of Kierkegaard's books and several works by Nietzsche.

C. Analytic Philosophy

Much of Bertrand Russell's work is on-line.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations (pdf) are 0n-line. Other 0n-line works by Wittgenstein appear in the right menu of the blog 'Methods of Projection'.

Lots of Wilfrid Sellars' works are available, including Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, among other Sellarsian texts and resources. There's also a pdf of Sellars' Notre Dame lectures (of which there's an incomplete audio recording).

The HIST-Analytic site has many papers and books (or parts of books). Many, but not all, are pdf's. There are several selections from works by Mach, Russell, G. F. Stout, Pritchard, Moore, Broad, C. I. Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Ramsey, H. H. Price, Dray, D. C. Williams, Hart, Grice, Rawls, etc. Elsewhere, there's Herbert Spencer's First Principles.

Volumes 1-14 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science are now on-line.

I found the penultimate draft of John Searle's 'Minds, Brains, and Programs'. Many recent on-line papers in the philosophy of mind are linked to at David Chalmers' site.

If I teach formal logic again, I'll consult this Handbook of Modal Logic as well as Ryckman's Logic Works.

D. Ancient & Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion
I don't teach ancient or medieval philosophy, but here are two good lists of resources (the latter of which includes many links to modern texts on religion as well). Here's a site that has 'Christian classics', including many medieval texts. This Fordham site gathers links to medieval humanities texts.

I'm sure there are lots of other on-line translations of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' works, but this is a good start. I found only some old translations of Plato (inc. Jowett's translations) via these two sites. And here are some of Jowett's Plato translations for the iphone. I also found W. D. Ross's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. John Holbo has posted his new translation of Plato's Euthyphro, Meno and Book 1 of The Republic.

This site lists more than 200 modern philosophy of religion texts that are on-line (including many books), including some by Tillich and some by William James. Speaking of James, here's his Varieties of Religious Experience. The Mead Project has posted excerpts from some of A. N. Whitehead's books. Whitehead's Religion in the Making is available elsewhere.

Here's a pdf of Ian Ramsey's paper, 'Talking of God: Models, Ancient and Modern'.

At the Alex site you can search by author's name for e-texts in the humanities, including many philosophical works. I'm not sure how widely the searches range -- many of the above sites don't turn up there -- but it does at least locate works that are available on Gutenberg. Also, the University of Adelaide's library has a list of e-texts in the humanities (again with many of the great works in western philosophy) that are accessible via that library and via other sites, too (inc. Gutenberg). Finally, many on-line classic philosophy works can be located at the Online Books Page.

Tillich and Niebuhr interviews

Here's a video of the first part of a talk with Paul Tillich. Reinhold Niebuhr is interviewed by Mike Wallace. The Harry Ransom Center (Univ. of Texas at Austin) has a neat lineup of these Mike Wallace interviews from the late 1950's. Other interviewees include Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali, Bennett Cerf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Steve Allen, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Fromm, Henry Kissinger, etc., many of whom speak through clouds of cigarette smoke as Wallace puffs away on his sponsor's product.

Retro book cover

I found this book while rummaging around in 2nd-hand bookstores on Yonge Street (Toronto) last summer. I bought it, ripped off the cover and tossed the book in a recycling bin. I really doubted that a book based on an old TV episode would be any good, but you know what they say -- don't judge a cover by its book.

Update: It turns out that this book wasn't based on an episode. It's a spin-off story from the TV series. The author, Richard Deming, apparently specialized in these spin-offs. Also, he wrote ten books under the 'Ellery Queen' name.

Farewell, Pages Books

I just visited Pages on Queen Street West (Toronto) for the last time. This amazing bookstore is going out of business tomorrow (August 31, 2009). (There's also a Pages in Calgary, which seems to be still in operation.)

The Toronto Pages has long been one of my two favourite local bookstores (the other is Bob Miller). In fact, I'd rank Pages up there with City Lights in San Francisco.

Pages was a lot like City Lights -- a funky little store with lots of good but hard-to-find items from small presses. This Toronto institution opened in 1979. I probably first visited it in around 1983, when, with some high-school friends, I'd ride the commuter rail into the city from my remote suburb (Pickering). We'd head straight for coolsville, which back then was on Queen Street West, especially the strip between Bathurst and Spadina. That's where you could see more punk and new-wave hairstyles than anywhere else in the city. The main draw for us back then was the Bakka science-fiction bookstore (where Cory Doctorow, another Pages fan, once worked), which has since re-located. I agree with the proprietor, Marc Glassman, when he says that Pages is "definitely one of the last examples of the indie hub in the neighbourhood, and one of the bulwarks keeping any kind of original spirit in the area.”

I've enjoyed more quality browsing in Pages over the years than at any other commercial venue, and I've acquired from this little store what seems like a supertanker's worth of cards, stationery, magazines and of course books. Oh, what great books! Fiction, history, philosophy, biography, travel, etc. etc. Books that I couldn't find anywhere else, books that I didn't know I wanted till I'd examined them at Pages, books by authors I hadn't heard of till I found them here. The store had real educational value for me and, remarkably (in view of its relatively small size), continued to do so even after the advent of the internet book behemoths.

It was sad today to see the mostly barren shelves, almost like seeing a cherished home after the furniture's been taken by the movers. I'm going to miss this store, and I'll miss the great music they played -- the alternative or punky-but-not-really-punk music (sorry, I'm not up on the genre labels) that I generally couldn't identify but instantly loved. The music wasn't piped in or programmed by some consultant. The man at the cash register today told me that it was always left to whoever was on shift to determine what music to play.

Pages was a great literary experience. The city is diminished by its loss.

There's a send-off party for Pages at the Gladstone Hotel on September 8.

I'm a terrible photographer, but I've included the pics I took today, including a shot of my favourite section ('Small Press').

Update (Sept. 3, 2009): Here's another post on the demise of this great store.