Kierkegaard, ignoble alchemists & battling medievalists

Mikhail Bulgakov

Northwestern University Press will soon release a book by Daniel L. Medin called Three Sons: Franz Kafka and the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and W. G. Sebald. I can't find it on the Northwestern site yet, but it looks like it'll be issued some time this month or next.

Mr. Waggish has a new post on Coetzee.

Emmanuel Levinas' Notebooks in Captivity

Auden on Kierkegaard (1944), Updike's review of a Kierkegaard biography (2005), a review of a new book on Kierkegaard (on faith & love), and (though I linked to this before) a review of Hannay's new translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript

I don't like Nietzsche, but lots of great philosophers do. Here are the recordings of papers given at a Nietzsche conference in Chicago (ht Leiter Reports)

Hans Gabriel reviews Vincent Kling's translation of Gert Jonke's Blinding Moment: Four Pieces about Composers (see this old post for links to more of Kling's work on Jonke)

Laurence Mackin on Mikhail Bulgakov's novels

The 'curiously relevant prose of von Kleist,' and Michael Dirda on Kleist (ht Books, Inq.)

In the Telegraph, John Lanchester on the fading of work-life from novels along with reviews of books on a WWII spy ruse involving Ian Fleming and on Simon Winder's Germania, which was also reviewed in the Financial Times, in The Scotsman and in the Spectator
A review of four books about German artists (Kirchner, Dix, Richter & Corinth)

Several prominent latter-day alchemists (economists) nominated for Ignoble Prize (ht Leiter)

Hugely ticked & mightily peeved medievalists fight back, with many philosophers on their side -- or: how the dogma that 'Market value is the only value' is distorting academia in the UK (ht BF's Omnivore). The broader Benthamite (or perhaps Reavers') assault on the humanities in the UK inspired this impressive broadside by Simon Blackburn.

Liz Phair driving through the desert to a NASCAR race & eco-consciousness-raising conference (ht BF's Omnivore)

Kay Redfield Jamison interviewed on Aussie radio
Herta Müller and 'the evil of banality'

Review of Jay Rubin's new translation of Natsume Soseki's Sanshiro (with an Introduction by Haruki Murakami)

Neuro-lit

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary neuroscientist, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez described the symptoms of semantic dementia before they were recognized in neurology.

I posted a while ago on some 'philosophy of mind' connections in two of Ian McEwan's novels. ManWithoutQualities recommends two novels that concern recent cog-sci work on consciousness, and there was this post last fall on "the rise of the neuronovel."

There might be something faddish about more recent neuro-lit, but if it leads authors to engage with old philosophical concerns in their new, souped-up neuro form (such as determinism), that's all to the good.

Incidentally, Jonathan Bennett has posted his new translation of de la Mettrie's Man a Machine.

Update (Feb. 11, 2010): MTB reminds us of an earlier book on this theme, Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, about which MTB has several posts.

This song by Raffaella Carrà bears little relation to the rest of this post, except that it exemplifies (for me at least) an interesting psychological phenomenon, which has been dubbed the 'earworm'.

Dalrymple, determinism and crime prevention

Theodore Dalrymple has a short article in the TLS on the implications of neuro-determinism. It is often supposed that if your neurons made you do it, then you shouldn't be held fully responsible for a crime. Some take this (or related deterministic views) to reduce the need for punishment of, or interference with, the perpetrator. For instance, an Italian court reduced a murderer's sentence by one year because the culprit "has genes linked to violent behaviour." Dalrymple challenges this move. He points out that if science could offer reliable precitions about who is likely to commit crimes (or about who has these genes linked to violent behaviour), then the state may want to screen people and try to fix or quarantine or simply eliminate those with the menacing genes. In short, we get a Clockwork Orange view of how to handle wrongdoers.

This was brought home to me in class after I told the students about the above Italian case. Several students argued that the court should have increased the murderer's sentence since he was probably beyond rehabilitation and would only threaten others again in the future.

In the end, Dalrymple is pessimistic about the prospects of genetics to yield reliable information about whether someone is sufficiently likely to commit crimes. This topic would be interesting to study in an entire criminology or legal-studies related class. Here are Warren Brown and Nancey Murphy on related issues.

Update (Feb. 14, 2010): Here's a WSJ article from last fall about Jim Fallon, a neuroscientist who studies biological features that predispose one to a life of crime. He found that he has some of these traits. Also, there's this brief entry on a related topic at the LA Times.

Update (March 2, 2010): Still more on this topic, this time concerning a Chicago court case.
Update (March 25, 2010): More about the Chicago case.