Philosophy, lit, etc.

Potpourri (Nov. 5, 09)

2009-11-05T05:02:00.010-05:00

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

2009-10-28T05:26:00.006-04:00

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

2009-10-26T20:47:00.004-04:00

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

2009-09-29T17:40:00.032-04:00

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

2009-09-28T04:03:00.006-04:00

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

2009-09-24T00:09:00.005-04:00

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

2009-08-30T19:01:00.013-04:00

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.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

2009-01-02T20:47:00.015-05:00

Brian Moore published The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (originally called simply Judith Hearne), in 1955 after he had left Belfast for Montreal. For this book Moore won the Author's Club First Novel Award (although it wasn't really his first novel). The book appears on the Guardian's list of 1000 books 'everyone must read'. A 1988 movie of the same name starred Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. Graham Greene apparently called Moore his 'favourite living novelist' (though I can't find the source of this quotation). Here's more about Moore by Ralph McInerny, and a review of this 1955 novel by John Self.

Moore here plumbs the turbid soul of a desperately lonely woman who's on the verge of becoming an old spinster. She's done in by the repressive mores of her culture, which she has internalized and of which she's largely uncritical. (Moore based Hearne loosely on one of his mother's friends, Mary Judith Keogh.) The other character whose thoughts are probed at length is James Madden, Hearne's last chance at a husband. He, too, has outlived his dreams and (like Hearne) drifts though his days in fear and frustration, which are relieved only by vices that promise short-term relief but long-term doom.

Moore's story is marred by some heavy-handed symbols (an empty church, e.g.), and I grew impatient with the protracted torments to which the author subjected poor Judy Hearne. Nevertheless, the book is a thorough and disturbing study of the corrosion and eventual demolition of a life by loneliness.

Hearne seeks refuge from her isolation in weekly visits with a happy and prosperous family whose patriarch she has known since childhood. She half knows that the family members generally dread her visits, but she goes to them anyway out of sheer desperation for some human contact. These portions of the book are pretty painful, for Moore makes it clear that the family members don't take Hearne seriously as a person. They treat her more as an ongoing bad joke.

This dismissiveness is echoed near the end of the story by the other tenants in Hearne's rooming house. Hearne drops from even this sad little society after a night of drinking that leaves her singing and talking to herself for hours on end in her room. After that, her housemates stop taking her seriously. They see her as a 'nutter' who needs to be evicted. As in her visits with the happy family, then, she's surrounded by people who don't respect her as a somewhat rational agent roughly on a par with themselves. Instead of recognizing her as a person, they see her as a nuisance and soon-to-be outcast.

In the end, Hearne is deposited in a residential hospital, where her interactions are largely with people who are, well, paid to interact with her and the other patients. In a cruel paradox, her life is now marked by not only a dearth of meaningful relationships but also a lack of privacy.

Another Roadside Attraction

2008-12-14T04:40:00.005-05:00

Tom Robbins serves up a hippy-fied Nietzsche: God is dead -- more accurately, Jesus is dead, and so, too, is the 'God the Father' myth that co-opted him and that has structured our society. The old habits of thought, feeling and practice that underpin this structure are now just constricting. Their demise is liberating and should be celebrated. But what replaces the old system? Apparently, it's some sort of nature mysticism -- we are all 'slowed down light', at one with the energy at the heart of everything.

Okay, this sort of thing can easily become a big, flaky mess, but after about fifty pages I succumbed to the grooviness of it all -- well, I enjoyed the story but wasn't swept up by the early New Age philosophy.

I prefer Robbins' next book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but that might be because I read that one in my 20's, which is apparently when one is most susceptible to Robbins' magical-mystical writing.

Allegedly, Elvis Presley was reading Another Roadside Attraction just before he died. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing....

Neat articles on Coetzee and Munro

2008-10-20T00:28:00.008-04:00

I started a subscription to The Raritan, a quarterly that is published at Rutgers University. It's too bad their articles aren't on-line, because their latest issue has an article by Jonathan Lear, a psychoanalyst and philosopher at the University of Chicago. The article concerns the ethical dimensions in J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year. I haven't read Coetzee yet, but have been meaning to do so, partly because he's known as a philosophical novelist and partly because his book Slow Man has a character named Paul Rayment.

Another nice article I've happened upon is Margaret Atwood's introduction to the Everyman collection of Alice Munro's stories. Atwood introduces the term 'Sowesto' to refer to southwestern Ontario, an area from which my father's side of the family hales and where I spent part of my childhood. I've started reading some Munro as part of the Canadian Book Challenge. Atwood's article (and AR's note about regionalist authors) has got me looking for other Sowesto writers.

Posting and reading are slow this term ....

2008-10-13T13:43:00.007-04:00

This academic term, I decided to teach five courses (post-secondary). I have about 410 students, many of whom send me e-mail within three days of an assignment due date or test.

I have some very bright students and some great discussions in class, but it was silly of me to have taken on this many courses.

As a result, I'm not reading much fiction. Wait, I suppose much work in bioethics and logic counts as fiction, so let's say I'm not reading much literary fiction.

I hope soon to post something about Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, which I'm reading as part of the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge. After that, I wasn't (until just recently) sure of what Canadian books to read. Shamefully, I've read maybe two Canadian novels, so the world is my oyster.

Fortunately, just last week I met Virgil Duff, an executive editor at the University of Toronto Press. There I was on the patio of the Artful Dodger, drinking a pint while reading Fifth Business,* when a man at the next table, Virgil, put down his own book and inquired about what I was reading. After some discussion of Canadian authors, he offered me a 6-page photocopy of a list of Canadian novels that he's read, with the best ones listed in bold. Actually, he said, he's given copies of this list to anyone he meets who has an interest in CanLit. He used to be an editor for the Macmillan Company of Canada, and in that capacity ushered some novels through the publication process.

Needless to say, I take this chance meeting as a divine intervention in my aimless CanLit reading and will duly include some of these titles in my Book Challenge endeavours. Thanks, Virgil, for your reading advice.

*Hold on -- wasn't I just whining about my heavy work load this term? And yet, there I was on a pub patio just last week?! Well, you must understand that in Toronto, when in October one happens upon a lovely, sunny day that is so warm that the pub patios are open, and one has just finished a hard day's work, one would have to be possessed of superhuman powers of puritanical self-abnegation to saunter, amble or meander right on past the patio at one's favourite pub. After all, one thinks at the time, this is likely the last 'quality patio time' until May.

Tillich on instrumental reason

2008-10-04T02:19:00.002-04:00

"… [A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means." (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, pp. 136-7)

Best of e-reader posts

2008-09-21T15:08:00.007-04:00

I'm collecting here some of the more interesting items I've found about the continuing evolution of e-readers:

Sony opens its e-reader to 'outside' publishers (allowing for a greater selection of books on its device).

Good critical feedback on Sony Reader.

Prototype of a more flexible reader (Plastic Logic's more flexible device has an 8.5 X 11 display, which allows for a pop-up, touch-sensitive keyboard; and since it loads Office documents easily, it might take over some of the functions of a laptop -- and it will still work after you beat it with a shoe).

Dual-display prototype from Berkeley and Maryland researchers (you can hold it like a book, seeing two pages at once, and the pages can be from different documents; or you can fold it to see just one page at a time).

Update (Sept. 6): New versions of the Sony and Kindle readers will soon hit the market.

Cafes Sperl and Zartl

2008-09-14T18:56:00.021-04:00

I took these pictures of the entrance and billiard tables at Cafe Sperl, an old cafe that's still open. It was once a favourite gathering spot for musicians such as Mahler and Lehar, as well as authors such as Franz Werfel. Here's more about its history (in German).

Another interesting cafe outside the central part of the city (like the Sperl) is Cafe Zartl. It was a favourite spot for Robert Musil (who lived nearby -- as did Wittgenstein) and Heimito von Doderer. More recently, the author Robert Schindel has said that he does much of his writing there.

I'll note here this nice guide to Austria for historically inclined literature buffs.

Cafes Schottentor and Victoria am Schottentor

2008-09-10T02:22:00.015-04:00

This photo is of Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring 12, which is by the Schottentor subway station, across the street from the main University of Vienna building (and adjacent to the Palais Ephrussi). There's little of interest in this building (which includes a McDonald's), but I tentatively conjecture that it's where Cafe Schottentor was once located. [NOT! see 2nd update below]

The Schottentor Cafe is one of the cafes preferred by Godel and other members of the Vienna Circle. It is mentioned by Elias Canetti in The Play of the Eyes. He says, "It was amazing how often I ran into Friedl [Benedikt] .... I'd take my seat in the empty No. 38 streetcar, look up, and there she'd be .... She always rode as far as Schottentor .... I went to the Schottentor Cafe. When I entered, she was already there, sitting at a table with friends." (p. 240)

Additionally, in her paper in Endeavour, Maria Rentetzi says that in the 1920's Cafe Schottentor was "a meeting point of Vienna's scientific, political and artistic circles, including women such as the journalist Hilde Spiel." (p. 44, n. 22) Spiel, it turns out, met Canetti at Cafe Schottentor.

It was also a favourite haunt of the poet Theodor Kramer, who is quoted as saying in 1945 that the cafe was opposite the University. Assuming he meant by 'the University' the main university building, the above location is the most likely site of the Schottentor Cafe.

I had initially thought that 'Cafe Schottentor' was an abbreviation of 'Cafe Victoria am Schottentor', the full name of a cafe which used to be at Schottengasse 10 (in the same building as the one pictured below). However, that cafe's name seems instead to have been shortened to 'Cafe Victoria' (which Godel visited with visiting family members, according to John Dawson, Jr.).

Update (Sept. 11): I've learned from Diane Silverthorn that there was another Cafe Victoria in Vienna. It was in the Hotel Victoria on Favoritenstrasse. So, I'm not sure if Professor Dawson's reference is to that cafe or to the Victoria am Schottentor.

Update (Sept. 15): Cafe Schottentor might have been a short block further from the university than I believed. This is according to Professor Karl Sigmund (from the Math Dept. at the University of Vienna), to whom I was referred by Professor John Dawson. Professor Sigmund informs me that there was until recently a Pizza Hut in the Schottentor's old location, but that a new cafe has opened there (at Schottengasse 2). It's called the Café im Schottenstift . The last cafe in that location before the Pizza Hut was Cafe Haag (Hague), which closed in 1997.

Update (Feb. 24, 2009): It looks like my original conjecture wasn't so far off. Here's a pdf copy of a 1936 weekly paper, Die Neue Welt (Feb. 7, 1936), which lists a number of cafes on p. 6 (right column). Cafe Schottentor is listed there as being located at Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 10, which would put it just to the right of the above pictured McDonald's (the address for which is Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 12). This location is now the site of a cafe called Coffee Day. The building in which it's located looks like a relatively new annex joined to the older structure that houses the McDonald's. I wonder if the part of the structure that housed Cafe Schottentor was wrecked during the war, with the result that the cafe re-located to Schottengasse 2.

Schwarzspanierstrasse 15

2008-08-30T00:08:00.011-04:00

On the site of this building stood the house where Beethoven died in 1827. Beethoven had many residences in Vienna. Otto Weininger, a very odd philosopher admired by Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, etc. -- took his own life in this apartment building in 1903.

Weininger hung out with some of the writers from Cafe Griensteidl, but his basic ideas seem largely unconnected to his Viennese contemporaries. His ideas have precursors in Kant and Schelling.

Cafe Imperial

2008-08-27T13:24:00.045-04:00

I wasn't much interested in Cafe Imperial. It seemed to be just an extension of a ritzy hotel, so I didn't even venture inside. Too bad, since it turns out to have a very interesting history.

First, Elias Canetti gives a mean-spirited anecdote about his meeting there with Stefan Zweig. I don't believe this anecdote to be accurate -- Canetti's autobiography is not that reliable, especially when he's talking about someone he didn't like. He evidently didn't like Zweig. Here's the relevant quotation:

"Soon after my return I ran into [Stefan] Zweig at the Cafe Imperial. He was sitting alone in one of the back rooms, holding his hand over his mouth to hide the absence of teeth [due to dental work]. Though he did not like to be seen in that condition, he beckoned me over to his table and bade me be seated. 'I've heard the whole story from Broch,' he said. 'You've met Joyce. ... Get Joyce to write a preface. Then your book will get attention.'" (Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, p. 186)

Cafe Imperial also appears in Robert Musil's Diaries, but (again) Musil doesn't have much of interest to say about a cafe: "Yesterday, or the day before yesterday, spent some time with Morgenstern in the Cafe Imperial." (Robert Musil, Diaries, entry for March 26, 1930, p. 366)

More interestingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein met at this cafe with Ludwig von Ficker during the latter's visit to Vienna (so that Wittgenstein could give away part of his family's fortune to worthy artists under Ficker's guidance). Here's Ficker's description of a meeting with Wittgenstein on July 24, 1914:

"We met in Cafe Imperial, where there ensued a somewhat strenuous, but positively stimulating conversation between [Ludwig Wittgenstein] and the hard-of-hearing builder [Adolf Loos] on the still contoversial Haus am Michaelerplatz on questions of modern architecture, which seemed to interest Wittgenstein." (Ludwig von Ficker describing a meeting on July 24, 1914 at Cafe Imperial; quoted from Wittgenstein in Vienna, Allan S. Janik & Hans Veigl [Springer, 1998], p. 123)

The cafe in the Hotel Imperial was initially called Cafe Frohner. It's mentioned by Fritz Wittels, a med student and budding psychoanalyst in Freud's circle. According to Edward Timms, Wittels was also part of Karl Kraus' circle in 1907-08. Timms summarizes Wittels' description as follows:

"Later they [Kraus and Wittels] would go on to the Cafe Frohner, situated in the luxurious Hotel Imperial. Kraus was a heavy smoker, but never took a drop of alcohol. He was a gifted conversationalist and on good days, Wittels recalls, he enchanted everyone. All kinds of people -- senior government officials as well as artists, actors, and attractive girls -- would come to his table; and Kraus made them feel they were the 'centre of the universe'. Later, feeling the need to escape from the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois coffee houses, Kraus and his circle would move on to lower-class cafes patronised by prostitutes and bookies." (Edward Timms, 'The 'Child-Woman': Kraus, Freud, Wittles, and Irma Karczewska', in Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. E. Timms and R. Robertson [Edinburgh University Press, 1990], p. 88)

Cafe Imperial was favoured by musicians; Mahler was a regular, as were Schonberg, Berg and Webern. According to Janik and Veigl, the Imperial was also visited by Freud, Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Rilke, Bruckner, Wagner, Brahms and Trotsky -- which raises a question: Is there a Viennese cafe from Trotsky's time in the Habsburg capital in which he did not luxuriate, excogitate or vegetate?

Update: I just read that Stalin was in Vienna briefly in early 1913 with Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky. I can't find evidence that Stalin frequented any cafes. In his excellent Stalin biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore reports that Stalin, like Hitler, liked to take walks in the park around the Schonbrunn Palace.

Montefiore quotes Trotsky's description of his first encounter with Stalin: "I was sitting at the table beside the samovar in the apartment of Skobelev ... in the ancient capital of the Habsburgs [...] when suddenly the door opened with a knock and an unkown man entered. He was short ... thin ... his greyish-brown skin covered in pockmarks ... I saw nothing in his eyes that resembled friendliness [...] Then, as silently as he had come, he left, leaving a very depressing but unusual impression on me." (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin [Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2007], p. 275)

Cafe Rudigerhof

2008-08-26T18:18:00.010-04:00

This is the Rudigerhof apartment building in Vienna. It's a nice example of the Jugenstihl style. It was designed by Oskar Marmorek and built in 1902. It has a neat cafe on ground level, which (according to my TimeOut Vienna guidebook) was frequented by the socialist politician Viktor Adler (who organized the 1st May Day parade), and was the site of at least one meeting between him and Lenin and Trotsky (though I'm suspicious of the claim about Lenin -- his movements in Vienna are harder to track than those of the other socialists).

Cafe Museum

2008-08-23T11:15:00.053-04:00

Cafe Museum is between the Karlsplatz subway station and the State Opera House. Its customers included Ludwig Wittgenstein, the artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as the Jugendstihl architect Otto Wagner. It's famous for having an interior designed in his typically spartan fashion by Adolf Loos.

This historic cafe was also a stomping ground for such literary heavyweights as Elias Canetti and Robert Musil. Canetti frequently mentions Viennese cafes in his autobiography, esp. in the third volume thereof (The Play of the Eyes). Musil, by contrast, is much more sparing in his cafe references -- in his Diaries he devotes much more space to describing his walking routes through Vienna.

Here's one of Musil's few mentions of a cafe: "We then went on foot to the Cafe Museum in the hope of meeting Morgenstern; I wanted to tell him about Frankfurt. But, to our surprise, we met Frau Krista." (Robert Musil, Diaries: Robert Musil 1899-1942 , ed. Frise & Mirsky, trans. Philip Payne [Basic Books, 1998] p. 365, entry for March 16, 1930)

Canetti's descriptions of Cafe Museum are more informative. Here are three of them:

"Georg Merkel, a painter ..., was a man of about Broch's age. I had seen him at the Cafe Museum, though less frequently than some other painters." (Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, trans. Ralph Manheim [Granta Books, 1999], p. 128)

"At the Cafe Museum, where I went every day after moving back to town, there was a man [later identified as Dr. Sonne] whom I noticed because he was always sitting alone and never spoke to anyone. That in itself was not so unusual, lots of people went to cafes to be alone among many." (Ibid., p. 112)

"I saw [Alban Berg] last at the Cafe Museum a few weeks before his death. It was a short meeting, at night after a concert." (Ibid., p.230)

Update (Sept. 27): There's a nice description of Cafe Museum in Wittgenstein in Vienna (by Allan S. Janik & Hans Veigl [Springer, 1998], pp. 57-8). The authors say that this cafe was originally (1886) at Babenbergerstrasse 5, and then moved to its current Loos-designed location in 1899. Among its patrons, they list (in addition to Musil, Klimt and Schiele) Hermann Broch, Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, Franz Blei, Roda Roda, etc.

They also include this bit from a letter written by the poet Georg Trakl: "Dear Mr. Ficker! I beg you to loan me 40 crowns, for I am momentarily in a very sad situation.... I would be very happy to be able to meet with you tomorrow, Thursday, at 2 p.m. in Cafe Museum." (Wittgenstein in Vienna, p. 58)

The physicists' cafe -- Cafe Astoria?

2008-08-22T09:28:00.021-04:00

In the late 1800's, the physicists at the University of Vienna were moved into a horrible building at 3 Turkenstrasse. Here's a quotation from Maria Rentetzi's article (in Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]):

"The Physicalisches Kabinett and Stefan's Physics Institute moved into the four-story building located in Turkenstrasse 3, a short side street crossing Wahringerstrasse. A 'very primitive, converted apartment house,' as Lise Meitner described it...."

Another description of the building is in Ruth Lewin Sime's 1997 biography of Lise Meitner (Lise Meitner: a Life in Physics [University of California Press]): "The physics institute was on the Turkenstrasse ..., on the same block as the institutes for pharmaceutical chemistry and medicinal chemistry. ... A photographer's studio and a coffee house stood on either side of Turkenstrasse 3 .... Originally the structure had been a small apartment house, already run-down when the university purchased it as a temporary building in 1875 (a permanent physics building opened in 1913). Its entrance reminded Lise Meitner of the door to a hen house. 'I often thought "If a fire breaks out here, very few of us will get out alive."'"

The coffee house mentioned above was at 12 Wahringer Strasse, at the corner of Turkenstrasse. I've included here two photos of that site from August, 2008. Given the inadequacy of the physics quarters, the physicists seem to have sought refuge in the little cafe at the corner. Here's Rentetzi again:

"The same architectural absurdity led the physicists, working at Turkenstrasse, to the charming coffee house at the corner of their laboratory and contributed to the confluence of scientific disciplines and discussions. Of that 'idyllic time', the physicist Karl Przibram later recalled with nostalgia that 'the young generation of physicists can hardly imagine the passion of the debates, echoed in those days, particularly in the above mentioned coffee house.' [19] The 'above mentioned coffee house' was a cafe at the corner of Wahringerstrasse and Turkenstrasse, one of the distinct Viennese cultural spots, which literally housed the young physicists of the Institute." ['19' is a reference to Przibram's 1959 'Erinnerungen ...' in Beitrage zur Physik und Chemie des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. O. R. Frisch et al]

While in Vienna, I bought a book called Kaffeehaus Album: 1860 - 1930 by H. Seemann and C. Lunzer (Album Verlag, 2000). On p. 58, they include a 1925 picture of Cafe Astoria's interior, which was located at 12 Wahringerstrasse. So, Cafe Astoria appears to have been the physics hotspot of Vienna.

Update (Sept. 12): Maria Rentetzi has published a book with Columbia University Press entitled Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices. She has made the full contents of the book available on-line. Chapter 3 of her book ('Gender, Science, and the City') has more information on physics in Vienna in the early 20th Century and includes a photo of several physicists in their cafe.

Godel's Viennese Hangouts -- Cafes Arkaden, Josephinum and Reichsrat

2008-08-19T22:35:00.023-04:00

These two photos are of the building in Vienna in which the Cafe Arkaden was located. It's across the street from the Votivkirche. Today, this space is occupied by the Votiv Cafe.

The Arkaden was patronized by members of the Vienna Circle. Here's a relevant description from Wittgenstein in Vienna by Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl ([New York: Springer, 1998] p. 188): "[Kurt Godel] sat frequently with [Rudolf] Carnap in this cafe, which was in the arcaded building built in 1883 ... opposite the university's stately old main building. ... We even see in Carnap's notebook: '[...] In the morning Arkadencafe. Discussion: Godel on propositions of language. Feigl, Waismann, [Marcel] Natkin present (30.11.1928).'"

Members of the Vienna Circle also frequented the Cafe Josephinum. I walked right past its old site without realizing it, which is strange since the same building housed one of Godel's apartments, and his old residences in Vienna have plaques indicating his residency. The building is still there, but is now the Hotel Atlanta (address: 33 Wahringerstrasse). In the 1920's this rather plain-looking structure was an apartment building. Among its residents (from October 1927 until July 1928) were the brothers Kurt and Rudolf Godel (according to John Dawson, Jr. in his biography, Kurt Godel [Logical Dilemmas, p. 33]).

The Cafe Josephinum makes an appearance at the beginning of Janna Levin's novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines: "At the centre of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white marble tabletop. They select the Cafe Josephinum precisely for this table. ... The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble..." (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, p. 8).

Another hangout for members of the Vienna Circle was the Cafe Reichsrat (also no longer in existence). In this cafe Alfred Tarski met with Godel on the former's visit to Vienna. The Reichsrat is also notable for being the first place where Godel presented some of his incompleteness results. This is according to John W. Dawson, Jr., who writes, "Specifically, on August 26, 1930, Godel met Carnap, Feigl and Waismann at the Cafe Reichsrat in Vienna, where they discussed their travel plans to Konigsberg. Afterward, according to Carnap's [diary] entry for that date, the discussion turned to 'Godel's Entdeckung: Unvollstandigkeit des Systems der PM; Schwierigkeit des Widerspruchsfreiheitbeweises.' Three days later another meeting took place at the same cafe. On that occasion, Carnap noted 'Zuerst [before the arrival of Feigl and Waismann] erzahlt mir Godel von seiner Entdeckungen'" (quoting from Dawson's article, 'The Reception of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems', PSA, vol. 2 (1984): 253-71).

Cafe Reichsrat is hard to locate, partly because the street name has been changed (from Reichsrat to Rathausplatz). According to Matthias Baaz, the old cafe's site is now occupied by the Konditorei Sluka. I wasn't sure about this at first, since the Sluka itself dates from 1891 (it was mentioned in a play by Thomas Bernhard); but it looks like the Sluka expanded at some time into the Cafe Reichsrat's location. Compare this photo of the Reichsrat's door to this picture of the Sluka's patio. The door under the window in the background of the latter shot (towards the right, behind the lamp) appears to be the same door that appears in the old Cafe Reichsrat picture. More pictures of the Sluka are available at Merisi's Vienna For Beginners.

I wonder if Cafe Reichsrat was owned by Walther Mayer. Mayer was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the University of Vienna, and he later moved to Princeton University as Albert Einstein's assistant. Mayer owned a small cafe near the university. According to Maria Rentetzi (in her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity', Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Mayer's cafe was across the campus from the Schottentor cafe, which could put it near the Rathaus. However, Retentzi adds that Mayer's cafe was near the Institute for Mathematics, the current location of which is far from the Rathaus.

Update (Aug 23, 2008): The math institute in Vienna seems to have had the same location when the Vienna Circle was meeting. Karl Menger says, "The meeting place of the Schlick Kreis was a rather dingy room on the ground floor of the building in the Boltzmanngasse that housed the mathematical and physical institutes of the University." (quoted from Friedrich Stadler's The Vienna Circle [Springer, 1997], p. 204 -- Stadler's book includes a photo of the entrance to the math seminar room where the Vienna Circle met)

Update (Sept. 11, 2008): I just bought Kurt Godel: Das Album/The Album (Karl Sigmund, John Dawson and Kurt Muhlberger), a bilingual book with many photos of Godel's old haunts, associates, etc. On p. 27 of this book, there is a picture of the interior of Cafe Josephinum, accompanied by the following description: "The ground floor of Godel's apartment house was occupied by the Cafe Josephinum, which was frequented by students and academics and hosted the post mortem discussions following scientific talks." The authors add that in addition to this cafe, members of the Vienna Circle liked to visit the Arkaden, the Reichsrat, Cafe Central and Cafe Herrenhof. The book also includes a picture of the Reichsrat's main doorway (to which I linked above) on p. 32.

Cafe Parsifal

2008-08-19T20:55:00.009-04:00

"As to the Parsifal, while it was generally known as the coffeehouse favoured by members of the philharmonic orchestra ... there also sat -- in a reserved niche at a table usually strewn with newspapers -- Karl Kraus" (whose tirade against the Young Vienna authors provoked a physical assault by Felix Salten) (Friedrich Torberg, Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes [Ariadne Press, 2008; 1st published in German in 1975]). The Parsifal was in this building on the northeast corner of Josefstadter Strasse and Albert Gasse, which has been home to the Cafe Hummel since 1936.

Viennese Cafes

2008-08-19T17:36:00.048-04:00

I was in Austria for about ten days and spent about half that time in Vienna.

Here are some nice descriptions of the ethos of Viennese cafes which suggest why they were so attractive and stimulating for artists and intellectuals (a feature which has prompted at least one academic conference about Viennese cafes).

1. Alfred Polgar wrote an essay about Café Central ('Theory of Café Central'). His article is included in H. B. Segel's collection Vienna Coffeehouse Wits. Polgar writes, “Its inhabitants are … people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it” (Segel, p. 267). Polgar adds, “There are writers … who are unable to carry out their literary chores anywhere but at the Café Central. Only there, only at the tables of idleness, is the worktable laid for them, only there, enveloped by the air of indolence, will their inertia become fecundity” (Ibid.).

2. Here's an observation by Stefan Zweig: "The Viennese coffeehouse is a particular institution which is not comparable to any other in the world. As a matter of fact, it is a sort of democratic club to which admission costs the small price of a cup of coffee. Upon payment of this mite every guest can sit for hours on end, discuss, write, play cards, receive his mail, and, above all, can go through an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines" (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday [University of Nebraska Press, 1964; 1st published in English in 1943]).

3. Here's a more recent blurb from Friedrich Torberg in his Tante Jolesch, or the Decline of the West in Anecdotes (Ariadne Press, 2008; published in German in 1975): "The classical attitude of a true habitué was possibly demonstrated even more convincingly by District Court Judge Reiter. Judge Reiter appeared each day -- for decades -- at Café Colosseum at four o'clock in the afternoon, sat down each day at the same table, was served a Melange with whipped cream and two horn-shaped shortbreads, received the evening papers first and then successively all other national and international newspapers, read them, paid, and did not have to utter a single word during this entire procedure." (p. 98 of Torberg's Tante Jolesch).

4. From Peter Altenberg's 'Coffeehouse': "You've got troubles of one kind or another -- get thee to the coffeehouse! ... You make four hundred Crowns and spend five hundred -- coffeehouse! ... You're a paper pusher and would've liked to become a doctor -- coffeehouse! ... You loathe and revile people and yet can't live without them -- coffeehouse! No place else will let you pay on credit -- coffeehouse!" (Telegrams of the Soul, trans. Peter Wortsman [Archipelago Books, 2005], p. 13)

5. In her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity' (Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Maria Rentetzi writes: "The role of coffee houses as locations of scientifc exchange, as sites of learning ... has recently become the interest of historians of science. For Vienna, coffee houses have been associated with the city's cultural pre-eminence at the turn of the 19th century, and have been portrayed as clubs of philosophical, political and artistic circles." [Rentetzi here cites U. Heise's Kaffee und Kaffeehaus (Insel Verlag, 2002), which has been translated into English.]

6. In a book published just last year (Sacred Spring [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 2007]), Robert Weldon Whalen writes: "Vienna's coffeehouses were highly specialized. Journalists could be found at one cafe, artists at others. While artists frequented the Scheidl, and the Fenstergucker, actors tended to congregate at the Dobner or perhaps the Café Stadtpark. Café Gabesam was a good general place for middle-class people. ... Public places with a strong sense of privacy, open businesses with intimate charm, they were the Viennese equivalent to public squares. Landsdale, in her turn-of-the-century guide to [Vienna], noted that 'the café is the centre of social life; there business is discussed and bargains concluded ... it corresponds to the Forum of the ancients.'" [Whalen here cites Maria Horner Landsdale, Vienna and the Viennese, (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1902), p. 146.]

One of the above-mentioned artists' cafes, the Fenstergucker, is now a Starbucks.

Philosophy of Mind in Ian McEwan's Saturday

2008-07-20T14:23:00.022-04:00

I liked Ian McEwan's Saturday partly because of its focus on the mind-body relation. The main character, Dr. Perowne, is a materialist -- there's nothing more to a mind than a brain.

Perowne regards three persons through this reductionist lens:

1. Perowne's alcoholic father-in-law, a complicated poet whose foibles grow predictably from the effects of alcohol on the brain;

2. Perowne's mother, who suffers from dementia; the sections about her are the most profound in the book, focusing on the pathos and tragic affront when a good and caring person is deleted by brute, neural wiring malfunctions; and

3. Baxter, the intelligent thug; the issue here is the conflict between, on the one hand, our natural moral indignation at the heinous crimes of a free person and, on the other hand, the picture of the criminal as an unfree victim of his own gnarled neural wiring. (Shades here of philosopher Wifrid Sellars' contrast between the Manifest Image [our common, everyday sense of ourselves and others as free and responsible persons] and the Scientific Image [in which those persons dissolve into amoral atom-swarms].)

Here's an ambiguous quotation in connection with that last point:

“Who could ever reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction?”

I've earlier quoted a nice philosophy-of-mind passage from McEwan's Atonement. Here's a phil-of-mind quotation from Saturday, this time on philosopher Jerry Fodor's notion of 'Mentalese', an innate representational medium with syntactic structure in which the mind does its thinking or representing (I believe Fodor developed the idea under Chomsky's influence):

“This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. … So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision … it already has the quality of an idea … unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.”

The main weakness of the novel is its plot, which seems implausible and jury-rigged in places, as if McEwan had notebooks full of good passages and riffs that he was itching to publish and just threw together any old narrative in which to embed them. The book is marred also by some smug political musings that are espoused by Dr. Perowne and that resemble some of McEwan's own political views. (I suspect that a lot of the recent, blogosphere animus against McEwan stems from disapproval of his politics. But who knows?)

Regardless, while it isn't as good as Atonement, there's some great writing in Saturday.

Here are some interesting reviews of Saturday, one of them by the late Richard Rorty.

Some Jeremias Gotthelf specs

2008-07-05T02:59:00.008-04:00

Albert Bitzius was a Swiss clergyman who wrote didactic fiction under the name of Jeremias Gotthelf. Several films have been based on his work (all in German).

His most well-known story is Die Schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider -- on which see the posts by AR and WS). About this scary tale Thomas Mann said, "And so I read Jeremias Gotthelf, whose Schwarze Spinne I admire almost more than anything else in world literature" (p. 63 of Mann's The Story of a Novel, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (NY: Knopf, 1961) published in German in 1949).

This novella wasn't even published in English until 1957. According to the translator, H. M. Waidson, several other works by Gotthelf were translated into English in the 19th Century, including the novels Geld und Geist and Uli der Knecht. Interestingly, Der Besenbinder von Rychiswyl , an 1852 short story, was translated as The Broom Merchant by John Ruskin in serial form in 1873-6; this story was more recently translated by Robert Godwin-Jones for his 19th-Century German fiction site (hat-tip to Will for that source).

Ruskin didn't know German well enough and so translated from a French version of Gotthelf's tale. It's surprising, then, that (as Waidson reports) Ruskin revised Julia Firth's English translation of Uli der Knecht, as well as adding notes to it (this version was re-issued in 1907 as vol. 228 in Everyman's Library).

Ruskin prefaced his Broom Merchant translation with a brief bio of Gotthelf, in which he called Gotthelf "the wisest man, taking him for all in all, with whose writings I am acquainted" (quoting from p. 229 of Waidson's article). Waidson qualifies Ruskin's approbation as 'patronizing', for Ruskin regarded Gotthelf's works as vehicles of simple moral truths (what we might now call homespun or cracker-barrel wisdom).

I have posted a review of Black Spider.