Philosophy, lit, etc.

Some philosophy, lit, and art links

2012-01-11T00:12:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting new-ish journal, nonsite.org, the focus of which seems to be on issues straddling the boundary between philosophy and literary studies. Issue 3 of nonsite has some articles on Wittgenstein. Issue 4 includes Gary Hagberg's reply to 'Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art', which was in Issue 3.

Robert Pasnau has a nice article on 'The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy', Averroës.

From an interview with George Steiner: 'My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs.'

While poking around looking for on-line stuff by or about Kleist for the previous post, I found this long reflection on Freud's development of the notion of the uncanny by reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman'.

Daniel Johnson reviews a book about 'the Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie of Vienna 1800–1938'.

Miranda Seymour reviews a biography of Stefan Zweig.

I first heard of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach when I was doing some research on Gusto Gräser. I didn't realize, though, that Diefenbach was even more of a wild-man-with-a-prophet's-beard than Gräser was. Strange Flowers has a post on Diefenbach with some neat pics. In the slide show at the bottom of that Diefenbach post, one of the photos shows Diefenbach and several other proto-hippies with flowers in their hair.

Here's the ultimate site for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. 'Pudding: ... A kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs.'

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's Walls of Berlin.

Cool but creepy photos by Stephen Berkman.

Joan Didion interviewed at the NY Public Library by Sloane Crosley:

Kleist on-line, etc.

2012-01-09T21:51:00.001-05:00

I hadn't realized that last November was the 200th anniversary of Heinrich von Kleist's death. Deutsche Welle posted a brief video about this anniversary (approx. 5 minutes long). Actually, that last link takes you to the Deutsche Welle site but I can't obtain a link that takes you directly to the Kleist material. There is a search window there, though, and entering 'Kleist' calls up the relevant items.

Tony Miksanek notes the concern in many of Kleist's works with the conflict between fate and freedom. Steven Howe has a look at Kleist's treatment of fate in a lesser known work, The Schroffenstein Family. As Miksanek points out, Kafka was influenced by Kleist's reflections on justice, esp. as presented in Martin Kohlhaas. Indeed, Michael Dirda says that Kleist's 'greatest disciple is undoubtedly Franz Kafka, whose fables of uncertain identity and bureaucratic horror take the Kleistian sensibility to its limits.' Liel Leibovitz adds that 'Kafka devoted one of the only two public talks he gave to reading segments of Kohlhaas, and he confessed that he could not think of the novella “without being moved to tears and enthusiasm”.' For Margaret Soltan, the brilliance of Kafka and Kleist 'is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.' According to Gertrud Leutenegger, Kleist (like Kafka) combined a disposition to melancholy with a wonderfully odd sense of humour or what Geoffrey O'Brien calls a 'dark hilarity'. While reviewing Günter Blamberger's new German biography of Kleist, Iain Bamforth says that Kleist 'wrote with his back to the wall, a “crisis specialist” in Blamberger’s words.' Mr. Waggish looks at an essay by Kleist on speech and thought.

In addition to the above-linked English translation of Kohlhaas, here's Peter Wortsman's translation of 'The Earthquake in Chile', and here's 'The Beggarwoman of Locarno'. Idris Parry's translation of 'On the Marionette Theatre' is on-line. Finally, here's a short story by Kleist called 'Saint Cecilia; Or, The Power of Music'.

Here are some articles about other authors:

James Gardner writes about Georges Rodenbach's 'Symbolilst novel,' Bruges-La-Morte, as well as about Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer's portrait of Rodenbach.

Michael Dirda reviews Laird M. Easton's edition of Count Harry Kessler's diaries.

Sonya Chung looks back at Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard.

Here's a quotation from an article about the amazing Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: 'Over the last academic year, the encyclopedia’s entry on Friedrich Nietzsche was the most accessed—followed by “John Locke,” “Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” “Game Theory,” and “Existence.”'

Michael Hofmann has translated and edited a new collection of Joseph Roth's letters. Joseph Roth, a Life in Letters is being published this month. There's a panel discussion of the book tomorrow (Jan. 10) in NY. Hofmann's introduction is behind a pay-wall at the New York Review of Books. Here's a YouTube clip of Hofmann reading from his own poetry.

From Kleist to Feist:

Central European characters

2011-11-27T15:02:00.001-05:00

NPR interviews Richard Rhodes about his new book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

'Mann's Inhumanity to Mann': Frederic Raphael reviews Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles. Aaron Thier reviews the same book on Heinrich Mann et al.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. A review of Eco's book by Scott Kelly in the Scotsman, and one by Benjamin Balin in Haaretz: 'Conspiracy theories and intense historical settings are Umberto Eco’s forte, and here he turns his attention to one of history’s most persuasive and destructive false texts - with mixed results.'

'[Rosa] Mayreder’s title alone reads as a challenge to [Otto] Weininger’s ... woman-hating bestseller Geschlecht und Character (1903), a title rendered as Sex and Character in English but that should really be translated as Gender and Character. Mayreder took a position against Weininger in her earlier A Survey of the Woman Problem [c. 1913] as well, a position she developed further in Gender and Culture [1923] to explain misogyny in Western culture as a historical phenomenon which she based on an abhorrence of the body and sexuality that had grown out of Christianity.'

Jiri Travnicek on Brno's literary history (mostly Czech literature post WWII) -- he mentions two stories about his home town by Milan Kundera.

'Had [Czeslaw] Milosz been there, said [Artur Sebastian] Rosman, he might have repeated his claim that his readers don’t “take into account a particular, quite fundamental fact: all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious”.'

From Astra Scheib's interview with Thomas Bernhard: 'I also cannot bear people applauding. Applause - actors are paid in such a way. They earn their money in such a way. I like it when the money from my publisher arrives on my account. But marching music, hosts of applauding people in the theater or in the concert -- I can't bear that. Nothing but disaster follows from applause.'

Thomas Bernhard as a sorcerer in Klaus Gmeiner’s Enchanted Forest (1956)

A great piece on Bernhard from last January by Richard Crary.

No great fan of Bernhard's, Peter Handke is interviewed by Cecilia Dreymüller. (I hadn't realized that Handke converted to the Orthodox Church.)

Iain Bamforth reviews a German biography of Kleist: 'Having locked himself up for a week with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he despaired of the self’s inscrutability – it could only be seen “through green glasses”.'

'The Beastly Péter Nádas: Why you need to read the massive novels of this NSFW Hungarian writer'.

'Angelo Soliman is probably best known in his fictional incarnation as the disgraced African servant boy in The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel about the end of the Austrian monarchy. Soliman ... arrived in Austria as a slave from western Africa, where he was born in 1721. ... He acted as a soldier and adviser in one princely household and then came to Vienna in 1753 to serve as a valet and tutor in another.'

Franz Cede compares the fall of the Habsburgs to that of the Soviets.

Erratic Schwabinger Otto Gross

2011-11-19T02:12:00.001-05:00

"Dear Jung, -- I climbed over the asylum wall and am now in the Hotel X. This is a begging letter. Please send me money for the hotel expenses and also the train fare to Munich. -- Yours Sincerely." (Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst, [p. 164])

This wonderful letter was sent by Otto Gross to Carl Jung shortly after Gross had left Jung's care. Gross was a brilliant young physician (a neurologist who worked with Emil Kraepelin) and early psychoanalyst who conducted many of his analyses in Schwabing's Café Stefanie. He at times resided in the early hippie haven, Monte Verità. In my post on that settlement, I noted its similarity to the 1960's counterculture. One missing element, it seemed, was the experimentation with drugs. Well, it wasn't missing when young Otto arrived. As a physician, he had access to drugs, and he did more than just experiment with them. In fact, among the ills for which Jung was treating him at the Burghölzli clinic were addictions to cocaine and morphine.

Gross' brilliance is attested by Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, who met Gross in Schwabing. Jones says, "[Gross] was the nearest approach to a romantic genius I ever met .... He was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis .... Such penetrative power of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again." (Ibid., pp. 163-4)

Gross was a prototype of the young punk rebel. The focus of his rebellion was the constricting, martial culture of German-speaking central Europe. The point of his rebellion is captured by Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, who say that Gross'

central insight was that it was not fathers alone ... who formed the repressive structure of personality in their children but that instead it was the structure and culture of a patriarchal society that had institutionalized repression in the family. His solution was to call for an expressive and unrestrained sexuality, which the unique conditions of Schwabing had shown to be possible. ('Otto Gross and Else Jaffé and Max Weber', Sam Whimster and Gottfried Heuer, Theory Culture Society [1998] 15: 129)

Indeed, it was Gross who coined the phrase "sexual revolution" (or its German equivalent).

So, for Otto the political was very personal. This brought him into conflict with Freud, who resisted efforts to link a political program to psychoanalysis.

The fusion of personal and political themes in Gross' life is especially clear in connection with his father, Hans Gross, an influential early criminologist (whose classes Kafka attended). Hans was the very opposite of Otto. Hans thought that 'degenerates' (e.g., vagabonds and revolutionaries -- e.g., his son) who didn't respond to treatment should be sent to Africa. Hans studied and tried to develop more effective forms of incarceration, including the concentration camp.

Karl Valentin

So, it's easy to sympathize with Otto Gross in his conflict with his father. Still, Otto was schizophrenic and did great harm to others. For instance, he was wanted by the police in Switzerland because of his role in the deaths of two women -- one an assisted suicide (Lotte Hattemer in 1906), the other a death by overdose (Sophie Benz in 1910). Also, he took no, or little, responsibility for his four children, as is indicated by the fact that both his sons (born in 1907 to different women) were named 'Peter'. He took no role in their naming.

It seems that Otto, though he meant well, didn't know what 'well' meant. It's not entirely surprising, then, that his father tried to have Otto committed to an institution. Hans succeeded in having Otto arrested in Berlin on Nov. 9, 1913. Otto was sent back to his homeland, Austria, and confined there in asylums at Tulln and Troppau. This father-son conflict became a cause célèbre, prompting Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire (among others) to oppose in print the father's incarceration of the son, an act that became emblematic of a generation's wider conflict with the patriarchy

The battle of the Gross's, père et fils, resonated with Kafka and engendered his generally sympathetic response to Otto Gross' ideas. Indeed, Hartmut Binder and others have claimed that the conflict fed Kafka's conception of The Trial. Still, it's difficult to find evidence of any influence by Gross on Kafka, and some authors deny that there was any (see, e.g., Jennifer E. Michaels, Anarchy and Eros: Otto Gross' Impact on German Expressionist Writers [NY: Peter Lang Publishers Inc., 1983], p. 164).

As was noted (above), Hans Gross was one of Kafka's professors. In fact, according to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth: the Counterculture Begins Ascona, 1900-1920 [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986], p. 40), "Kafka had sat under Hans Gross for sixteen class hours a week in his fifth, sixth, and seventh semesters of law at Prague University." Shortly after he graduated, Kafka met Otto Gross briefly in 1907 (although only the linked source reports that encounter). Later, in 1917, Kafka and Gross met at least twice, first on a night train from Budapest to Vienna (or from Vienna to Prague -- sources differ here) and later in Prague. Of the meeting on the train, Henrik Jensen says (pdf), "Kafka was with Gross ... listening to his meanderings, afterwards claiming that he had not understood a word. Still, he did see something 'essential' beyond the ridiculous, as he later stated in a letter to Milena Jesenská." Here's an excerpt from Kafka's letter (as quoted in a paper by Gottfried Heuer):

I have hardly known Otto Gross; but I realised that there was something essential here that at least with its hand reached out of the "ridiculous." The perplexed frame of mind of his friends and relatives (wife, brother-in-law, even the enigmatically silent baby amongst the travelling bags ...) was somewhat reminiscent of the mood of the followers of Christ as they stood below him who was nailed to the cross.

(The 'wife' was actually Gross' mistress, Marianne Kuh, and the 'brother-in-law' was her brother, Anton Kuh.) Later in 1917, Gross met in Prague with Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and others to discuss a new journal in which Kafka showed interest. It was to have been called the Journal Against the Will to Power. Also, Martin Green reports (Mountain of Truth, p. 40) that Kafka read all of the articles that Gross had published in a journal called Die Aktion. Finally, in 1922, three years after Gross' death, Kafka severely criticized Werfel for casting Gross in a bad light in his play called Schweiger, in which the loathsome character of Dr. Ottokar Grund was made the spokesman for Gross' ideas (according to Peter Stephan Jungk, Franz Werfel [NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990], p. 92).

Im Café by Jeanne Mammen

Otto Gross had direct or indirect connections with many other famous people -- Max Weber, D. H. Lawrence, Gustav Landauer, etc. -- but one of these in particular stood out for me. One of Gross' followers was Heinrich Goesch, who befriended Paul Tillich and (rather more intimately) his wife, Hannah Tillich. (That last link is to an article about his parents by René Tillich -- highly recommended. It even mentions a trip to Lake Ascona, near Monte Verità.) According to Martin Green (Mountain of Truth, p. 192), the Tillichs were receptive to many of Gross' ideas, as mediated by Goesch.

Update (Nov. 27, 2011): In a NY Times review of David Cronenberg's film A Dangerous Method, Otto Gross is described as, "A fellow analyst, sent to Jung by Freud, who turns out to be a feral and charming emanation of pure id, an imp of the Freudian perverse."

Recently sighted shades of central Europe

2011-11-06T01:39:00.001-05:00

Adolf Loos (photo by Trude Fleischmann)

From 2003, a long article by Robert von Dassanowsky situating The Sound of Music in its historical context

From last August, John Gray on Elias Canetti's best work of fiction, his autobiography. Here's Geoffrey Hill's poem prompted by one of Canetti's other works, 'On Reading Crowds and Power'.

From last April, a new book on Musil, published by Continuum (and relating his work to recent continental theorists). It's reviewed by David Winters.

Mr. Waggish reflects on a paper by Burton Pike about Musil and language; and reflects on Ernest Gellner's Words and Things.

Daniel Hartley reflects on love in Rilke's Duino Elegies.

I didn't know that Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life while vacationing in Duino.

From A Common Reader, a note on the movie version of Joseph Roth's Legend of the Holy Drinker (which features Rutger Hauer), and a series of posts on Roth's Radetzky March.

From Philosophers Zone, Paul Mendes-Flohr on the work of Martin Buber.

The UNC Press blog has an article on Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation.

Leoš Janáček's Sinfonietta features prominently in Murakami's IQ84.

From the New York Public Library, Edmund de Waal in conversation with Paul Holdengraber:

Franz Hessel

2011-10-10T03:26:00.000-04:00

One of the interesting characters from early 20th-Century Schwabing was Franz Hessel, a flaneur and friend of Walter Benjamin's whom Anke Gleber has characterized as 'one of the last representatives of the metropolitan, intellectual bohemian characteristic of the European culture of early modernity.' In his book Weimar Germany: promise and tragedy, Eric D. Weitz quotes extensively from Hessel's writings (and Joseph Roth's) in order to convey a sense of Berlin's street life during the Weimar Republic.

Born in Stettin, Hessel arrived in Munich in 1900 as a law student. He soon changed plans in order to focus on archaeology and philosophy. He also became a poet, a vocation that brought him into contact with Karl Wolfskehl and the members of his circle. (I wonder if he bumped into Frederick Grove.) In this part of Hessel's life, his bohemian credentials were well and truly established by his complicated relationship with Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow, which began in 1903 when he entered a ménage à trois with her and Bogdan von Suchocki. (Here's a photo of the house in which Reventlow and Suchocki lived at the time; it's in Kaulbachstraße in Munich, and here's a photo in which you can see Hessel with Reventlow's son.) Suchocki seems to have been replaced in this arrangement in 1907 by Henri-Pierre Roché, by which time Hessel had moved to Paris.

Roché and Hessel would later maintain a similar relationship with the German journalist, Helen Grund, whom Hessel married in 1913. This ménage became famous as the centrepiece of Roché's novel, Jules et Jim, which was the basis of Francois Truffaut's film of the same name. The character of Jules was based on Hessel. Roché was the basis of Jim, and Catherine ('Kathe' in the novel) was based on Grund.

Hessel wrote his own novel about this relationship, but it doesn't seem to be available in English. In German it's called Alter Mann, while in French it's Le Dernier Voyage. Hessel wrote it in the 1930's, but it was thought to have been lost until it was recovered in 1984.

It looks like Hessel's most important relationships with women were in the context of a ménage à trois. In this setting, Jean-Michel Palmier writes that Hessel 'becomes [women's] confidant, he loves them and admires them at a distance, preferring the role of friend to that of lover.' (Here's the original, French version of Palmier's essay.) Of his relationship with Roché and Grund, Hessel himself (in Alter Mann) said that it 'expanded the habitual scope of friendship and love.'

Franz Hessel volunteered to fight for Germany in WWI. After the war, he worked in Germany for Rowohlt Verlag. It appears that he and his family fled for France relatively late (1938). In 1940, Hessel suffered a stroke while in a detention camp in France. I believe that he was held in that camp (Camp des Milles) before the Germans had control of it, at a time when the French were using it as an internment camp for any Germans and Austrians who happened to be in France. After his release from the camp, Hessel died in January, 1941.

His and Helen's son, Stéphane, fought for the French resistance and became an accomplished diplomat. Here are brief bios of father and son.

Franz Hessel

Consciousness, Buddhism & human nature

2011-09-18T20:27:00.000-04:00

Alan Saunders interviews David Chalmers about 'zombies and consciousness'

Does possibility entail conceivability? See the comments for points about Davidson's reliance on this entailment in his argument against the possibility of a language that isn't translatable into our own.

On Philosophy Bites, Frank Jackson is interviewed about 'what Mary knew'

William Seager reviews a posthumous collection of papers by idealist and panpsychist T. L. S. Sprigge (The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics and Ethics)

Mr. Waggish on Buddhism and Galen Strawson's panpsychism

Pain reduction through meditation? 'The degree of concordance between these studies suggests that meditative practices may indeed reduce pain through a unique neural mechanism, one corresponding to increased attention and reduced evaluative/emotional responses'

From last March, David Weisman on Buddhism's anticipation of key findings in modern neuroscience.

Tim Thornton's neat-looking course, 'Meaning, understanding and explanation'

Adrian Owen's detection of consciousness in people previously thought not to have it (people in vegetative states).

From the Abstract for a paper called 'What is a "mood-congruent" delusion? History and conceptual problems': 'This article investigates the history of the concept of mood-congruent delusions and the problems accompanying this concept. In the late nineteenth century, there were conflicting views regarding the relationship between the contents of an individual’s delusional thought and his/her affective state.'

Edge's 'Master Class' on the science of human nature (with Daniel Kahneman, Michael Gazzaniga, Steven Pinker, etc.).

Unfortunately, Kate's performance is cut off in this clip, so if you want the whole of her song, the original video is on YouTube.

Northrop Frye on the teaching machine

2011-09-12T01:04:00.000-04:00

Northrop Frye in 1970:

All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.

Philosophy links & Beckett's film

2011-08-21T20:30:00.001-04:00

Georg Reimers

Here's a podcast in which Robert Zaretsky discusses the friendship and dispute involving Hume and Rousseau.

A review of Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment.

Two new entries in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one on Shaftesbury, one on Goethe

A review of Janice Carlisle's book about John Stuart Mill's 'character and sense of self.'

Jonathan Rée on William James: 'He favoured philosophy too, but not the dreary timidity encouraged by what he called “the PhD Octopus”, nor the stupefying smugness and philistine cleverness propagated by a posh young Englishman called Bertrand Russell.'

Turning from the history of philosophy to the philosophy of history, my library finally has access to the relatively new Journal of the Philosophy of History, a recent issue of which includes Celina María Bragagnolo's paper, 'Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate'.

Re. the history of the philosophy of history: W. H. Walsh wrote one of the standard introductory books on the philosophy of history. Daniel Little has posted a discussion of it, as well as a second item, situating Walsh in the idealist tradition.

A new, open-access journal on Wittgenstein (ht Language Goes on Holiday), and Oxford University Press has made several journal articles on Wittgenstein publicly available, as has the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

David Auerbach posts some quotations that illustrate how Rudolf Carnap viewed his philosophy in the context of contemporary artistic and political movements.

Here's a short film by Samuel Beckett with the following description: 'A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film ... in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts.'

Paul Boghossian argued against moral relativism in a NY Times piece, in which he objected to a 2001 article by Stanley Fish. Fish replied to Boghossian. Now, Boghossian has posted a masterful reply.

In that debate, Fish said that philosophy doesn't much matter outside the classroom. Bookforum's 'Omnivore' has posted a series of links under the heading 'Does philosophy matter?'

'Does Anything Matter?' by Peter Singer.

Mark Oppenheimer on Charles Taylor on 'how the Western liberal can reconcile a preference for liberal democracy with the illiberalism necessary for cultural preservation or self-preservation, which many accept as understandable goals.'

James Wood discourses on Taylor, Virginia Woolf, The Tree of Life, Max Weber, Philip Kitcher, etc. while reviewing The Joy of Secularism.

A podcast of Alan Saunders' interview with Martha Nussbaum.

Links mostly about German novels

2011-08-10T08:03:00.000-04:00

T. T. Heine's poster for a Munich cabaret (depicting Marya Delvard)

The Tablet launches a series of monthly podcasts called 'Long Story Short' with an interview of Vivian Gornick about Rosa Luxemburg

Tom Wolfe on Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Norden's 1969 interview of McLuhan for Playboy

From Robert Zaretsky's review of The Pursuit of Laziness: an Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment: 'Diderot’s Rameau is a loafer for whom artistic creation means mimicry and regret. ... Other creations of Diderot... delight in doing nothing by the traditional standards of the West: the Tahitian natives in his Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville for whom mocking those same western standards is about as busy as they get; or Jacques and his master in Jacques the Fatalist, content with interruptions and detours in their own lives that mock our traditional standards.'

Bomb Magazine's1988 interview of Gregor von Rezzori (via Three Percent), and Three Percent's review of Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Two of Irmgard Keun's books have just been translated into English:

1. From Other Press: 'Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was [Keun's] The Artificial Silk Girl.'

2. From Melville House: 'Now, at last, [Keun's] After Midnight is available in the United States, the first title in Melville House‘s Neversink Library.'

Jenny McPhee discusses both of these books by Keun, and Salonica Monica reviews Artificial Silk Girl. Here's more about Keun by Sarah Bakewell.

Daniel Mendelsohn analyzes the women in Theodor Fontane's novels, and Jane Librizzi reviews Fontane's newly re-issued Irretrievable.

Michael Wood reviews five of Heinrich Böll's books, which have been re-issued by Melville House.

Kenji Fujishima on a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra: 'Whereas Mahler often laid out his struggles right on the surface, to the point where some might find his music impossibly overwrought, Bruckner—in his symphonies, in particular—often finds more serene, if sometimes no less anguished, expressions of his musical quests for God.'

From Glenn Gould's 1979 documentary on Toronto: 'I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colours of any kind depress me.' The documentary is about 48 minutes long. In it, Gould appears to like Toronto mainly because it doesn't much intrude on his consciousness. And he sings Mahler to elephants at the zoo. In case the above link to the documentary doesn't work, here's the first of the six YouTube clips from it.

Here's a passage about a strange crackpot named Alfred Schuler, which I came across while reading about fin-de-siècle Munich: 'Nietzsche was even the intended recipient of Schuler's occult therapy. For two years Schuler made preparations to cure Nietzsche's madness through the freely interpreted rite of an ancient Corybantic dance. It was never implemented, partly because of the difficulty of enlisting suitable youths for the cultic dance.' (Quoted from p. 79 of The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany -- 1890 - 1990, by Steven E. Ascheim)

New philosophy links and unrelated video

2011-07-29T07:31:00.001-04:00

Erich Mühsam

Erich Mühsam

David Auerbach on Hans Blumenberg: 'It is rare for [Hans Blumenberg] to “take sides” explicitly because he is often preoccupied with showing that the sides are not what we think they are.'

From a review of Interpretation: Ways of Thinking about the Sciences and the Arts: 'If Machamer, Wolters and their contributors have their way, [the topic of interpretation] should also figure importantly in various areas of the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and action, and practical aesthetics.' Some chapters of this book are on Google Books.

Michael Sandel is interviewed about his interest in political theory

Paul Feyerabend's critique of rationalist models of scientific method (ht Siris)

Here's a podcast of an interview with Robert Pasnau about his book Metaphysical Themes: 1247-1671

Robert Brandom's Munich Hegel Lectures are available on-line

Here are videos of the Frankfurt Lectures on normativity going back to 2008, including talks by Brandom, Robert Pippin, Sabina Lovibond, etc.

Pippin is interviewed about Hegel and art: 'With Hegel, the official answer to that question is that art is an intuitive, sensible mode of intelligibility of the Absolute.'

Jerome E. Copulsky reviews two books on Moses Mendelssohn

From an interview with David Cartwright, Schopenhauer's most recent English-language biographer: 'If you observe the behavior of a bulldog ant cut in two, you can understand some of Schopenhauer’s basic claims.'

Peter Thompson's series on Karl Marx in the Guardian

Richard Sennett on humanism: 'Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience.'

A 33-minute video of Francis Fukuyama on the origins of the political order

In the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, David M. Johnson reviews the Cambridge Companion to Socrates, and Eleni Kaklamanon reviews The Demands of Reason: an Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism.

Alan Saunders interviews Peter Adamson: 'Who was Plotinus?'

At Philosophy Bites, Peter Singer talks about Henry Sidgwick's ethics.

At Virtual Philosopher, Julian Savulescu discusses moral enhancement technologies.

Duncan Richter has a series of posts on Richard Joyce's Myth of Morality

In a blog post about the perils of using 'and/or' in legal writing, there is this quote from a 1942 case: 'The expression “and/or” is unfortunate. I do not think I have met it before in a will, and I hope I shall never meet it again.' And from a 1976 case: '[T]he commonly accepted meaning is that "and/or" means either "and" or "or," or both.'

I like Raymond Chandler, but never have I so desired to rip a cigarette out of someone's mouth as when I heard this 1958 interview of Chandler by Ian Fleming:

Ian Fleming Talks to Raymond Chandler 1958 from 33hirtz on Vimeo.

Austro-Hungarian subjects

2011-07-26T08:00:00.003-04:00

Mia Slavenska

Otto von Habsburg's obituary: 'He died a happy man, right about almost everything, if usually too early.'

'“Only silence is innocent”: Zagajewski on Rilke, irony, and the future of poetry'

Brett Foster reviews Edward Snow's new translation of some Rilke poems (here's an excerpt from Zagajewski's introduction to Snow's translations)

Mark Harman's translation of Kafka's 'Message From the Emperor'

Isotropic Films is making a film of Kafka's Metamorphosis (the father's packin' heat -- I wonder if the bug will shoot electric rays from its antennae)

At Three Percent, Bill Marx goes to bat for Ernst Weiss's novel, Georg Letham, and Brady Evan Walker reviews Joseph Roth's Job, and Chad W. Post introduces Gregor von Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Tom Nairn reviews a new biography of Ernest Gellner

Otto Preminger one-ups Letterman:

Freud's cocaine thing. Here's a pdf about Freud's cocaine thing (and the much worse drug habits of renegade psychoanalyst Otto Gross, who had radical ideas about sex and free love, and who had an affair with Frieda von Richtofen, who later married D. H. Lawrence and might've presented to him [Lawrence] Gross' ideas about sex and free love ...).

A longish piece in Haaretz called 'Monk, Mystic, Mechanic' -- on a recent Berlin exhibit devoted to Wittgenstein

Alan Saunders' and Gavin Kitching's podcast on Wittgenstein's puzzlement

Wittgenstein's photos, and a 'Lost archive shows Wittgenstein in a new light'

Dave Maier on Wittgenstein and meaning: "Can I say 'bububu' and mean 'If it doesn't rain I shall go for a walk'?"

Humpty Dumpty

Fergus Johnston reviews the new translation of Jens Malte Fischer's 2003 biography of Mahler, and here's Rupert Christiansen's review

And M. Werbowski reviews Norman Lebrecht's Why Mahler?

Bob Duggan reviews a Neue Galerie show on fin-de-siècle Vienna: 'How Vienna in 1900 gave birth to modernity' -- '“In his life, Klimt clearly divided women into those he respected, even exalted, and those he slept with,” [Jill] Lloyd acknowledges, but also “Klimt’s images of women are acknowledged as complex representations with a symbolic force; as such, they embody allusions to the ‘women question’ that are far from straightforward".'

Mattel's new 'Gustav Klimt Barbie doll echoes the artist's portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, reflecting the painting's Byzantine mosaics and Egyptian motifs. She wears a halter gown with silvery trim, draped chiffon sleeves and bustle .... She is a magnificent muse.'

The world's first mobile internal combustion engine was made in Vienna

Mahler, with Glenn Gould conducting, Maureen Forrester singing:

Café Stefanie (Munich)

2011-07-18T02:49:00.005-04:00

I did not make my entry into the Bohème until I had pushed back the thick baize curtain behind the glass door of the Café Stefanie, seated myself at one of the little marble-topped tables and ordered an absinthe. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')

Café Stefanie (1905)

Researching Munich's café life in the early 20th century has proved to be an excellent 'way in' to the cultural and artistic milieu of a great and very influential creative centre. I don't know if it was on a par with café life in Vienna, but the gathering of creative and intellectual talents in the cafés of Schwabing at least comes close.

One of the liveliest cafés in Schwabing was the Café Stefanie. Destroyed in WWII, it was located at what is now Amalienstrasse 25 (at the intersection with Theresienstrasse). You can see its location at roughly the 9-minute mark of this YouTube guide to Schwabing.

The Stefanie was one of the three central European cafes that were nicknamed Café Grössenwahn (Café Megalomania) -- the other two were the Café des Westens in Berlin and the Griensteidl in Vienna. The characterization of these three establishments' regular customers as megalomaniacal might have been an act of mockery by others, but it was also a bit of self-irony on the part of the customers themselves, who included many writers, activists, and artists.

It had two rooms, a large one with two billiard tables ... and a smaller one at whose windows the chess players sat. ... In the smaller room the chess-players sit crouching silently over their boards: Gustav Meyrink, who popularized magic and horror, is playing with Roda Roda [aka Sandór Rosenfeld], who substitutes for the officer's uniform he used to wear the obligatory red waistcoat and the monocle in his rubicund bulldog face. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')

Chess at the Stefanie

While the more established artists and intellectuals (inc. members of the Blue Rider) tended to congregate at the Café Luitpold, the Stefanie drew a younger, more left-wing crowd. Among its habitués were the dramatist Frank Wedekind, the artist Alfred Kubin, the novelist Heinrich Mann, and the fiction writer Gustav Meyrink, who used the Stefanie as the setting for a short story called 'Wie Dr. Hiob Paupersum seiner Tochter rote Rosen schenkte', which appeared in an issue of Simplicissimus in 1915 (here's a pdf of that issue).

There were also several anarchists and communists, such as Erich Mühsam, Kurt Eisner, and Otto Gross. Younger customers included Oskar Maria Graf, Erwin Piscator, Franz Jung, and Emmy Hennings -- these last three would become influential in the Dada groups in Berlin and Zurich. Else Lasker-Schuler visited the Stefanie on her trips to Munich. And of course there was Franziska Countess zu Reventlow, a novelist, translator, and occasional prostitute who was a sort of cross between Lou Andreas-Salomé and Anita Berber. (Update [July 28]: Here's more about the Countess.)

And the psychoanalysts: the unhappy Dr. Gross, son of the famous criminal psychologist, his waistcoat sprinkled with cocaine, who was put away by his father; Dr. Gösch, ... lecturing to an attentive following on his idea of circular marriage, Leonhard Frank whose Cause made him famous because he introduced psychoanalysis into literature. (Richard Seewald, 'In the Café Stefanie')

The Stefanie became a sort of home base for the revolutionaries who instituted the Bavarian Soviet Republic just after WWI. In that capacity it attracted the leading German anarchist Gustav Landauer (grandfather of Mike Nichols) and the logical positivist Otto Neurath (as an economic adviser). Lewis Feuer describes the centrality of the Stefanie to the communist uprising at the end of WWI (and notes that a young Werner Heisenberg was in the Freikorps that suppressed it).

Ur-hippies from Germany to California

2011-07-12T20:57:00.005-04:00

Gusto Gräser

In a previous post I applied the term 'hippie central' to Schwabing (a neighborhood in Munich). I meant 'hippie' to refer generally to Bohemian tendencies, but I've discovered closer ties between the Bohemians of early 20th-century Germany and the American hippies of the 1960's. The man pictured above, Gusto Gräser, was a nomadic 'poet-prophet' who lived in many parts of Germany -- he's in Berlin in the above photo -- including Munich and it surroundings. He eventually settled in Munich.

Gräser in Munich (1945)

Gräser was one of many naturmenschen, men who rejected industrialization and the unnatural trends of urbanization and who adopted a 'back to nature' creed. Although Gräser lived in Munich and visited cities, for much of his life he lived in more pastoral places. He lived for a while at Monte Verità (pdf) near Ascona in Switzerland. Monte Verità, which Gräser co-founded, was similar in many ways to a hippie commune. Its founders were pacifists who wanted to establish a communal, vegetarian and clothing-optional settlement far from any cities. More information about this commune can be found at the next link along with several photos, but note that some of the depicted inhabitants of Monte Verità aren't clothed. Among the inhabitants were so many artists and authors from Schwabing that it was called 'Schwabing von Schwabing'. These inhabitants included Otto Gross, Leonhard Frank, Erich Muhsam, Franziska Countess zu Reventlow, Oskar Maria Graf, Marianne Werefkin, Alexej Jawlensky, Hugo Ball, Paul Klee, and Ernst Toller. One of the commune's most famous visitors was Herman Hesse.

Ur-hippies at Monte Verità

Some of the naturmenschen moved to the USA. For example, there was Hermann Sexauer, 'a philosophical anarchist, a radical pacifist, a theoretical nudist, and an anti-communist,' who was born in Teningen, Germany and who moved to the USA in 1906, eventually establishing a natural foods store in Santa Barbara. More influential was Bill Pester of Saxony. He left Germany (to avoid military service) and settled in California. Here are some photos of Pester, including one of him at his hut in Palm Canyon, California.

These pics look like they're straight out of the 60's, but they're from approx. 1917. (Pester moved to the USA in 1906.)

Pester met a young American named eden ahbez (who eschewed capital letters) and became ahbez's 'mentor'. Ahbez and the other young Americans who followed Pester called themselves 'nature boys' (a loose translation of naturmenschen). In 1948, ahbez wrote a song about Pester and called it 'Nature Boy'. Nat King Cole recorded it, which drew media attention to ahbez. He appears briefly in this clip followed by footage from another TV show in which Cole performs the song.

The nature boys received some attention also from Jack Kerouac's reference to them in On the Road. And they became well-known in California simply because of their distinctive appearance.

This story has been told before (esp. at the above links) but I wasn't aware of it until I looked up Monte Verità.

Get your phil of love

2011-07-09T04:12:00.007-04:00

By Gustav Doré

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the philosophy of love

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on phil of love

'Love, the Pope and C. S. Lewis' by Avery Cardinal Dulles

A brief note on Anders Nygren's book from the 1930's, Eros and Agape

Robert Merrihew Adams on 'pure love'

MIT's open course site for Irving Singer's course on the phil of love, and here's a playlist of Singer's lectures

Philosophy Bites' podcast on love in Plato's Symposium (Jowett's translation of the Symposium)

Two papers on love, one on love in Plato and the other relating love to Epicurus

ADDED (July 11) via Omnivore: 'Plato, Romance, and Self-Inquiry' by John Bardi

Syllabus for a neat-looking Notre Dame course on love 'built around Plato's Symposium, Shakespeare, Catholic writings, and several movies'. There are videos of the lectures, which I can't play -- but they're also on iTunes.

Eric Ormsby on the 'Erotic Inferno' -- a review of A. N. Wilson's Dante in Love

Last January's issue of Essays in Philosophy was devoted to the phil of love (8 articles)

A summary of Kierkegaard's Works of Love

From 2001, Melvyn Bragg talks to Roger Scruton, Angie Hobbs, and Thomas Docherty about the phil of love

From 2007, Alan Saunders talks to Linnell Secomb about 'philosophical love stories', with references to Nietzsche, Frankenstein, and de Beauvoir

Nichi Hodgson reviews books on love by Simon May and Lisa Appignanesi

Philosophy Bites interviews May on love

From Nicholas Lezard's review of Gillian Rose's Love's Work: '"Love" and "life" are for Rose almost interchangeable words; we read the phrase "life affair" more than once.'

Freud's love letters to his future wife

Alain de Botton surveys Schopenhauer on love:

Rowohlt and friends in Leipzig

2011-07-08T04:59:00.008-04:00

Riquet Café with Nikolaikirche behind it

In Saxony, Dresden is a more popular tourist destination than Leipzig. I was short of time at this stage of my trip, so I could visit only one of these cities. I opted for Leipzig, and I'm glad that I did. Historically, Dresden was the more extravagant capital of Saxony, while Leipzig was more prominent as a trade centre, but a very cultured one. Among Leipzig's former residents are Leibniz, Bach, Goethe, Mahler, Schumann, Wagner, Luther, Lessing, Nietzsche, and Schiller.

The city drew so many geniuses partly because it has long been a university town and partly because it was home to many publishers. For me, the most interesting of these publishers was Rowohlt, which was run by Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff.

Rowohlt preferred to do much of his work in nearby bars and cafés. Over the lunch hours (one gets the impression that with Rowohlt lunch took hours), he and his associates did business at Wilhelms Weinstube [Wilhelm's Wine Parlour].

The student who introduced me to Hasenclever soon led us to the regular midday gathering in the back room of Wilhelm's Wine Parlour .... [T]he little circle was dominated by a colossal figure with enormously broad shoulders; beneath a tuft of ginger hair beamed the reddish face .... This was Ernst Rowohlt, bursting with vitality and joie de vivre .... [Kurt Pinthus, 'Leipzig and Early Expressionism', in The Era of Expressionism, p. 68]

According to my guide (Literarisches Leipzig), this wine parlour was located at Hainstrasse 23, where the ugly, low building is (lower right) in this photo:

Among Rowohlt's early writers were Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Kafka, Hugo Ball, Georg Heym, Albert Ehrenstein (whom Pinthus dubbed 'the bitterest poet of the century whom I called the "cosmic Schlemihl"' [p. 73]), and Arnold Zweig (audio plays at that last link).

[T]he midday gathering at Wilhelm's Wine Parlour ... became a breeding ground, then a centre, a place of pilgrimage for the young writers from the German-speaking world. Whenever any writer of the young or older generation came to Leipzig from Berlin, Prague, Munich, Vienna, West Germany he knew that he would meet Rowohlt and Werfel and Hasenclever and me and others like himself in that wine parlour. And he knew that he would then go on to the traditional coffee houses: the refined Café Felsche ... the stark Café Merkur ... or Café Bauer on whose old-fashioned red plush benches generations of men of letters had sat. [Pinthus, p. 71] (audio plays at last link)

Pinthus says that Werfel arrived in Leipzig at the end of October, 1911, and became an employee at the publishing firm.

With a powerful, though untrained, voice [Werfel] sang arias from his beloved Verdi ... and thunderously declaimed his hymnic poems. Every other day he would come and see me with a new magnificently declaimed poem. [Pinthus, p. 70]

Here's a photo that was reproduced in Reiner Stach's book on Kafka:

Hasenclever, Werfel, and Pinthus in Leipzig (1912)

Pinthus recalls (p. 73) the day when he met Kafka (June 29, 1912): 'Brod turned up with a tall, thin, very pale, very shy person who hardly spoke at all: Franz Kafka.' In advance of this meeting, while Kafka toured the city, Brod had met with Rowohlt and the others and raved about his friend's work. Intrigued, Rowohlt suggested that Brod bring Kafka around for lunch.

Brod and Kafka headed straight for Wilhelm's Tavern, where Rowohlt sat and waited with Pinthus and his friend and freelance editor Walter Hasenclever over several large mugs of wine spritzer. [Kafka: The Decisive Years, Rainer Stach, p. 74]

Stach says that the meeting didn't go well, for Rowohlt was impressed by other extroverts, like Werfel, and not so much by shy, nervous characters like Kafka. (Kurt Wolff, at that time Rowohlt's 'silent' partner, wasn't so disapproving of shyness.) Kafka, too, didn't seem pleased with the encounter. He wrote in his diary, 'Strange daily gathering at noon in the Wine Parlour. Large, wide wine goblets with slices of lemon.' [Quoted from Pinthus, p. 73] Still, Brod succeeded in persuading the publisher to add Kafka to his small stable of authors.

As Pinthus said, in the evenings Rowohlt and company typically headed for a café, though it sounds like Werfel often went his own way. (Singing and thunderously declaiming all the while?) 'He usually went to the Café Felsche or the theater in the evenings, then spent the night making the rounds of bars, cabarets, and brothels.' [A Life Torn By History: Franz Werfel 1890-1945, Peter Stephan Jungk, p. 32]

While Werfel was making his evening rounds, Rowohlt could usually be found in the Café Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum, which opened for business in 1694. Its past customers include Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Lessing, Gottsched, Goethe, and Bach. (The apple strudel here is perfect.) Here's the decoration above its entrance.

Pinthus says that this decoration was installed by Augustus the Strong (and the profligate), and that it depicts 'a Turk sitting under a coffee bush holding a huge coffee pot while a cherub is passing him a cup of what the Leipzigers call the "hot stuff".' [Pinthus, p. 72] Of the café's past customers, its owners seem especially impressed by Schumann, to whom they've dedicated a room.

Once ensconced here for the evening,

Rowohlt reigned at a clean scrubbed wooden table where great quantities of Pilsner were drunk and many ham and egg sandwiches consumed. This was rounded off by a session in the spacious Central Theater Bar .... And there about midnight we would really let ourselves go [!?!], especially Ernst Rowohlt, full of enthusiasm, laughter and boisterous good spirits. [Pinthus, p. 72]

Rowohlt, Wolff and their employees were in their twenties at this time. Werfel, Pinthus, Hasenclever, and Willy Haas (a friend from Prague) shared an apartment. They enjoyed the lifestyle of rowdy grad students while launching one of the most important publishing companies of the 20th century.

Roth and Musil in Berlin

2011-07-04T23:19:00.013-04:00

This building at Kurfürstendamm 217 in Berlin must have been a pension or hotel in the first third of the 20th century, since both Robert Musil and Joseph Roth lived in it at different times in the '20s and '30s (source: Literarisches Berlin).

A plaque on the building indicates that Musil wrote a portion of Man Without Qualities while residing at this address from 1931 until 1933. Here's a passage from Musil's diaries (actually from an unsent letter included in them) about apartment hunting in Berlin at an earlier stage of his life:

In the first few days in Berlin I had one or two flashes of insight. When I was looking at rooms. Some small, some big, dark, elegant ones, and bright patriarchal ones. I was looking for something, but didn't know what; not a study, not a work-room, not a room for living, a room of the kind that might have been occupied before me by the person I would like to have become. It sounds so ridiculous, but it made me walk the streets for days. (Notebook 3, Oct. 4, 1903)

Roth lived at Kurfürstendamm 217 in 1925. He continued to live in the area into the early 1930's, including at the Hotel am Zoo, and worked on The Radetzky March in a nearby bar/café at Kurfürstendamm 15. One finds this plaque at the latter address:

Update (July 6, 2011): I found an older picture (1950s?) of Kurfürstendamm 217 (the Musil-Roth residence) in Wilfried Berghahn's book Robert Musil. The building used to be 'Pension Stern'. Here it is:

From Altschwabing to Manitoba

2011-07-03T19:18:00.004-04:00

Schwabing lay at the heart of Munich's artistic creativity in the years before and after WWI. In about two minutes one can walk past the former Schwabing residences of Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Karl Wolfskehl (a poet and playwright who belonged to Stefan George's circle). These artists all lived on Ainmillerstrasse and on Römerstrasse. By clicking on the next links, you can see my photos of Rilke's place, Klee's old building, Kandinsky's home, and Wolfskehl's place around the corner from them.

Kandinsky reminisced fondly about his days in Munich in a letter that he wrote to Hanna and Karl Wolfskehl on Nov. 6, 1926, in which Kandinsky recalls

the old times -- Ainmiller-Römerstrasse -- I still have in good memory. Those were in general good, exciting, hopeful times that promised more than has been realized till now. (Quoted from Peg Weiss's book, Kandinsky in Munich: the Formative Jugendstil Years, p. 82)

Karl Wolfskehl

Munich's creative ferment sustained many such interconnections across the arts, connections not just between individual talents but among whole creative circles as well. Kandinsky, for instance, was at the centre of the Blue Rider painters while Wolfskehl (the 'Zeus of Schwabing') belonged to the Kosmikerkreis (Cosmic Circle). There was also a musical influence on the Blue Rider, for Kandinsky was much inspired by the work of the Viennese musician (and painter) Arnold Schoenberg.

One surprise for me in reading about the creative milieu of Munich in the early 20th century is its long hidden connection to Canadian literature. One of the early Canadian novelists was Frederick Philip Grove. Apart from being a novelist, Grove turns out to have been an accomplished fabulist. He appeared in Manitoba in 1912, claiming to be from Russia. He became a teacher and eventually a principal, lived near the North Dakota border, and wrote stories about prairie life. It turns out that Frederick Grove, prairie storyteller, was really Felix Paul Berthold Friedrich Greve, a Prussian who had moved to Munich in 1901 and associated with members of Stefan George's circle (esp. Friedrich Gundolf). In Munich, Greve affected the mannerisms of Oscar Wilde, which apparently undermined Greve's attempt to ingratiate himself with Wolfskehl. Greve ran up a big debt, was sent to prison, faked his own suicide and moved to Kentucky and then Canada. [Correction (July 15): After Munich, Greve moved to Berlin and began a relationship with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She helped him to fake his suicide and followed him to America, but he parted company with her in Kentucky.] So, this seemingly somewhat boring old figure in Canadian, prairie literature turns out to have arrived here from the fin de siècle's hippie central in Schwabing, Munich.

Sources consulted (besides those mentioned above): München: Literarische Streifzüge by Margarete Graf; Only in Munich by Duncan J. D. Smith.

Evil café lurker

2011-07-01T12:31:00.005-04:00

I've just returned from a trip to Germany. I visited Munich, Augsburg, Berlin, and Leipzig. I'll post on the cultural history of some of these places (in the way that I did on cafés in Vienna), with the focus on Munich, where I spent the most time.

Munich has much in common with Vienna. Both cities are predominantly Roman Catholic centres in which German is the main language. Both cities served as the home base for several Holy Roman Emperors and have the magnificent, old buildings to prove it. Both cities hosted a brilliant artistic culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a culture that thrived in several cafés. And both cities included among their early 20th-Century inhabitants Lenin and Hitler.

Differences between Munich and Vienna are evident from the fact that Hitler disliked Vienna but loved Munich. He seems to have regarded Munich as his adopted home town (even though Vienna was the capital of his home country). Why did Vienna repel this monster while Munich attracted him? From what I can tell, Hitler hated Vienna's more cosmopolitan milieu. Also, Vienna showed more appreciation and support for its creative Bohemians (like Peter Altenberg) while Müncheners seem, for the most part, to have regarded their city's artistic, café culture with disdain and suspicion. This hostile stance reflects the incursion of rural and small-town Bavarian attitudes into the city, feeding a tendency in its inhabitants to be uncritical of tradition and to resent the apparently idle proto-hippies who challenged it. As Thomas Mann put it, Munich was 'the unliterary city par excellence. Banal women and healthy men – God knows what a lot of contempt I load into the word "healthy"!' (Quoted from p. 4 of Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich by David Clay Large)

Pro-tradition and against the shock of the new (esp. in the arts) -- it's no surprise that a man like Hitler would find such a setting more congenial than Vienna. However, it is an uncomfortable fact that Hitler himself affected the style of a café Bohemian. One of the things that drew him to Munich was its advanced status as a city for painters. After failing in Vienna, he found that he could support himself (for a brief time) as a postcard painter in Munich. He became an outsider Bohemian, a Bohemian in his lifestyle but a reactionary in art and politics, whose opinions in these areas were (even before WWI) more in line with the overall tone of Munich than that of Vienna.

One of the Munich cafés that Hitler favoured was the Carlton Tea Room. It was across the street from the more famous Café Luitpold. The Luitpold's building didn't survive WWII. After the war, the Luitpold re-opened in a new building on the same site as the old one. Across the street from the Luitpold I found an establishment called the Carlton Bar and Restaurant.

I don't know what (if any) connection it has to the Carlton Tea Room. It's in the courtyard of this building:

In his autobiography, The Turning Point, Klaus Mann describes his experience of observing Hitler in the Carlton Tea Room as follows:

It was at the beginning of 1932 that I spent half-an-hour or so watching him at a table just a few feet from mine. The Carlton Tea Room in Munich was one of his favorite places .... My main reason for going there was that the Café Luitpold, on the other side of the street, was crammed with SA men. ... I found him surprisingly ugly, much more vulgar than I had anticipated. ... He was flabby and foul and without any marks of greatness, a frustrated, hysterical petty bourgeois. It was a most unpleasant experience to have him so close to me, but at the same time it meant something like a relief. For I was positive that he had no chance to conquer Germany. 'He is not to be our dictator,' I felt with a sort of malignant satisfaction. 'You have no chance, silly little mustache. Don't fool yourself, Schicklgruber: you are a washout. Five years from now, nobody will remember your name ...' Was there no bloody aura around his head to remind me? No writing on the wall of the Carlton Tea Room?

A comprehensive summary of Munich's history at the centre of the Nazi movement can be found in this 51-page pdf on a German and Bavarian government site (cf. their site with an MP3 version).

McLuhan in the Walrus

2011-06-14T07:08:00.000-04:00

The latest issue of the Walrus has an article on Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer. I knew that McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism, but I hadn't realized how strong was his antipathy towards Protestantism. Heer says that McLuhan blamed pretty much all that's wrong in modern western culture on Protestant attitudes. For McLuhan, the Reformation was a long, slippery slide into a real slough of despond. According to Heer, McLuhan reached this conclusion during his sojourn in a vast, blighted waste that the Protestants had left in their path (Winnipeg). I wonder if his dislike of Protestantism is one of the sources of the friction between McLuhan and some of his United Church colleagues in the English Department at the University of Toronto (such as Northrop Frye and N. J. Endicott).

Heer refers to some McLuhan clips on YouTube. However, the one from which Heer quotes most extensively is a longer piece on Google Video in which McLuhan goes head to head with Norman Mailer. The discussion was recorded by the CBC's The Summer Way in 1968. Heer includes this neat quotation of McLuhan from that broadcast:

Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

Here's the whole discussion:

While poking around on the Walrus' site, I found this older piece on McLuhan by Lewis Lapham. Lapham quotes McLuhan as follows:

Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I’m resolutely against…it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button.

Finally, here's a reminiscence of McLuhan by an acquaintance of his.

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

2011-05-22T05:03:00.000-04:00

Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who designed several stations in the Moscow subway system, and who was Isaac Babel's common-law wife, and about whom I learned from Elif Batuman's funny book, The Possessed

A map of Turkey's reading culture. Among the findings: the most popular Turkish authors are Ömer Seyfettin, Ayşe Kulin and Orhan Pamuk, and people in the northern province of Tokat prefer detective novels. No word on William S. Burroughs' popularity -- one of his books is being investigated in Turkey for 'incompliance with moral norms' and 'hurting people’s moral feelings.'

The Hindu's review of Orhan Pamuk's Naive and Sentimental Novelist: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Here's Alberto Manguel discussing the same book.

There's a Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg

An article by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times on the centenary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth

Chandrahas Choudhury on George Szirtes' translation of Sandor Marai's Portraits of a Marriage

Marjorie Perloff reviews a new book on Georg Trakl: 'Christian Hawkey’s brilliant Ventrakl, which puts Trakl’s tragic life squarely into the poetic equation, testifies to the enormous change that has come over lyric poetry in the twenty-first century.'

A clip from Barbara Gowdy's 1993 interview with Leonard Cohen:

Robert Boyers reviews Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past.

Jesse Freedman reviews Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Amelia Atlas on Joseph Roth's Radetzky March

Willard Spiegelman on The Leopard: 'If one mark of a great novelist is the ability to forgive everything by understanding everything, then [Giuseppe] Tomasi [di Lampedusa]'s only rivals are George Eliot, Tolstoy and Proust.'

A review of a collection of lectures by Natsume Soseki (published by Columbia Univ Press)

Finnegan's Wake on-line, with glosses for the puzzling words and phrases

Nicholas Allen reviews R. F. Foster's Words Alone re. Yeats' intellectual origins

A newly recovered story by Daphne du Maurier

Brendan Behan at the pub:

Jane Smiley on the re-issue of Nancy Mitford's novels

Paul Theroux on the 'the trouble with autobiography'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Here's an extensive site by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (with several audio clips) to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible

Three talks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Narnia

'History is written by the winners, literature is written by the losers'

2011-04-09T01:26:00.003-04:00

Here's Paul Holdengraber's deeply rewarding, enriching interview with Howard Jacobson from the NY Public Library.

Jacobson is suspicious of those who are hell-bent on winning (suspicions confirmed now by Charlie Sheen), although it must be said that Jacobson himself is keen on winning when it comes to ping pong. Perhaps that's okay, though, since ping pong, as Jacobson suggests, is (or was) a game for losers. His remarks on ping pong connect with his really wonderful observations on the nature of comedy and failure, which prompted his statement in the subject header. Here's an article at the Tablet about this great interview.

This is from an article on ping pong by Jacobson:

'From the start, table tennis had attracted deracinated intellectuals, thinkers, depressives, sun-avoiding contemplatives and melancholics. The first official world champion was Dr Roland Jacobi, a Hungarian attorney. Note the doctorate. In photographs I have seen of him, he plays without removing his cardigan. No sweat. His nationality, too, I take to be significant. If you discount the Englishman Fred Perry ... every world champion for the next 25 years came from one dejected outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or another.'

Junker shuns liberal teachings

2011-04-03T16:36:00.000-04:00

Henry Kissinger on a new book about Bismarck: 'Bismarck’s opponents were still wedded to the 18th-century concepts of the international system as a great clockwork with intricately meshed parts: the science of Newton. Bismarck foreshadowed an age whose equilibrium was an ever-changing interaction of forces, themselves in constant flux, like later atomic physics. Its appropriate philosopher was not Descartes but Darwin; not “I think, therefore I am,” but the “survival of the fittest.”'

Schleiermacher oversaw Bismarck's confirmation in the Lutheran Church at Berlin's Holy Trinity Church. Later in life, Bismarck forgot whatever Schleiermacher had taught him.

Philosophy podcasts & negative book reviews

2011-03-26T21:45:00.035-04:00

Otto Neurath

Galen Strawson gives Nicholas Humphrey's new book a negative review, and Humphrey retaliates with some nasty remarks in the comments section

Colin McGinn takes a relatively mild tone (compared to some of his other reviews) in this reflection on V. S. Ramachandran's latest book.

Scott Atran comes down hard on Sam Harris's book, and Gary Wills is not impressed by that book about 'whooshing' by Dreyfus and Kelly. Here's a brief reply by Kelly.

A BBC podcast in which Melvyn Bragg talks to Simon Blackburn, Helen Beebee, and Galen Strawson on free will, and here's Bragg talking to Grayling, Millican, and Keefe about logic

From Philosophy TV, here are Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson discussing 'philosophy and literature'. Here's an article by Boylan on the use of fiction for the exploration of philosophical questions.

From North Dakota, there's an impressive archive of interviews for the radio show, 'Why?'. For example, there are hour-long interviews with Arthur Danto, Charles Taylor, Rebecca Goldstein, Martha Nussbaum, etc.

Two podcasts on the Philosopher's Zone: one on the philosophy of music (with A. J. Hamilton), the other on Kurt Gödel (with Mark Colyvan)

And two from philosophy bites: one on Montaigne (with Sarah Bakewell) and one on F. P. Ramsey (with Hugh Mellor -- there's a link there to Mellor's BBC documentary on Ramsey from the late 1970's in which Mellor interviews A. J. Ayer, I. A. Richards, R. B. Braithwaite, etc.). Here's Anthony Appiah's discussion of Bakewell's book on Montaigne. And there's now another book on Montaigne, this time by Saul Frampton.

Here are several audio files from a Philosophy of Literature meeting at Royal Holloway University (ht OLP)

Here's the text of an interview with Julia Kristeva

A video of Baroness Mary Warnock in a panel discussion of roles for philosophy in politics. Warnock recently made the Guardian's list of the top 100 women in writing and academia, as did another philosopher, Onora O'Neill.

A Guardian piece on Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which influenced Sebald

Here's the 2nd hour of CBC's 'Sunday Edition', in which Michael Enright interviews Jason Brennan, a philosophy prof at Brown University, about not voting

At 24:30 of that CBC podcast, Enright begins his interview with 'Debo' Mitford. It isn't about philosophy but I highly recommend it. I LOL'd at 36:10 and 37:25. Here's a description of the whole program.

Karen Armstrong at the New York Public Library

2011-03-17T01:36:00.000-04:00

The grand old Dame was never plain

2011-03-17T01:34:00.002-04:00

The Guardian has two reviews of Richard Greene's new biography of Dame Edith Sitwell. There are lots of other reviews -- by Claudia FitzHerbert, Robert O'Byrne, Duncan Fallowell, Sarah Bradford, Deborah Longworth, and by Victoria Glendinning (whose own biography of Edith Sitwell appeared in 1981). The reviewers are divided over the merits of Greene's book and of Dame Edith's poetry. They all seem to agree, though, that Edith Sitwell had a genius for publicity and was a celebrity (the proof of this is usually taken to be the photo of her with Marilyn Monroe -- see below). In the Daily Mail, Roger Lewis portrays Sitwell's life as a gag-a-minute comedy skit.

Sitwell's great-nephew, William Sitwell, comments on Greene's biography and reflects upon his famous family. He calls the illustrious Dame's collaboration with William Walton, Façade, 'early white rap'.

Sitwell's appearance was striking. Elizabeth Bowen likened it to that of 'a high altar on the move.' In Roger Lewis compares Sitwell's appearance to 'an effigy on a Plantagenet tomb.' According to Lady Natasha Spender, these 'Plantagenet features could strike a chill'.

At the Telegraph, Dr. Christopher Goulding wrote in to correct a remark of Claudia FitzHerbert's, who had said that Edith, while still a child, received as a gift from her father a book called How to be Pleasing, Though Plain. Dr. Goulding says the book was more likely called How to be Pretty, Though Plain by C. E. Humphry. I haven't seen this book, but rummaging around on the net I found these gems quoted from Ms. Humphry's book:

'When the face is washed care must be taken to dry the nose downward, not upward, and whenever the nose is touched with the hand or handkerchief, the same advice must be borne in mind or very ugly results will follow.'

'To Remove Freckles: Apply with a linen cloth two tablespoonfuls of grated horseradish mixed with teacupful of sour milk.'

'Now, I am far from wishing to encourage tight-lacing, but if girls and women will practise it I should like to point out how it may be done with the least possible injury to the organs of the body.... girls (and women) will tight-lace, no matter what strength of protest is made, and it is better for them to do it in the least injurious way, if possible. Therefore I offer the following advice:-.... Of course, this is all unnecessary when funds are available to command a well-made corset from a trained physiologist.'

Funny Firbank, Hamilton's plaque, and a little flower girl

2011-02-23T02:46:00.003-05:00

Ingeborg Bachmann

From Christopher Fowler's list of nearly forgotten but good authors: 'Asked for his opinion of literature, [Ronald Firbank] admitted that he adored italics; a typically oblique Firbankian remark. His books contain party chatter consisting of disconnected words and phrases, much as we actually perceive them. Infamously, one chapter consisted of the exclamation “Mabel!” repeated eight times.'

An NPR segment on Patrick Leigh Fermor's Time to Keep Silence AND Werner Herzog reading Roger Ebert's review of the animated movie based on J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip

Patrick Hamilton gets a blue plaque in London but it isn't on a pub

Some Anglican evangelicals in literature

Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical forays

A short piece on Friedrich Torberg and Vienna café writers

Five questions for Jenny Erpenbeck

Mooks & Gripes reviews Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl

A neat-looking British horror anthology from 1969

Tess Lewis on Victor Serge's novels

F. R. Leavis remembers Wittgenstein

Steven E. Aschheim in Mittelweg: 'The critique of liberal-bourgeois instrumentality and mass modernity invariably informed the nature of their projects and the political positions they adopted – conservative, Zionist, Marxist, or religious. These sentiments were very much in the mould of Weimar intellectuals. ... Now, I want to compare them to another intellectual who ... occupies a remarkably iconic position precisely because he is a liberal. I am referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin.'

Vince Taylor, on whom the character of Ziggy Stardust was partly based:

2011-02-08T00:22:00.003-05:00

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher -- The Schleiermacher blog is back in action with new material on Troeltsch

According to Joseph Bottum, Charles Taylor believes that 'Selves are formed in community, even when the community has ... decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.'

Mark Vernon on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics

Pat Devine reviews a new book on Karl Polanyi's economics

A video of Chris Hedges speaking about his new book, the Death of the Liberal Class

George Prochnik on Vienna's 'Kaffeehaus Canon' (inc. a photo of Cafe Hawelka)

Matthew Gallaway on the 'city of dreams' in Musil's Man Without Qualities

Brad Johnson on Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé

Lesley Chamberlain on a collection of Karel Capek's short pieces

This fall, Random House will release Robert Walser's Berlin Stories as an e-book (trans. S. Bernofsky) (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Rudy Rucker on Cronenberg's Naked Lunch

Hari Kunzru's interview with Michael Moorcock

Recommended books for a novice reader of Rebecca West

Pamela Norris reviews Kathleen Jones' book on Katherine Mansfield

Lavinia Greenlaw on the Nova Scotian background of Elizabeth Bishop

Ange Mlinko on Robert Duncan and H. D.

The University of Chicago Press has released Powell's Dance to the Music of Time as 12 e-books

Murakami's 1Q84 to appear in English this year

Shashi Tharoor reviews Nelson Mandela's Conversations With Myself

Rare footage of the Ballets Russes

Another review of Kristin Hersh's memoir

P. J. Harvey reads Joyce, Pinter and T. S. Eliot

Seems vaguely Popperian

2011-01-30T20:27:00.001-05:00

"But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.” -- George Eliot, Middlemarch

Here's a new book on the real Casaubon, Isaac Casaubon, reviewed here.

Five recent references to philosophy (mostly from the New Statesman)

2011-01-04T14:09:00.001-05:00

Colette photographed by Madame d'Ora

James Ryerson's long article on Wittgenstein's influence on David Foster Wallace

James Ryerson's note on the late Philippa Foot

Snippets from Baroness Mary Warnock's interview in the New Statesman: 'You can't pretend that Bach wrote his religious cantatas out of anything other than profound Protestant belief'; 'Morality comes from our common human nature'; 'Rights are too legalistic a concept to be the foundation of morality.' In response to the question whether we're all doomed: 'Probably - but it will be after my time.'

From the New Statesman's article on Ricky Gervais: 'Science, Gervais says, was his first love, then philosophy, which he studied as an undergraduate. The rigours of both disciplines, he says, inform his material: logical investigation and rational inquiry.'

The New Statesman`s interview with Daniel Kehlmann: `Yes, I come from philosophy. I could never have become an original philosopher, but I was always interested in philosophy and I studied it. And I'm still very much concerned with ideas and how they interplay with human beings. There is a certain sort of comedy that arises out of the clash between lofty ideas and the banal realities of life.`

Recent climate science shows us to be on the precipice

2011-01-03T23:12:00.000-05:00

Some of the more striking items in this post at Climate Progress (via Existence Machine): A study in Nature reports a 40% drop in the oceans' phytoplankton. Scientists in the Royal Society find evidence that "the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record." The National Science Foundation warns of the destabilization and venting of the massive methane stores in the East Siberian Arctic shelf.

Philosophy on the net from approx. the last 3 or 6 months

2011-01-01T22:22:00.003-05:00

Carl Stumpf

Marilynn Robinson on William James: 'In James's understanding, it is theism that places us in the cosmos whole and wholly human.'

The Journal of Humanistic Psychology's special issue on William James

A new biography of Moses Mendelssohn

A website devoted to C. D. Broad (with his 'Autobiogrraphy' and several of his papers)

Ned Block reviews Damasio's new book

From Philosophy Bites: Helen Beebee on laws of nature and Philip Pettit on group agency, Peter Singer on the life you can save

Kurt Gödel's ontological argument

A website devoted to Rudolf Carnap

Pierre Wagner on 'linguistic turn and other misconceptions about analytic philosophy'

Ben Granger on Hazlitt: 'He was prophetic in his critique of commerce, and of the narrow, selfish spirit of laissez faire individualism which it generates. Libertarian to the core in the true sense of this much-abused word, he saw straight through the gossamer thin arguments of those who use the word to defend big business, the lie that economic liberty for the rich few results in true liberty for society.'

On YouTube, Simon Blackburn on why Sam Harris is wrong

Margaret Midgley against humanism

Rouven Steeves on Augustine, Calvin, Tolkien, Tocqueville, Hans Christian Andersen, etc. on evil (pdf)

Roger Scruton: 'The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.'

John Haldane objects to Stephen Hawking's dismissal of natural theology

Christopher Howse on Dummett's claim that 'a man's philosophy ought not to be controlled by his religious beliefs' and a putative example from Elizabeth Anscombe's life; and Howse on Anscombe's use of the doctrine of the double effect (see esp. the comments by Allectus)

Here's a podcast of Alan Saunders' discussion of the doctrine of the doube effect with a cancer surgeon and an ethics professor

Saunders' interview with Robert Wallace on 'Hegel and Hegel's God', a new sketch of Hegel's views at the Goethe Institute, and Saunders' conversation with Steven Nadler on the problem of evil

Videos of Don Marquis and Michael Tooley on abortion, Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson on philosophy in literature, and Barry Loewer and Tim O'Connor on emergence, quantum mechanics and consciousness

John Cornwell on Alasdair MacIntyre on money

Margot Lurie on Beauvoir's relation to Nelson Algren: 'A bit of cognitive dissonance sets in when one learns that The Second Sex was written while Beauvoir was romantically involved with a man whose calling card was his working-class virility, his easy assumptions of male superiority.' Rachel Kwan's review of Toril Moi's book about Beauvoir

Martha Nussbaum reviews a book on the history of US feminism: 'Modern feminist economists such as Amartya Sen (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development work) have argued that no theory of development based on the satisfaction of people's preferences could ever be normatively adequate: such a theory would always be an unwitting accomplice of an unjust status quo.'

Podcast interviews with Nussbaum, Sen and others from Chicago, and here's Nussbaum speaking on the value of the humanities, and here's the text of Jeffrey Williams' 2008 interview with Nussbaum

From December, 2010: Nussbaum interviewed in The Telegraph (Calcutta)

Madame de Staël as quoted in Ruth Scurr's review of a new book about her: 'This new kind of authority in the State, of which neither the nature nor the strength was as yet known, astonished the greater part of those who had not reflected on the rights of nations.'

Andy Lamey on Montreal Marxist, G. A. Cohen

Habermas in the NY Times on the recent hotheadedness over multiculturalism in Germany

Nicholas Xenos on Leo Strauss: 'The prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.'

'Ernest Gellner: an Intellectual Biography'

'A Fresh Look at Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science'

David Kaufmann on Walter Benjamin: 'Benjamin ... wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one.'

Gordon Marino on Kierkegaard

Who were the professional philosophers in Nazi Germany?

2010-12-31T22:21:00.006-05:00

Eric Schwitzgebel has a post about professional philosophers (and ultimately ethics professors) in Nazi Germany. How many of them supported the Nazis? How many took a stand against the Nazis? How many tried to be neutral on the matter?

In his post, Schwitzgebel determines who the professional philosophers were by looking at the number of people who completed a Habilitation in philosophy. That's a sensible approach, but it should form only one of several criteria for counting professional philosophers.

To see why, note that one of the first academics to be dismissed by the Nazis was Paul Tillich. Though known chiefly as a theologian, Tillich had a doctorate in philosophy (but no Habilitation) and periodically taught in philosophy departments. At the time of his dismissal, he was a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt.

Another German professional philosopher in the 1930's who lacked the Habilitation was Karl Jaspers, who was teaching philosophy at Heidelberg in 1937 when he was forced into retirement by the Nazis (because his wife was Jewish). Jaspers' training was in medicine. I don't think he even had a philosophy degree, let alone the Habilitation.

Finally, there is Kurt Huber, who was part of the White Rose resistance group and was executed by the Nazis in 1943.

Huber's higher degrees were in musicology and psychology, but (according to the above site) Huber, a Leibniz scholar, started teaching philosophy at Munich in 1926. I think it was in that capacity that he met and influenced the younger members of the White Rose group (esp. Sophie Scholl). Moreover, Huber actually joined the Nazis in 1940, apparently due to his opposition to communism, before becoming a martyr in the White Rose resistance.

Fermor and 'Pips' Schey in The Hare With Amber Eyes

2010-12-30T01:58:00.001-05:00

One of the most popular entries in the books-of-the-year lists for 2010 is Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes, which chronicles the history of his family, the Ephrussis, and their collection of netsuke.

The book has no index, which is unfortunate, since some interesting characters turn up in its pages. For instance, Patrick Leigh Fermor puts in an appearance on p. 149. Part way through his Danubian trek, he stayed at Kövecses (which appears now under its Slovakian name, Strkovec), where his host was Philipp ('Pips') Schey, Baron von Koromla, who was the brother of de Waal's great-grandmother, Emmy Schey von Koromla. The family's noble title seems to have been conferred on an earlier Philipp Schey for his services in support of the Habsburgs in the 1848 uprising (more here).

Fermor describes this visit on pp. 265-75 (in Ch. 10) of A Time of Gifts. A relevant passage from Fermor's book is quoted (in English) on this Polish (?) site.

This might be a picture of Pips Schey's house, which is now apparently a home for disabled adults, and this might be a photo of the neaby village of Kissujfalu, where Schey and Fermor parted company:

Fermor thoroughly enjoyed his visit with Schey, who introduced the young traveller to Proust's works. One of the Paris Ephrussis, Charles Ephrussi, knew Proust and was (along with Charles Haas) a model for Charles Swann.

A bookstore trend that must die

2010-12-29T23:17:00.001-05:00

A new section at a local bookstore:

There's a 'Controversial Knowledge' section at Amazon, too. Do the books outside this section contain uncontroversial knowledge, or just non-knowledge?

Common Sense & Uncommon Sensibility

2010-12-06T20:46:00.001-05:00

Gilbert Ryle, whose 'ordinary language' philosophy championed common sense (and whose physician brother invented the Ryle Tube). Peter Smith of Logic Matters has posted Ryle's paper on Jane Austen, 'Jane Austen and the Moralists'

Chris Power on Bruno Schulz's short stories, and John Self on Schulz's Street of Crocodiles

Mr. Waggish on Thomas Bernhard's nihilistic ranting evasions

Philip Lopate on a new collection of Bernhard's addresses, My Prizes: An Accounting: "No one could be less accepting of the human condition, and so [Bernhard] tells the awards audiences that they are in for a future of endless cold, that life is meaningless and that Austrians are apathetic, megalomaniac, monotonous. Strangely, these speeches did not go over well."

E. M. Cioran 'belongs to the tradition of French and especially German aphorists, like Lichtenberg, Novalis, and finally Nietzsche.' According to the linked article (in The Hindu), Cioran regarded Meister Eckhart as the 'profoundest thinker of the Occident.'

Sean Kelly on 'navigating past nihilism'

A new biography of Romain Gary

Charles Taylor on 'The Meaning of Secularism'

From 2005, 'Schiller's relevance for us and for all times'

More vintage Toronto bashing by Wyndham Lewis and now Hemingway, too

2010-12-01T02:55:00.001-05:00

I picked up William Burrill's book on Hemingway's years in Toronto, when Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star. Curious as to whether Hemingway had crossed paths with Wyndham Lewis, I checked the index for Lewis' name. Unfortunately, it appears that they didn't meet. In fact, it doesn't look like their stays in Toronto overlapped -- Hemingway lived here (Toronto) only in 1919-20.

Lewis, though, is quoted by Burrill as calling Toronto a 'sanctimonious icebox.' Burrill then quotes Lewis as follows:

If New York is brutal and babylonian, in this place [Toronto] it is as if someone were sitting on your chest -- having taken the care to gag you first -- and were croaking out [hymns] ... from dawn to dayshut.

--p,. 153 of Hemingway: the Toronto Years, William Burrill

As for Hemingway, well, Robert Fulford quotes him as remarking of Toronto (in a letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas), 'What bothers me is why with my fine intelligence I ever came out here.'

Both Irving Thalbergs

2010-11-13T19:55:00.001-05:00

Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg, Sr.,who married Montreal-born Norma Shearer and whose son, Irving Thalberg, Jr. (scroll down at the last link for his bio and pic), was a philosopher

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's letters have been published

Saul Bellow's wife interviewed about his letters

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's letters

Hannah Arendt's correspondence with Leni Yahil

Emily Darrell on Salinger in Vienna (and here's Mark Twain's writing about his time in Vienna, but it's behind a pay-wall)

Roger Boylan on Twain's autobiography

About Haruki Murakami's IQ84, English translations of (the 1st 2 vol's of) which will appear in 2011

Tibor Fischer on Hans Fallada's Wolf Among Wolves

Ina Hartwig surveys 'punch-packing' contemporary German lit

Paul Holdengräber interviews Cees Nooteboom

A review of Patrick Wilcken's book about Lévi-Strauss

Stephan Wackwitz wants to save Walter Benjamin from his fans

A review of Peter Martin's book about Samuel Johnson

The Paris Review's interviews going back to the 50's

Mr. Waggish on László Krasznahorkai's mythology, and on Leo Perutz

Vivian Gornick on Tolstoy

Richard Tempest on Solzhenitsyn and modernism

Ben Yagoda on the characters in the 1959 obscenity trial for Lady Chatterley's Lover

Kristin Hersh interviewed

Saul Bellow on how the political has encroached on the personal

2010-11-10T09:27:00.000-05:00

Who would have guessed that Saul Bellow anticipated a feminist theme? Admittedly, he does put a different spin on the idea.

"The personal is political." -- Carol Hanisch (1969)

“Public life drives out private life. The more political our society becomes (in the broadest sense of ‘political’ — the obsessions, the compulsions of collectivity) the more individuality seems lost. … [N]ational purpose is now involved with the manufacture of commodities in no way essential to human life, but vital to the political survival of the country. … The whole matter … has to do with invasion of the private sphere (including the sexual) by techniques of exploitation and domination.” — Saul Bellow, Herzog, p. 178 (1964)

Grass, Bernhard & Sebald

2010-11-01T22:46:00.006-04:00

Kurt Eisner (NY TImes pdf)

Günther Grass interviewed in the Guardian. I didn't realize how much in the Tin Drum was drawn from Grass's life. He really did have a Nazi father and a Slavic uncle who was killed by the Germans at the outset of the war.

Michael Hofmann reviews Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters (trans. Ewald Osers and re-issued in Penguin's Central European Classics series) in the LRB. Here's a podcast in which Hofmann keeps a low voice during a panel discussion of Stefan Zweig.

Jessica A. Sequeira discusses Bernhard's Correction

Stephen Sparks reviews Bernhard's Prose

Shifting Sands identifies a difference between Bernhard and Sebald -- Sebald explores the melancholy mind via its projection onto, or interpretation of, its surroundings (landscapes, cities, etc.) while Bernhard's focus is on the different shapes that melancholy takes (esp. bitterness) in interior monologue

It's old news now, but Conversational Reading noted a while back that three newly translated books by Sebald will be published in the next couple of years.They'll be tranlsated by Jo Catling. Catling will also contribute to this upcoming collection of papers about Sebald. Other contributors include Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell.

Brian Oard wrote a nice series of posts last August about Sebald's Vertigo, Emigrants, Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz (inc. a second, short post on the latter).

Here's a podcast of Will Self's 'Sebald Lecture' from last January.

Mitteleuropa items

2010-10-09T17:16:00.005-04:00

Hans Blumenberg. Telos issues a Call for Papers for a special issue on his work.

Here's an intriguing new book from Cambridge, Thinking the Unconscious, about the idea of the unconscious in 19th-Century German thought, with articles about Schelling, Nietzsche, Fechner, Goethe, etc.

We've heard of the great influence on North American science by Jewish immigrants from central Europe, but it's interesting also to see the impact of these immigrants on our pop culture (beyond Hollywood), from Barbie to PR to the shopping mall to ... surfing. Here's Peter Lunenfeld on Freud, Gidget and the Austro-Hungarian roots of the surfer ethos -- 'It's gnarly on the Ringstrasse, dude!'

Beyond the Ringstrasse -- Red Vienna architecture.

Here's a PEN panel-discussion in NY of Stefan Zweig from last April, which includes Michael Hofmann, Paul Holdengräber, and others. Here's some coverage of the event.

Recent pieces by and about Kwame Anthony Appiah

2010-10-07T00:13:00.002-04:00

Kwame Anthony Appiah's review of Sam Harris' Moral Landscape;

Appiah's insightful conjectures about what we will be condemned for by future generations;

Bookforum's interview with Appiah about his new book, The Honor Code (in which Appiah quotes from Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year);

another interview, this time on NPR's Talk of the Nation;

and more about his book at the Big Think.

Appiah's mother, Peggy Appiah, was a British author and his father, Joe Appiah, was a Ghanaian statesman. They are said to have partly inspired the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Two of Anthony Appiah's uncles were kings of the Ashanti, and his British grandfather was Sir Stafford Cripps.

Update (Nov. 10, 2010): Here's a piece by Appiah in The Telegraph.

New book on Milton's influence on Kant

2010-10-01T12:34:00.002-04:00

Illustration for Paradise Lost by Gustav Doré

Kant and Milton, a new book by Sanford Budick about Milton's inlfuence on Kant.

Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate;
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.
Yet with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
Pain for awhile, or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm the obdured breast
With stubborn patience, as with triple steel.

– John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book II, 557-69)

Barthian blogfest

2010-09-27T21:38:00.003-04:00

The 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference has begun with an exchange about Barth's relation to Schleiermacher.

Wyndham Lewis

2010-09-22T01:27:00.004-04:00

Wyndham Lewis

Walrus Magazine has an intriguing article about Wyndham Lewis, an unlikeable English writer and artist who, sadly, was born in Canada. 'Sadly' for him, since he despised Canada (especially Toronto), and 'sadly' for us, since he was a racist and anti-Semite, which is clear from his political tracts in the 1930's. Indeed, of all the literary and visual artists whose sense of judgment was impugned by their political allegiances in that 'low dishonest decade,' it's hard to imagine anyone who was as thoroughly discredited as Lewis, whose 1932 book on Hitler included a chapter called 'Adolf Hitler a Man of Peace'. To his credit, Lewis did at least come to oppose the Nazis (shortly before WWII).

It says a lot about Toronto in that era that when Lewis lived there during the war, he (bigot though he was) came to detest the city for its intolerance. That is one theme of the Walrus piece that did not surprise me. European intellectuals seldom had much good to say about 'Toronto, the good' before the 1960's. Another Englishman who spent some time in Toronto during the war was A. J. Ayer. He was learning how to kill a man 'with his bare hands' (according to his autobiography) at a secret spy school east of the city. He characterized the Toronto of that time as a 'cold, Scots Calvinist town.' Actually, according to what I've heard, the northern Irish did more to shape Toronto's Calvinist ethos than the Scots did (which might explain why the Belfast of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne seemed so familiar to me).

(This Irish Protestant influence was more pronounced in eastern Ontario, where the Orange Lodge still operates, and one can find an Orange Hall in several towns [such as Peterborough].)

A surprising discovery for me in the Walrus article was the revelation of Lewis's strong influence on Marshall McLuhan, as is attested by a 1967 interview in which McLuhan credits Lewis with the insight that 'the man-made environment is ... a programmed teaching machine.' Here's an excerpt:

Louis MacNeice on the net

2010-09-06T03:31:00.007-04:00

Louis MacNeice, whose reading of 'Prayer Before Birth' you can hear at the Poetry Archive. His letters were published this summer by Faber and are reviewed by David Wheatley in the TLS and by Roy Foster in the Financial Times (and by Robert Giddings in Tribune). Here's a nice, long review of MacNeice's Collected Poems by Maria Johnston. (Other reviews and excerpts are complied here.)

Here's a BBC recording of MacNeice reading an autobiographical poem called 'Carrickfergus'.

MacNeice's admirers include Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Jon Stallworthy (MacNeice's biographer). You can hear Stallworthy, as well as Paul Muldoon and others, speaking about MacNeice in the mp3's gathered at this conference site. And, while Denis Donoghue's LRB article on MacNeice (1987) is behind a pay-wall, you can read the subsequent exchange of letters in that periodical between Donoghue, Edna Longley, Peter McDonald, and Jonathan Allison.

Some of MacNeice's poems have quite a musical quality, especially 'Bagpipe Music', the first of his poems that I read. Here's a recital of it:

Several of MacNeice's poems have been set to music. There's a musical reading of MacNeice's poem 'Autobiography' (about his childhood loss of his mother) by Andy White on Jackie Leven's Forbidden Songs of the Dying West. You can hear an excerpt from it on the Amazon site for Leven's recording. Tim Dalling has set some MacNeice lyrics to music. And on YouTube you can find a couple of MacNeice pieces set to music by Andrew Toovey. Before them all, though, MacNeice's writing was set to music by Benjamin Britten, including the poem 'Cradle Song'.

After WWII, MacNeice worked for the BBC, where (among other things) he wrote radio plays. Of these, the most prominent seems to be the 1946 play Dark Tower, which has been published by Faber (along with some other scripts). Britten wrote the music for Dark Tower. The play was based on Robert Browning's poem, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' (which drew its title from a line in King Lear). I wish I could find a recording (audio or video) of this play. It sounds interesting.

Here's a short, 1957 poem by MacNeice, called 'To Posterity':

   When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
   And reading and even speaking have been replaced
   By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
   Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
   They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
   And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
   Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

Finally, here's a nice clip from a series produced by Optic Nerve for the BBC, in which Tom Paulin, Kate Clanchy and Jamie McKendrick read and discuss 'Prayer Before Birth':

Old BBC TV interviews of novelists

2010-08-22T18:23:00.007-04:00

Via Piece of Monologue, I've happened upon many televised interviews of British novelists in a BBC archive. I've just watched Malcolm Muggeridge's interview of Somerset Maugham from 1954. When asked about Harold Nicolson's silly claim that the novel is dead, Maugham interpreted it to mean merely that Nicolson was tired of reading novels.

I also watched John Lehmann's interview with a very modest Aldous Huxley. Simon Raven's short interview with Kingsley Amis (who according to the host 'likes living in Swansea') was intriguing, though I had the impression that throughout the roughly five-minutes of the session Amis was only just suppressing a desire to leap forth, punch, and then strangle Raven (and that Raven would have enjoyed that).

There are also interviews there of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Golding, etc. And a delightful segment on Tolkien (with interviews of him and his students).

Swinburne interviewed

2010-08-22T17:53:00.002-04:00

I hadn't heard Richard Swinburne speak until I saw this clip at the Centre for Public Christianity. He's quite good. In this clip, he elaborates on the traditional Christian approach to the Old Testament as texts to be read for their metaphorical, not literal, meaning. The rest of the clips from the longer interview with Swinburne are available at the Centre.

The violence of the Old Testament from CPX on Vimeo.

August religion links

2010-08-15T22:54:00.019-04:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University has a good collection of articles on the civil rights movement and on King's theological influences (inc. entries on Barth, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel movement, a tradition that wielded much influence in my home and native land). King's work is situated in the tradition of African-American preaching in Preaching With Sacred Fire, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Here's an NPR interview (ht) with Simmons. The interview includes a recording from a sermon by C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father).

The influence of this same tradition on President Obama is analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, and it's the subject of this CNN piece, which features quotations of Gustav Niebuhr, Richard Crouter (whose new book on Reinhold Niebuhr was just released), and former Senator John Danforth.

Two more reviews of Newman's Unquiet Grave, one by Terry Eagleton and one by Anthony Kenny

Francisco Ayala: 'Evolution can be religion's friend'

Siris has an interesting treatment of James' 'Will to Believe'

Gary Gutting poses challenges to theists and to atheists

Laura Miguélez reviews Stephen Williams' The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity

From Gordon Marino's article on Kierkegaard: 'Philosophers gravitate toward epistemological problems such as what makes a belief true or false. Kierkegaard, however, is unusual in that he fixes his attention firmly on the belief or appropriation side of knowledge: on our personal relationship to ideas.'

Summer literary links

2010-08-12T02:47:00.001-04:00

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

The newly discovered Kafka texts in Tel Aviv and Zurich: "Among the papers found in the sealed boxes were letters to or from Stefan Zweig."

Robert Leiter reviews Amos Oz's Rhyming Life & Death

Colin Marshall interviews translator Suzanne Jill Levine about Borges

James Meek reviews four books concerning Tolstoy

Levi Stahl reviews Tolstoy's Hadji Murat

Aaron Stuvland reviews Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Lesley Chamberlain on Nabokov in Berlin

Staff Pick's at The Millions: Andrey Platonov's Soul

Adam Kirsch on two works by Hans Keilson: Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key

John Crowley looks back at Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game

Peter Swirski: "Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism."

Professor Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie about religion and rights

David Burleigh on Meira Chand's A Different Sky

"[Jose] Saramago is known for committing mischief with religious and historical texts"

'The Best Magazine Articles Ever' (from the 1960's until 2010)

"Not all Baron Cohens are public figures"

Artists and writers each select five books for their summer reading list

Passionate distortion can be fun, I guess

2010-08-10T10:12:00.016-04:00

A common objection to the New Atheists is that their own atheistic movement bears many of the hallmarks of a religion.

I don't know if that's true (partly because I'm unsure of how to define 'religion'), but many of the New Atheists do put me in mind of a particularly irksome kind of religious person, the moralizing prude.

I'm afraid my example of this sort of religious adherent is my own maternal grandmother -- may she rest in peace (though she probably won't). Her moral judgments were quick, passionate and about as amenable to rational critique as a tornado. Righteous indignation was her favourite pastime and no one was going to spoil her fun by quelling it with reason.

I got a similar impression while reading the comments to a couple of blog posts about Harriet Baber's article in the Guardian. The blog posts are at Pharyngula and Butterflies & Wheels. (See Siris for more intelligent commentary.)

I don't agree with Baber's hedonistic position, but I don't think her view is as bad as it's made out to be in the comments at those two blogs. E.g., Baber said that the truth is overrated. Several of the commenters misinterpreted her as saying that the truth is unimportant. I piped up in the comments in order to correct the misinterpretation, but got the impression that there was little point in doing so. It would only spoil some of the other commenters' fun, which seemed to reside in bashing Baber herself.

If these commenters were really so concerned with the truth, they wouldn't devote so much time and energy to ad hominems but would, instead, simply consider Baber's argument and the reasons for being unpersuaded by it. Also, they would expend more effort in trying to tease out of her article a chain of reasoning that is more plausible than the silly views that they've attributed to her. Attributing to someone the best argument that fits her words is an important step in getting at the truth. When people don't do so, when they instead interpret the other person as giving a weaker argument, that's a sign that they are primarily concerned not to arrive at the truth but, rather, to depict their interlocutor as a miscreant, a worthy target of their passionate, righteous indignation. In such a context, anyone who tries to point out the uncharitable nature of their interpretation is likely himself to become the target of their moral outrage.

In the comment threads at Pharyngula and Butterflies & Wheels, many of the commenters got into a royal tizzy and subjected Baber to all manner of insult and character assassination. But insult isn't argument. In fact, it often has negative value, since it tends to divert people from the dispassionate search for the truth. Dialogue that aims at truth should be a lot less fraught.

Update (Aug. 17, 2010): Maverick Philosopher takes a line similar to Baber's.

Who is Don Draper? My only Mad Men riff

2010-08-09T23:48:00.014-04:00

Spotted on a fridge magnet today: "Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."* From the ground up, ex nihilo? Creating from what and with what? Who's doing the creating?

Similar questions confront me after watching Mad Men. Don Draper's presented as a self-made man, someone who made himself a new self, a 'personal brand', the self of his dreams, the kinds of dream that he, as an ad-man, is in the business of selling. He becomes an extension of this business, a made-up person playing at being a husband, a boss, a playboy, a player in everything he does.

What do authenticity and integrity mean for such a person? Draper's a good example of someone who lacks integrity in the rudimentary sense. His diverse roles aren't well integrated; in fact, he's riven by conflicting principles. He's not so much unprincipled as multiply principled.

Authenticity? Being 'true to oneself' in one's endeavours? In the moment of self-creation (if there can be such a thing) there's no self yet to which to be true. And it's unclear how any attempt at self-re-creation could escape the guiding influence of one's old self, the self that one found oneself already to have had when one first became able to entertain such questions.

I hope we learn more about Draper's upbringing, about the influences that shaped his principles.

* The saying is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. I do know that Paris Hilton twittered this saying.

Update (Aug. 13): This is amazing: "The problem with the current season's approach to the characters is it's using them to describe the era, not using the era to describe the characters." Which reminds me of Northrop Frye's idea of displacement (applied to ideas more generally and not just to traditional mythology). The characters are less displaced, that is, they've become more one-dimensional and expressive of a particular idea or theme -- this guy is Sexism, this young lady is Moxy-But-Losing-Part-of-Herself-as-She-Makes-It-In-a-Man's-World, etc.

All of Life Magazine is on Google Books

2010-08-07T21:51:00.003-04:00

All the contents of Life Magazine (1935-1972) are available via Google Books! It's searchable, so it's easy to find pieces on or by Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Bertrand Russell, etc.

G20 waste

2010-06-26T20:51:00.007-04:00

Why are events like the G20 meetings still held in large cities? We here in Canada have so many little islands where this meeting could have been held. Unoccupied islands, islands that have nothing but a plush resort or two, literally thousands of locations where the G20 participants would have been much safer than in downtown Toronto.

Our elected officials know these meetings attract violent protesters, and they know that the costs due to vandalism and lost business are huge. Today, Toronto's pretty much closed for business. Even the subway trains aren't running south of Bloor. I walked south from Bloor to get pictures of some of the damage to retailers, but first ....

I happened to be at the very corner where the Black Bloc showed up and destroyed two abandoned police cruisers. The police had been ordered to 'disengage', basically sacrificing the two cars to the vandals.

I'm generally left of centre in my economic views, but how on earth this destruction is supposed to accomplish anything worthwhile is beyond me. Of course, it's supposed to attract mega-publicity. Mission accomplished! But it's false that all publicity is good publicity. Any intelligent criticism of the G20 leaders will be drowned out by this violence and vandalism. Critics of the G20 leaders will be branded as marginal, dangerous people. The added publicity has only negative value for left-wing positions.

I'm a lousy photographer, but I managed to get some usable shots. Notice that the police were content (at this point at least) to pull back and establish a boundary.

There really didn't seem to be that many protesters, but the worst ones sallied forth and enjoyed their anarchic outburst. Due to their relatively small numbers, they didn't try to break through police lines (as far as I could see), opting instead to turn east and then north along Yonge Street (Toronto's main street), where they broke many windows.

They've succeeded in turning most of this fairly liberal city's population against them.

Here you see the police who had been ordered to "disengage" when the Black Bloc arrived. They're not that far from one of the vandalized cars. They must have been awaiting further orders.

They were sent east on King St. to form a line just west of Yonge St.

Shortly after I had turned north on Yonge, I saw this media savvy police bus* racing south towards King St. My conclusion: the police must have been told not to engage the protesters unless they had a comfortable superiority in numbers. (* 'Media savvy' because it's covered in a recruiting ad.)

More here.

Mid-June philosophy & literature links

2010-06-12T04:27:00.037-04:00

Wilhelm Dilthey

Mr. Waggish mentions Dilthey in the lead-up to some remarks on a passage by Hans Blumenberg. Telos has issued a call for papers for a special issue on Blumenberg (deadling: June 1, 2011).

Catherine Pepinster reviews John Cornwell's new book on Cardinal Newman, and here's Cornwell interviewed about Newman by Jonathan Derbyshire

Michael Ruse: 'Lament for the Humanities'

'Hegel at Georgetown -- The Master-Slave Dialectic'

A posthumous review by Martin Gardner, and here's an interview with Gardner in 1997

Roger Scruton on 'the conflict between value and price'

A nice intro to Bayes' theorem

Steven Laureys & David Chalmers on 'the hard problem' of consciousness. Here are the mp3's, etc. for Chalmers' John Locke lectures at Oxford (see his site for more).

Cian Dorr defends analytic metaphysics from Ladyman, Ross, et al. (More discussion here.)

'What is a law of nature?' A report on a meeting of philosophers & physicists, inc. Julian Barbour. The talks from this conference are on-line.

The New Statesman finds J. G. Ballard's answers for a mid-90's interview but can't recollect what the questions were

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, has a nice reply to Steven Pinker's NY Times attack

Simon Winchester is preparing a new book on Lewis Carroll

Transaction Publishers has re-issued Stefan Zweig's essays on Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac, and will soon (end of summer?) re-issue his essays on Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche. These two volumes are part of a projected trilogy of Zweig's works entitled 'Master Builders of the Spirit'. They include new introductions by Transaction's senior editor, Laurence Mintz. I can't find any indication of what will be in the third volume.

Zweig's previously unpublished novella, Journey Into the Past, will soon be published by New York Review Books, who will also be issuing the first full English translation of Gregor von Rezzori's The Ermine of Czernopol

An article about German translator, John E. Woods

"Writers have no more moral authority than plumbers or butchers," says Han Magnus Enzensberger.

Another review of Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham

Here's the text of the late Peter Porter's poem 'Wittgenstein's Dream' along with a recording of him reading it

Working towards a PhD online lets you explore more literature and study philosophers.

New philosophy links

2010-06-07T12:12:00.040-04:00

Hannah Arendt

On Philosophy Talk, Seyla Benhabib discusses Hannah Arendt. Here's a conference from last April called 'Reading Hannah Arendt for the 21st Century', with contributions by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Richard Bernstein & Susannah Gottlieb. If you can't get the audio at that last link, try this one. (h/t Omnivore)

Alexander Kissler on Heidegger's 'notorious seminar'

Boyd Tonkin looks at new books by Eagleton and Scruton

Martha Nussbaum on C-Span, and Nussbaum on Mill and the reasons for a liberal arts education

A. N. Wilson on Cornwell's new book about Newman

Andrew Pessin on balancing conviction and intellectual modesty. Siris elucidates Pessin's point, with reference to the Preface paradox. The paradox itself is nicely elucidated by DEQ in the comments thread for this B&W post

Du Plessix Gray on the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

A tribute to Sartre & Camus, 'philosophic duellists'

Michael Sandel's TED talk on the lost art of democratic debate

G. A. Cohen, 'the thinking man's Marxist' (h/t Evolving Thoughts)

Iris Murdoch's correspondence

Mathew Iredale on Lévy-Strauss

Jeremy Waldron's Holmes Lectures on hate-speech laws

Melvyn Bragg interviews Grayling, Bate & Natarajan about Hazlitt

Bragg's podcast on Burke

A new book on Spinoza and 'the hidden Enlightenment'

Are we close to explaining consciousness? (inc. a video of David Chalmers)

David Sloan Wilson interviewed

'Darwinists and Divinity' -- a review of Michael Ruse's latest book

Obituaries for Richard Gregory in the Times of London, the Guardian, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Telegraph. Here's more in the Guardian, by Sue Blackmore

Literary Links

2010-06-07T00:47:00.041-04:00

Ernst Weiss

Podcasts with Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, and many, many more

Eileen Battersby on Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, followed by an interview with Fallada's son

An excerpt from Herta Müller's Everything I Own I Carry With Me

David Auerbach on László Krasznahorkai

Video of Thomas Mann at the beach (wearing a tie)

The Canetti family: "In some Jewish families, the least admirable member may be the one who wins a Nobel Prize."

Stephen Vizinczey on Central European classics

William Gass on Knut Hamsun

Coverage of the latest pieces on Robert Walser

A description of P. D. Smith's Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-view of Science 1780-1955 (on Goethe, Büchner, Stifter, Musil & Brecht)

Christopher Byrd on Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham

Geoffrey O'Brien on Kleist

Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny

Providentia blogs on the Kaspar Hauser story

David Askew on Jonathan Swift

Kevin Hartnett on Haruki Murakami

Colin Marshall on the 'scientifically surreal, eerily erotic novels of Kobo Abe'

Joshua Willey on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence

CIM is collecting the tributes to David Markson

Allan Massie on a new collection of essays about Jane Austen

Jim Thompson -- 'a dime-store Dostoevsky'?

Marilynn Robinson, Calvin and Stefan Zweig

2010-06-05T13:40:00.022-04:00

I've just received Marilynn Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind, an excerpt from which can be found at the Guardian. There's a review of this new work by Tim Teeman at the Times of London, and a very favourable review of it by the Archbishop of Canterbury. For more reviews, see this Complete Review page.

Calvin doesn't figure much in Robinson's new book; he's mentioned in passing once (in the chapter on Freud). Robinson wrote extensively on Calvin in her collection of essays, The Death of Adam, and she wrote the Preface for John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant. Here's a good article on her treatment of Calvin.

Another sympathetic expositor of Calvin in popular forums is Paul Helm, who wrote the Guardian's series on Calvin last year. And here's Melvyn Bragg's BBC podcast on Calvin.

Remarkably, there's a relevant link to Stefan Zweig (who's become a lurking presence on this blog), since Zweig wrote a book called The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin (I think this is Zweig's book on-line but with a slightly different title). Calvin's Geneva served as Zweig's dystopia, with Calvin and his minions playing the role of Big Brother. The protagonist was Sebastian Castellio, who had the temerity to disagree with Calvin over Biblical interpretation.

Castellio has since become a sort of saint for liberal Protestants such as the Unitarian minister Duncan Howlett, who wrote an essay called 'Sebastian Castellio: Neglected Saint of the Liberal Church', and the Quaker scholar Roland Bainton, who contributed a paper on Castellio to a volume called Persectution and Liberty.

Zweig is blamed even now for Calvin's bad image in Germany.

Linked lives in early Austrian feminism

2010-06-03T23:38:00.057-04:00

This post was substantially revised on June 11, 2010.
The photo is of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Ebner-Eschenbach, a Roman Catholic aristocrat and author, was one of the first women to receive a doctorate from the University of Vienna. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the faculty of philosophy in 1900. Also of note is the fact that Ebner-Eschenbach and her husband were among the first members of a Viennese organization that was formed in 1891 to combat anti-Semitism. After Ebner-Eschenbach's death, Lou Andreas-Salomé described her to Freud as "a prototype of motherliness ... the lovelier the older she grew: I was every time newly astonished at how simply and naturally she grew on -- into death itself as into a final breath of life."

I wonder if such talk of motherly love rubbed Freud the wrong way and connected with his tendency to betray men who showed him patrician benevolence. Here's an examination of such a case, in which the older victim of Freud's betrayal was Josef Breuer, a friend of Ebner-Eschenbach's (she was one of Breuer's patients and the two had an extensive correspondence). Before the betrayal, Breuer had helped Freud immeasurably (partly by giving him money). Famously, Breuer gave Freud the story of Anna O., one of Breuer's patients.

Anna O. was Bertha Pappenheim, an Austrian feminist in the first third of the 20th-Century. Whatever one thinks of Breuer's and Freud's methods, they were better than those of the sanatorium in which "electric eels were applied to [Pappenheim's] face, currents of electricity were shot through her body, and she was treated with arsenic." It was in connection with Breuer's treatment that Pappenheim wrote fairy tales, which have now been translated into English.

One can only imagine the courage that it must have taken to be a feminist in Austria-Hungary, a militaristic society that, with a little more organization, would have been truly fascistic. Yet this same culture produced another heroic Bertha, the author Bertha von Suttner, who, though she hailed from a line of field marshals and cavalry captains, combined her feminism with determined pacifism, for which she was awarded the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize. It was Bertha von Suttner's husband, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, who co-founded the above-mentioned Viennese society against anti-Semitism.

Another important early Austrian feminist was Rosa Mayreder, an essayist and activist whose critique of sexism led her to engage with the ideas of Nietzsche (pdf), Salomé's old boyfriend and a sexist whose misogyny was outdone probably only by that of the Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger.

The depth of sexism in Austria is evident from its tardiness in admitting women to the hallowed halls of academe. The first woman to get a doctorate from the University of Vienna was Gabriele Possanner von Ehrenthal, who received a doctorate from the faculty of medicine in 1897 (though all her coursework was completed in Zurich since the University of Vienna's medical faculty didn't admit female students until 1900). In 1901, Elise Richter earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna. She later (1905) became the first woman to pass her habilitation from that school. She later perished in Theresienstadt (1943). It wasn't until 1930 that a woman passed the habilitation in the University's medical faculty.

Despite the opposition, these early feminists' efforts bore fruit. This is attested especially by the success of Austrian women in math and the physical sciences between the world wars. There is, for example, Lise Meitner, Olga Taussky-Todd, Hilda Geiringer von Mises, Herta Taussig Freitag, Cecilia Krieger, Marietta Blau, and Hertha Wambacher. In psychology, there was Else Frenkel Brunswik, who studied in Vienna with Karl Bühler.

And, of course, psychoanalysis attracted many Austrian women of a scientific/medical inclination between the wars, such as Helene Deutsch, Edith Buxbaum, Margaret S. Mahler and Anna Freud.

Martin Gardner, a 'whys' man

2010-05-26T04:06:00.034-04:00

Martin Gardner died on May 22 at the age of 95. He wrote the 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American for 35 years and was an accomplished critic of pseudo-science.

I first became aware of Gardner by way of his work on C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), especially as evidenced in his Annotated Alice (see also his Universe in a Handkerchief). Of all Gardner's works, though, my favourite one is his Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (wise indeed). Here's a review from the New Criterion (where Gardner himself published several reviews).

If philosophy begins in wonder, then Whys is a great entryway into philosophy. The index is loaded with names like Wittgenstein, Russell, Reichenbach, Carnap, Rudolf Otto, Tillich, Barth and F. R. Tennant, but Gardner never introduces the philosophy cold (in textbook fashion). Instead, he makes the philosophical questions seem like the most natural and enticing explorations on which to embark. He works up to this effect by way of more literary reflections, sometimes making his approach through passages from children's literature.

For this purpose, Carroll and L. Frank Baum (author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz) seem to have been Gardner's favourites. I particularly like Gardner's use of an episode from The Marvelous Land of Oz in connection with the concept of the numinous (on p. 342 of Whys). In this episode, Tip is startled when the wooden Saw-Horse comes to life. Gardner notes that the Saw-Horse is even more startled, rolling its eyes and "taking a first wondering view of the world in which he had now so important an existence" (Gardner quoting Baum, p. 342). Gardner then asks whether this (and other) quotations have not stirred in the reader "a similar sense of surprise and wonder." "Have you never," he continues, "felt amazed to find yourself not only living in an Ozzy world but, more incredibly, aware of the fact that you are alive?"

It was in Whys that Gardner announced his 'philosophical theism'. He later characterized himself as "a mystic in the Platonic sense."

I have found two nice blog tributes that focus on Whys, one by Julia Galef and one by William M. Briggs (from whom I've learned that Gardner studied at Chicago with Rudolf Carnap).

One of the best on-line resources concerning Gardner can be found at the Cambridge University Press blog, which includes a 5-part interview from 2008.

Here are several obituaries and tributes: the Guardian, the NY Times, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Lewis Carroll Society, Discover, the Skeptical Inquirer, one by James Randi, one by Roger Kimball, a video clip at BoingBoing, and several items at Scientific American (inc. a contribution by Douglas Hofstadter).

Here's an older article from the Wall Street Journal (last April 2) and an interview of Gardner by Alex Bellos.

Update (May 26, 2010): More tributes to Gardner are being tracked here (in English & Spanish).

More philosophy bits

2010-05-25T03:16:00.034-04:00

Simone de Beauvoir

Katie Roiphe on the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

Melvyn Bragg talks to Jonathan Rée, John Haldane & Gwen Griffith-Dickson about William James' Varieties of Religious Experience

A review of a new book on Cardinal Newman

Two finds: the Goethe Institute has a set of introductions to German philosophers (from Leibniz to Tugendhat), and a list of the articles in the 'How to Believe' series at the Guardian

A review of two philosophy books about J. M. Coetzee's work

A review of Paisley Livingston's new book, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy
An article on Hannah Arendt in the Tehran Review

A look at Hans Sluga's 2008 study of Arendt & Carl Schmitt

Historian Isaac Kramnick on Lockean liberalism & the American Revolution

Historian Jeffrey Collins on Perez Zagorin's new book about Hobbes

Historian Samuel Moyn on some recent books about the Enlightenment: "[Jonathan] Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating" -- Moyn prefers Dan Edelstein's Terror of Natural Right

Brendan Boyle on Raymond Geuss' Politics and the Imagination. Here's a podcast of Geuss discussing utopian thinking

A. C. Grayling on Emerson

An April, 2010 article on Adam Smith by Amartya Sen (and here's a pdf of Sen's April, 2009 talk on Smith at the University of Glasgow)

Hume, Smith and Burke on 'dirty hands' ("the view that some forms of power, used properly, lead to guilt and bad actions")

Leibniz and the science of happiness. Here's an Aussie podcast in which Alan Saunders interviews Paul Redding & Simon Duffy about Leibniz

More recently, Saunders interviewed Ruth Abbey about Nietzsche

Martha Nussbaum on gay marriage & John Stuart Mill

A nice article on long-time religious skeptic Paul Kurtz

Here's a Philosophy Talk podcast in which Rebecca Goldstein discusses philosophy in fiction

All the Wittgenstein links you could ever want

H/t for some of these links to Bookforum's 'Omnivore' blog

Morley Callaghan interview (1977)

2010-05-23T22:42:00.003-04:00

Morley Callaghan was a Canadian author who associated with Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris in 1929. He wrote about this sojourn, and his boxing match with Hemingway, in That Summer in Paris. In this clip from a CBC interview in 1977, Callaghan expresses regret about a letter he sent to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kierkegaard around the 'net

2010-05-15T16:52:00.004-04:00

I've noticed lately some good Kierkegaard resources on the web, and I thought I'd gather the links into one post (I linked to some other Kierkegaard items in an earlier post).

There's perhaps some irony in this, since some (viz. Hubert Dreyfus) think that Kierkegaard 'would have hated the internet'

Princeton University Press has put much of Kierkegaard's writing (in the Hongs' translation) on Google. (Here are some older translations.)

The Guardian ran an 8-part series on Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle; and here's a Philosophy Bites podcast in which Carlisle discusses Fear and Trembling (I link to two more podcasts near the end of this post).

Carlisle also has a paper on Kierkegaard and Heidegger at the Oxford Research Archive. To get her paper at that last link, click on the pdf 'Attachment' button near the top right corner of the site. What you then get is a long document with four papers from a conference on Heidegger. Carlisle's begins on p. 2.

On p. 41 of the same pdf you'll find Stephen Mulhall's paper called 'Absolutely Paradoxical Finitude: Heidegger between Kierkegaard and Sartre'.

Also on the Oxford archive is this 2007 paper by David Groiser, 'Repetition and renewal: Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig, and the German-Jewish renaissance'.

The last item to which I'll link from that clunky (but substantial) Oxford resource is this 2008 dissertation by Matthew Kirkpatrick called 'Kierkegaard and a Religionless Christianity: The place of Søren Kierkegaard in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer'. Actually, I'll likely add more links to that resource once the papers from this conference are posted there.

Here's a review of a new book about tragedy in relation to Kierkegaard and Aristotle at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

In addition to the above-linked Carlisle podcast about Kierkegaard, here's one from the BBC (with Jonathan Rée, John Lippitt and Carlisle again) and one from Philosophy Talk

Some recent Mitteleuropa links

2010-05-11T06:57:00.020-04:00

Gustav Landauer, grandfather of Mike Nichols

Penguin announces a new series devoted to Central European classics

On the Stefan Zweig front, Will Stone has posted a riposte to Michael Hofmann's LRB evisceration of Zweig. Damian Kelleher reviews Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, and here's Stephen Maughan on Zweig's collection of music manuscripts

New translation of a Thomas Bernhard story

A review of Peter Handke's Don Juan

Dezső Kosztolányi's novel, Skylark, reviewed by Deborah Eisenberg. Mooks & Gripes on the same book, which gets a favourable review also from His Futile Preoccupations. Ottilie Mulzet translates one of Kosztolányi's poems

Two on Czech artist, Alfons Mucha

A review of Claudio Magris' Danube

Sebastan Smee's review of Roberto Calasso's Tiepelo Pink, and Peter Conrad's

Adam Kirsch reviews David Ruderman's Early Modern Jewry

Susan Bernofsky interviewed about her Walser translation

Her translation reviewed

Danuta Borchardt interviewed about her Gombrowicz translation

Her translation reviewed

Quite the brouhaha in the National Interest

2010-04-26T15:01:00.011-04:00

John Gray and A. C. Grayling go toe-to-toe at the National Interest's site. Gray wrote the initial, longer attack piece. Both authors fight dirty. That is, ad hominems all over the place! Indeed, Grayling's rebuttal consists of little else -- I hope he posts a longer rebuttal than the quick one he's offered.

I'm more sympathetic to Gray's position. Grayling, Hitchens and the others take a too simplistic view of religion's historical influence. One example is their neglect of abolitionism's roots, especially in the UK. Even those British philosophers, like Hume, who opposed slavery, tended still to be racist. Their opponents were British writers who appealed to the Biblical notion that we're all equal in the eyes of God.

Gray notes the positive influence of some English philosophers (such as Locke) in promoting toleration and respect for freedom of expression, but he doesn't mention Milton. Is that a deliberate omission? Regardless, while Milton the Puritan likely wouldn't measure up to our current ideals of toleration, he played an important role in their development.

Gray points to the malign influence of 20th-Century atheistic regimes, noting that so far, atheists in power have been illiberal. His approach reminds me of that of Marilynn Robinson. Both authors round up the usual benighted, wannabe rationalists (usually Marxists), document their crimes, and then add: 'Sure, most rationalists will deny that these characters are what they had in mind when talking about reason, but that's the same move that we religious folks make when we disavow the Crusaders. See? How do you like it?'

Some of Gray's points on this score reminded me of Paul Tillich's application of the notion of idolatry to recent history. Tillich itemized the terrors that follow when one's ultimate concern is invested not in a forever transcendent, divine target but, rather, in some finite, wholly immanent object (such as a human leader or the state).

Here's where a point can be made in support of Grayling's side of the debate. Granted, the atheistic rulers of the past century left a sad legacy, but that is because they extended their devotion to a concrete, historical object (such as the state). By contrast, Grayling's more liberal brand of atheism takes as its focus the ideal of reason. Given our inevitable failure to be perfectly rational, to do so is to direct one's trust towards an ever-receding, transcendent ideal (rather than towards any historical figure).

So, many religious and atheistic ideologies of the past were equally dangerous because their trust, loyalty or ultimate concern resided in a concrete, contemporary figure in the government or church instead of in a never wholly manifested ideal (secular reason or an infinite God) that stands forever in judgment of our historical, fallible efforts.

Gray would likely acknowledge something like this point but reiterate that most ideologies, whether religious or atheistic, have an equally sorry track record when put into practice.

Philosophy bits

2010-04-21T11:31:00.024-04:00

A new biography of R. G. Collingwood (pictured) is reviewed here & here; and this article on Collingwood by Dale Jacquette is -- for now -- available

The Archbishop of Canterbury on Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Boyd Tonkin on the same book

Michael Walzer interviewed in the Tehran Times (ht Pol Theory)

Amitai Etzioni's review of Michael Sandel's book

David Rieff holds forth on Bernard Williams & Martha Nussbaum

Robert Pippin on how to make sense of people

Alan Saunders interviews Elliot Sober on arguments from design
('intelligent design')

Philosophy Bites interviews Ned Block on consciousness

The WSJ on Leibniz and this, the best of all possible worlds, a view that was pilloried by Voltaire, about whom there's a new biography (also reviewed here), and whose Candide inspired the Random House logo

A review of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex

The latest on the James Dean of philosophy: Peter Beaumont on why Camus still divides opinion in Algeria; and Justin Clemens and Jamie Bollenbacher review Robert Zaretsky's new book on Camus' life

The passing of two eminent philosophers of religion

2010-04-20T17:54:00.011-04:00

Antony Flew (1923-2010)

Jordan Howard Sobel (1929-2010)

Two leading figures in the philosophy of religion recently died: Jordan Howard Sobel and Antony Flew.

Here are some reminiscences about Flew by colleagues and students, and here are some more by Michael Ruse.

I first heard of Professor Sobel in connection with the ontological argument. He was one of the first people to write about Kurt Godel's version of that proof.

A memorial service for Professor Sobel will be held in Toronto on April 25.

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

2010-03-29T01:55:00.012-04:00

At Bloggingheads, Daniel Schultz and Peter Beinart discuss Reinhold Niebuhr. Elsewhere, Schultz chides David Brooks for misinterpreting Niebuhr (one of President Obama's favourite philosophers). Here's Mike Wallace interviewing Niebuhr in 1958. And here's a discussion of Niebuhr by Gary Dorrien and Kevin Mattson from last November on Minnesota Public Radio

Ernst Cassirer -- Emily Grosholz on his humanism (with a quick survey of the neo-Kantians)

Heidegger makes it into Wired 's science blog

Vivian Gornick reviews Michael Sandel's book on justice, which is also reviewed by Richard Reeves (along with Sen's book on justice). Sen devoted his Demos Annual Lecture to the topic 'Power and Capability'

And here's a justice free-for-all (with Sandel, Walzer, Nussbaum, Pollitt, etc.)

David Harvey's guide to Marx's Capital

Judith Butler interviewed (ht Silliman's Blog)

Alan Saunders interviews Alan Hájek on probability on Aussie radio

On Bernard Baars' 'global workspace' theory of consciousness

A. J. Ayer's doctor has spoken about Ayer's near-death experience

A review of the Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky

Speaking of stimulating Anglicans, John Polkinghorne was interviewed (ht Books, Inq.)

A. N. Wilson wrote an introduction to the Gospel According to Matthew (ht 3:AM)

Baudelaire & the Beats (several neat YouTube clips of pop depictions of beats)

A biography of Dr. Seuss

Will Self on Bulgakov's White Guard

The English trans. of Michael Maar's book Speak, Nabokov received a couple of good reviews

On the Hungarian lit front, Deborah Eisenberg likes Dezso Kosztolanyi's Skylark

And the Neglected Books site has a piece on Miklos Bánffy's Transylvanian trilogy, about which the Telegraph raved in 2007 (and again in 2010)

Reading Uwe Johnson in NY

Vertigo digs up an early review of Sebald's Emigrants by Gabriel Josipovici

I hope Patrick White wins the 'lost' Man Booker Prize -- it'll serve him right

Denis Donoghue on Yeats, Pound and Eliot

I linked to reviews of these two books in my last load o'links: Germania is reviewed in the WSJ and John Gray reviews World That Never Was

The Economist on Moses Montefiore: "He joined forces with middle-class religious dissenters and evangelicals to help end the slave trade, underwriting along with Rothschild a £15m loan to finance abolition in the West Indies."

Elaine Showalter reviews Hilary Spurling's book on Pearl Buck. Here's Claudia FitzHerbert's review

Someone's started a reading group for At Swim--Two Birds

When I read something by Theodore Dalrymple, I want either to stand up and cheer or to punch my pillow. He's interviewed here

On-line discussion forum for the Chicago Manual of Style. (This marks me as deviant, but I really fell in love with this manual while writing my dissertation.)

China Miéville on J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories

Patti Smith interviewed on KCRW. (ht 3:AM)

Three reviews of a new book on Irving Thalberg, Sr., along with an interview with the author of an older book on him. Thalberg's son, Irving Thalberg, Jr., was a philosophy professor in Chicago

Dodgson's math in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

2010-03-24T02:06:00.010-04:00

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, math lecturer and logician.

Melanie Bayley wrote a couple of articles, one in New Scientist (behind a paywall) and the other in the NY Times, in which she discerns a mathematical satire in Alice. I first heard of her argument in Boing Boing, and it has received coverage elsewhere. Her claims have won agreement in some quarters but not in others (though she offers a rebuttal in the comments). [Correction (May 26, 2010): Peter Cameron, to whose comments the last link of the preceding sentence links, notes that he was not rejecting Dr. Bayley's hypothesis but merely reflecting on it.]

Dodgson wrote some works of popular math (pdf) and developed something called 'Dodgson condensation' (pdf). Robin Wilson's book, Lewis Carroll in Numberland, is a biography that focuses on Dodgson's mathematical efforts. There's also a book by Bernard Patten on the logic in Alice.

Update (March 24, 2010): NPR has coverage of Bayley's thesis. From the comments there I learned that Bayley cites the work of Helena Pycior as having introduced similar interpretive claims in the 1980's.

Update (May 26, 2010): Here's a piece on Dodgson by emeritus Oxford philosopher, J. R. Lucas.

Links on Fodor & evolution

2010-03-21T14:24:00.014-04:00

What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, has provoked a lot of bloviating, ad hominem abuse. Probably, the best critical reply is that by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher. Here's an exchange between Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini and Block & Kitcher. There's also this excellent dialogue between Fodor and Elliott Sober. Sober wrote an earlier paper (pdf) about Fodor's views on evolution.

Update (March 22, 2010): Fodor and Sober continue their exchange on Leiter's blog. There's also this note by Terry Tomkow.

Update (March 23, 2010): Here's a new piece by Sober (pdf).

Update (March 24, 2010): Here's Fodor in TPM.

Update (March 28, 2010): Here are three posts by former or current Rutgers students.

Update (May 11, 2010): Here's Richard Lewontin's review in the NY Review of Books.

Update (May 13, 2010): Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini have a letter in the April 28 issue of the TLS, in which they reply to Samir Okasha's review of their book.

Update (May 24, 2010): Robert Richards' review.

Update (Aug. 3, 2010): John Dupré's review, Peter Godfrey-Smith's review, Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarin's reply to the latter in the LRB letters section

Update (Aug. 11, 2010): Godfrey-Smith's reply in the LRB letters section

Philosophy, lit, etc.

Some philosophy, lit, and art links

Kleist on-line, etc.

Central European characters

Erratic Schwabinger Otto Gross

Recently sighted shades of central Europe

Franz Hessel

Consciousness, Buddhism & human nature

Northrop Frye on the teaching machine

Philosophy links & Beckett's film

Links mostly about German novels

New philosophy links and unrelated video

Austro-Hungarian subjects

Café Stefanie (Munich)

Ur-hippies from Germany to California

Get your phil of love

Rowohlt and friends in Leipzig

Roth and Musil in Berlin

From Altschwabing to Manitoba

Evil café lurker

McLuhan in the Walrus

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

'History is written by the winners, literature is written by the losers'

Junker shuns liberal teachings

Philosophy podcasts & negative book reviews

Karen Armstrong at the New York Public Library

The grand old Dame was never plain

Funny Firbank, Hamilton's plaque, and a little flower girl

Seems vaguely Popperian

Five recent references to philosophy (mostly from the New Statesman)

Recent climate science shows us to be on the precipice

Philosophy on the net from approx. the last 3 or 6 months

Who were the professional philosophers in Nazi Germany?

Fermor and 'Pips' Schey in The Hare With Amber Eyes

A bookstore trend that must die

Common Sense & Uncommon Sensibility

More vintage Toronto bashing by Wyndham Lewis and now Hemingway, too

Both Irving Thalbergs

Saul Bellow on how the political has encroached on the personal

Grass, Bernhard & Sebald

Mitteleuropa items

Recent pieces by and about Kwame Anthony Appiah

More KBBC posts

New book on Milton's influence on Kant

Barthian blogfest

Wyndham Lewis

Louis MacNeice on the net

Old BBC TV interviews of novelists

Swinburne interviewed

August religion links

Summer literary links

Passionate distortion can be fun, I guess

Who is Don Draper? My only Mad Men riff

All of Life Magazine is on Google Books

G20 waste

Mid-June philosophy & literature links

New philosophy links

Literary Links

Marilynn Robinson, Calvin and Stefan Zweig

Linked lives in early Austrian feminism

Martin Gardner, a 'whys' man

More philosophy bits

Morley Callaghan interview (1977)

Kierkegaard around the 'net

Some recent Mitteleuropa links

Quite the brouhaha in the National Interest

Philosophy bits

The passing of two eminent philosophers of religion

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

Dodgson's math in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Links on Fodor & evolution