G20 waste

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

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

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

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

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

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.