January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.