August philosophy links

Kevin Berger interviews Mazviita Chirimuuta about colour.

'How to teach classical Chinese thought'.

Chris Power on David Markson's book Wittgenstein's Mistress:

The most impressive element of Kate’s narrative is its ability, in David Foster Wallace’s description, to 'make facts sad'. ... Markson finds the profound in trivia, and the effect of this is so powerful precisely because every life possesses its footnotes, and it is most often in them, in asides rather than signal events, that the real business of living takes place.

The Scofield's inaugural issue is devoted to the work of David Markson.

From Carroll Clarkson's article, 'Not I':

Coetzee makes an observation about Beckett’s Watt, with reference to philosopher, René Descartes: 'The Meditations are written in the first person and the present tense. If we rewrite them in the third person and past tense we have something close to the philosophizing of Watt.' ... In a Cartesian, “I think, therefore I am” we have a congruence of narrating and narrated consciousness .... In Beckett’s use of the third person, past tense, these congruencies and signs can no longer be assumed .... Yet in Coetzee, the signature style is the third person, present tense, and if there is a rift between ... narrating and narrated consciousness, it’s never a clean break.

Benjamin Crockett on Hélène Cixous' book Tomb(e).


Ty Clever on skepticism and Annie Dillard. 

Audio recording of Lilian Calles Barger's interview of James Turner about his book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities.

Colin Guthrie King on August Boeckh (1785–1867):

Philology, according to Boeckh’s famous definition, is the business of “understanding knowledge” (Erkenntnis des Erkannten), and philology’s objects in this business are not only, or not primarily, texts.

Steven Poole reviews Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design:

[Wilczek's] eccentrically brilliant book is a ‘meditation’ on the possibility that beauty really is truth. From the Pythagorean mantra that ‘All things are number’, and Plato’s atomic theory (wrong in detail but surprisingly right in many principles), through to Newton’s work on light and gravity, and up to modern quantum theory, Wilczek offers a stirring defence of rationalism: the uncovering of truth through pure reason. These days, we tend to assume that empiricism is the only game in town. Yet time and time again, Wilczek shows, ideas in theoretical physics long precede the evidence that turns out to support them.

A symposium on 'the unknown Newton'.

La pensée des lumières - and English-language site on French Enlightenment thinkers.

Siris on Hobbes and a national Church of England.

Hazlitter on Jim Holt on Hugh Aldersey-Williams' book on Sir Thomas Browne, 'an excuse to cite some astonishing passages of prose'.

A new Hume biography, by James A. Harris, is being published by Cambridge.

Nick Barrowman on 'Correlation, Causation, and Confusion'.

At the Atlantic, James Parker reviews Carol and Philip Zaleski's The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. Parker quotes Owen Barfield's idealist claim that

When we study long-term changes in consciousness, we are studying changes in the world itself … Consciousness is not a tiny bit of the world stuck on the rest of it. It is the inside of the whole world.

Michael Nelson on the Inklings.



Zinzi Clemmons' Young Black Writers: After Michael Brown', with an extensive reading list.

'In Feminist Edges of the Qur’an, Aysha Hidayatullah explores ... the works of Muslim women who have produced commentaries (tafsirs) on the Qur’an in the past half-century.'

J. L. Schellenberg on divine hiddenness.

Rowan Williams: 'Violence is an unavoidable part of being human'.

'Identity is lost without a moral compass'.

From last March, Galen Strawson reviews John Gray's Soul of the Marionette. John Banville reviews Gray's book in the Guardian.

Calvin Normore and a bro 'Debate The True Meaning Of A Sandwich'.

'Counterfactuals: The Short Course'  by Kadri Vihvelin and Terrance Tomkow.

Several video clips from Susan Haack's talks.

Stuart Elden on 'the last of Foucault’s courses from the Collège de France to be published'.

First post in a series on the reception of Hegel in 19th-century Britain.

August episodes from the BBC's History of Ideas series.

Podcasts and videos from the University of Queensland's Centre for the History of European Discourses.

Tilo Wesche's 'Dialectical negativism: Michael Theunissen, 1932-2015'.