Early September links

Syrian refugee philosopher receives Goethe Medal. 'The Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm, one of the most recognized intellectuals in the Arab world, is a strong advocate of freedom of speech and democracy.'

Toni Morrison 'on Primo Levi’s defiant humanism'.

Computers predict schizophrenia by analyzing one's language use. 'Several studies of at-risk youths have found that doctors are able to guess with impressive accuracy—the best predictive models hover around 79 percent—whether a person will develop psychosis based on tracking that person’s speech patterns in interviews.'


Daniel Chernilo on 'the case for a philosophical sociology'.

Audio recordings of John Rawls' lectures on John Stuart Mill.

Beate Roessler: 'What is there to lose? Privacy in offline and online friendships'.

Sam Houston reviews Kenneth Garden's The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and His Revival of the Religious Sciences.

At Philosopher's Zone, Joe Gelonesi interviews Akeel Bilgrami about .Islam and identity'.

From last February, an Aussie radio interview of Charles Taliaferro, Richard Swinburne and others on the soul.

Bill McKibben on the Pope's Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.

Artur Rossman interviews Thomas Pfau on his book Minding the Modern.

Karl Barth's anthropology.

Laura Guerrero reviews Amber Carpenter's book Indian Buddhist Philosophy.

Evan Thompson on recent results concerning whether consciousness is a 'stream', and the relevance of the Buddhist Abhidharma tradition.

Mark Siderits reviews Jay Garfield's Engaging Buddhism. Also reviewed by Charles Goodman.

Michael Puett on Zhuangzi in Relation to Confucius"


Now available -- Feminist Investigations and Other Essays (an issue of New Literary History):

We have called this cluster of essays “Feminist Investigations,” in reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. 1 The five essays that follow work in the philosophical tradition after Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell.

Claire Messud, 'Why I Write' (with mentions of Camus, Kant, Thomas Bernhard, Tolstoy, etc.).

Rohan Maitzen on George Eliot: '“You would have to feel with me,” Dorothea tells Celia at the end of Middlemarch, “else you would never know.” Turning feeling into knowledge is the process Eliot’s fiction enables for us as well.'

Barry Stocker on 'Kierkegaard as Philosopher of the Novel'. 

Anil Ananthaswamy: 'If a philosopher argues that our sense of being an “I” comes from being agents of actions, meaning that we feel like an “I” because of our sense of agency, then the phenomenology of schizophrenia questions that philosophy.'

From last June, David Kordahl reviews three philosophical books by physicists.

'Experiment confirms that quantum mechanics scoffs at our local reality'.

Austin L. Hughes on Jerry Coyne's book Faith versus Fact.

From Buzzfeed, atheist academics asked about finding meaning in a purposeless universe.

Daniel José Camacho on 'Why James H. Cone’s Liberation Theology Matters More Than Ever'.

David Womersley on Richard Bourke's book Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke.

Harald Sack on Locke and the social contract.

The always interesting David Auerbach on taking a Wittgenstein course (ht Phil Percs).

Videos from the Character Project (Wake Forest University, funded by the Templeton Foundation).

Philosophy Bites - David Owens on duty.