December philosophy links

Putnam says Husserl got the gist of 'twin earth' in 1911.

Alva Noë on colour as well as Evan Thompson and Stephen Batchelor's new book.

Ivan Ilyin, Putin's philosopher.

'Marcuse Today -- Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man is more prescient than its author could have imagined' by Ronald Aronson.

'Ernst Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 1)'.

From last November, Amartya Sen: 'Social Choice and Social Welfare'.

'Anne Jaap Jacobson on Mind and Representation'.

From the Abstract for a law paper of philosophical interest: 'The article discusses how negligence doctrine has long distinguished misfeasance (a “misdoing”) from nonfeasance (a “not doing”), purporting to provide that the former occasions liability and the latter does not.'

A new book called Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science.

Hugh Gough's review of Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685-1798 by Jennifer Powell McNutt.

'Todd Berzon on Aaron P. Johnson’s Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre: The Limits of Hellenism in Late Antiquity'.

Alan Montefiore's review of Rowan Williams' The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.

Rowan Williams on some recent books about fairy tales.

A 1996 list of movies with philosophical content (to which yours truly contributed).

At Philosophy Bites, Julia Annas on virtue ethics and Hugh Mellor on probability.

Links without any intended unifying theme

Image source

Richard Nixon in an undergrad paper at Whittier College in 1933:

In making a short study of English philosophers during the past year I became an intense admirer of David Hume.

From an exam answer at Boston University by Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Jan. 1952) (via a comment by 'dmf' at NewApps):

As for me, I have found a solution of this problem in the thought of men like Karl Gross, Brightman and Hocking.

Who's Karl Gross? I have heard of Hocking. My late uncle on my mother's side (a Whitehead fan) often spoke of Hocking with reverence. There's a recent Harper's piece by John Kaag on Hocking's excellent library.

King's student paper on Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr's 1965 telegram to King.

Rheinhold Niebuhr.

The 1984 BBC documentary series Sea of Faith is on YouTube, with installments on Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein (among others). The house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister appears at 6.35 of this episode. The host, Don Cupitt, gives a partial tour of the house and mentions its 'geometrical tranquility', which reminded me of The Cone in Thomas Bernhard's novel Correction (a very difficult book).

From Cupitt's 2002 Guardian piece on Iris Murdoch:

In the metaphysical tradition it had always been assumed, ever since Parmenides and Plato, that the really real must be one, and perhaps also must be unchangeably perfect. But from Schelling and Schopenhauer onwards, a new tradition develops which, on the contrary, depicts ultimate reality as being at odds with itself, divided and even malignant.

Rowan Williams' lecture 'Faith and Human Flourishing: religious belief and ideals of maturity'.

The latest issue of Humanities (the journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities) has some good literary pieces, inc. Danny Heitman's 'The Quiet Greatness of Eudora Welty', Mark Athitakis' 'The Otherworldly Malamud', and Kathleen B. Jones' 'The Trial of Hannah Arendt'.

Clive James' piece on Robert Frost (from a recent issue of Prospect).

The Japan Times has a series on essential reading for Japanophiles.

Some philosophy links

Reinhold Niebuhr (a pdf of his NY Times obit). The Niebuhr family.

A series of Michael Sandel's podcasts at BBC4. And here's Sandel at the Boston Review with commentary by Richard Sennett, Debra Satz, etc.

At the Guardian, Benjamen Walker interviews Giles Fraser, Lesley Chamberlain, and Jennifer Ratner about Nietzsche's line that 'God is dead'. More recently, Walker spoke with Mark Kingwell, Mark Vernon, Julian Baggini, and Charlotte Higgins about Plato's just society.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Prof. Richard Dawkins and Sir Anthony Kenny discuss 'The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of their Ultimate Origin' (posted on an Oxford University site last Feb. 28). If the video doesn't play, click 'Get Video File' (just under the screen) and you'll get the QuickTime copy of the video.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss 'the work and influence of the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.'

George Pattison reviews Eric Ziolkowski's The Literary Kierkegaard: 'A sub-theme of The Literary Kierkegaard is that of the humorous and even the comic Kierkegaard, as we meet him directly in the chapters on Aristophanes, Carlyle, and perhaps more indirectly in the discussion of the holy fools Parzival and Don Quixote.'

From the blurb for Elizabeth R. Napier's book Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fictions: 'Drawing on six works of early English fiction — Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Napier examines how authors grappled with technical and philosophical issues of the body, questioning its capacity for moral action, its relationship to individual freedom and dignity, and its role in the creation of art.'

Jim Holt: 'Is philosophy literature? ... I hope I have clinched my case for analytic philosophy as belles lettres.'

Ian Hacking on the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

A review of Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-1951 (ed. Brian McGuinness).

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

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

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.

Philosophy bits

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

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

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

Ads in old Penguins

This ad for Army Club Cigarettes adorned an old Penguin paperback. The bottom caption reads, "This is the cigarette for the fellow with a full-size man's job to do. When you're feeling all 'hit up,' it steadies the nerves."

Beginning in the late 1930's (but before WWII), Penguin's books contained ads for products other than the publisher's own books.

Here's another commercial, this time for Euthymol ('the refreshing antiseptic toothpaste'), which appeared in William Temple's Christianity and the Social Order:


This same Euthymol commercial adorns the inside of the back cover of Volume 1 of John Lehmann's justly celebrated series, The Penguin New Writing, a volume that includes Orwell's 'Shooting an Elephant', part of Isherwood's Berlin Diary and V. S. Pritchett's 'Sense of Humour'.

Getting back to William Temple, he was the Archbishop of Canterbury, as is indicated near the back of Christianity and the Social Order in his bio, which competes for attention with a Craven A commercial:


One of Penguin's more lucrative clients must have been Cadbury's (the company seems to have dropped the 's' from its name), which was marketing its chocolates as food:


That first Cadbury's ad was near the back of Penguin's Three Plays by Anton Tchehov (or Chekhov). The second one was near the back of Volume 2 of The Penguin New Writing.

Another reliable client was Pears, maker of soap (the "original transparent soap") and shaving accessories:

The shaving product commercial is on the back cover of Chekhov's Three Plays. I'm not sure where the soap ad ('Feel its tonic action') is from. I scanned that image last year when I posted some of this material on my old Chapters site (long since deleted), and -- here I will confess to an act that is unforgivable in the eyes of some -- I discarded that old Penguin. Yes, I sometimes chuck a particularly beat-up old Penguin into a recycling bin. I do so without remorse and occasionally with glee. Anyhow, a similar Pears soap ad is on the back of Volume 5 of The Penguin New Writing series. The crest at the top of the soap ad is the Royal coat of arms. The caption under it reads, "By Appointment to H. M. [His Majesty] The King."

That fifth volume has this next ad for Huntley & Palmers biscuits (a company with an interesting history) on the inside of its front cover:


Finally, on the back of Volume 6 we find this commercial for Norvic Shoes:

I don't know when Penguin stopped running commercials of this sort in its books. Those who wanted to purchase advertising space in a Penguin were advised to direct their enquiries to E. W. Player Ltd. at 61 Chandos Place in London. Unlike most of the above companies, Player seems not to exist any longer. (The most recent mention of them that I can find via Google is from 1980, when they were located at 30 Fleet Street.)

A nice touch in the wartime Penguins is this note (usually found near the backs of these books):

"For the Forces. Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the services may enjoy it too."