Final batch of 2015 philosophy links

I begin the new year by trying to finish off the old one with this roster of philosophy links from the final third of 2015. I've done some housekeeping by adding new tags, including one for Jane Austen, about whom Barry Stocker has put up seven posts (see below).

Johannes Zachhuber on the relevance of Max Weber to the study of historical and contemporary religion (inc. a discussion of Peter Ghosh's book Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic': Twin Histories). Duncan Kelly's review of Ghosh's book in the TLS.

Robin Lane Fox's book on Augustine (Augustine: Conversions to Confessions) reviewed in the Financial Times by John Cornwell. Mark Lilla's review of the same book in the NY Times, and Sameer Rahim reviews it for the Telegraph.

Renaissance Mathematicus debunks the notion that Aristotle was a 'killer of science', and on the fruitfully mistaken phlogiston theory.

Joshua P. Hochschild: 'What's Wrong With Ockham? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West'.

Massimo Campanini on 'science and epistemology in medieval Islam'.

Harald Sack on 'Avicenna and the Islamic Golden Age'.

Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri interviewd by Nina zu Fürstenberg on processes of 'economic and social decadence'. 

A reflection on the life of Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015), 'the pride of Islamic feminism'.

Susan Gelman is interviewed about essentialismhttp://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-149-susan-gelman-on-how-essentialism-shapes-our-thinking.html.

Barry Stocker on 'Jane Austen and the Ethical Life', a seven-part series.

Soupy Sales nails it:



Danny Heitman on 'the talented Mr. [Aldous] Huxley'.

From the ManWithoutQualities blog: 'Oakeshott, Ivan Illich, and J. K. Rowling on 'School''.

Daniel A. Kaufman on C. S. Lewis' essay conceived in a toolshed.

Andy Wimbush reviews James Wood's The Nearest Thing to Life.

Ava Kofman on 'Nietzsche the space man'.

John Yargo on 'Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas'.

In the Lancet, 'Voices, Identity, and Meaning-Making' (Angela Woods on the Hearing Voices Movement).

The 'Madness & Literature' Network.

From Philip K. Dick's last interview:

The big turning point came when I was nineteen. ... I looked around at the world. And I said, Causality does not exist. It’s an illusion. And I talked with a guy who was in the philosophy department. I said, 'I suddenly realized it was all an illusion. Because, an effect follows something, B follows A, we think A caused B. But actually it just follows it. It’s a sequence. A sequence like a sequence of integers. They’re not connected.'

Patrick Wilcken reviews Adrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science.

Michael Roth reviews George Makari's Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.

Nick Hopwood is interviewed about his book Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud.

The THE solicited book recommendations from academics.

Some philosophy, lit, and art links

Here's an interesting new-ish journal, nonsite.org, the focus of which seems to be on issues straddling the boundary between philosophy and literary studies. Issue 3 of nonsite has some articles on Wittgenstein. Issue 4 includes Gary Hagberg's reply to 'Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art', which was in Issue 3.

Robert Pasnau has a nice article on 'The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy', Averroës.

From an interview with George Steiner: 'My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs.'

While poking around looking for on-line stuff by or about Kleist for the previous post, I found this long reflection on Freud's development of the notion of the uncanny by reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman'.

Daniel Johnson reviews a book about  'the Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie of Vienna 1800–1938'.

Miranda Seymour reviews a biography of Stefan Zweig.

I first heard of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach when I was doing some research on Gusto Gräser. I didn't realize, though, that Diefenbach was even more of a wild-man-with-a-prophet's-beard than Gräser was. Strange Flowers has a post on Diefenbach with some neat pics. In the slide show at the bottom of that Diefenbach post, one of the photos shows Diefenbach and several other proto-hippies with flowers in their hair.

Here's the ultimate site for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. 'Pudding: ... A kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs.'

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's Walls of Berlin.

Cool but creepy photos by Stephen Berkman.

Joan Didion interviewed at the NY Public Library by Sloane Crosley: