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.

Philosophy links

Kadri Vihvelin and Terrance Tomkow didn't like Dennett's review of Mele's book on freedom: 'It is disgraceful because Dennett is coyly, with nodding winks and cunning smiles, inviting the reader to commit the ad hominem fallacy.'

Jerry Coyne didn't like John Gray's review of Dawkins' autobiography.

Michael Rosen reviews The Impact of Idealism: The legacy of post-Kantian German thought (four volumes).

'"Blind" to the obvious: Wittgenstein and Köhler on the obvious and the hidden' (by Janette Dinishak).

Sarah Bakewell's review of The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science (by Armand Marie Leroi). Also reviewed by Patricia Fara.

Frank Freeman reviews Emily Wilson's The Greatest Empire: a Life of Seneca.

Peter Thonemann reviews books on Thucydides by Neville Morley and Geoffrey Hawthorn. Morley's book is Thucydides and the Idea of History.

From Morley's post on the death of German novelist Siegfried Lenz:

It is the task of the novelist, as it is of the historian, to represent the complexity and ambiguity of life, against the tendency of politicians and businessmen to seek simple answers based on a limited number of suppositions and ends.

Baroness Onora O’Neill's Hansard Lecture: ‘Can Human Rights Be Justified?’

Cass Sunstein reviews Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (by Richard J. Evans).

Russ Roberts interviewed about his book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.

Benjamin Bilski reviews Vincent Azoulay's newly translated Pericles of Athens:

Writing with precision and avoiding clichés and anachronisms, Azoulay carefully balances the credibility of classical sources. He presents a convincing account of the stratēgos in the Athens that emerged from the Persian Wars as a fragile democracy in which Pericles played a central role as the city further democratised its public institutions and increased its power until defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

Martin Woessner reviews two books on philosophy and film.

'Under the tutelage of [Wilhelm] Herrmann, [Karl] Barth was from the beginning suspicious of metaphysics and its impact upon Christian doctrine.'

Richard Waters reviews Walter Isaacson's book The Innovators (on the post-war pioneers who laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley):

Unlike Jobs, who was in equal parts brilliant and obnoxious, those singled out for special mention by Isaacson freely share both ideas and credit for their discoveries. The writer is at pains to stress that innovation often works best when combined with a selfless, highly collaborative approach.

From BBC Radio3, Andrew Hussey on Camus.

A Kierkegaard bicentennial roundup

Sketch by Christian Olavius Zeuthen (1843)

May 5 was the 200th anniversary of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard's birth, as was noted by Julian Baggini. The anniversary was also the occasion for this piece by Andrew Torrance at Per Crucem ad Lucem.

I rounded up some Kierkegaard links a couple of years ago, including one for Hubert Dreyfus's paper on why Kierkegaard would have hated the internet. (I'm sure Kim Kierkegaardashian would disagree.) Dreyfus spoke about Kierkegaard earlier this month on Philosopher's Zone, hosted by Joe Gelonesi. The other speakers were Patrick Stokes and Tim Rayner.

Three older podcasts on Kierkegaard from: a 2008 episode of In Our Time; a 2010 one from Partially Examined Life; and a 2008 episode of Philosophy Bites.

A collection of videos about Kierkegaard. You can find others, by Dreyfus, on YouTube.

From the University of Edinburgh, Sean Turchin's on-line dissertation about the relation between Kierkegaard and Karl Barth.

W. H. Auden's Introduction (pdf) to The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard.

'The Oddest Prophet' -- Malcolm Muggeridge on Kierkegaard. 

A chapter on Kierkegaard and Sartre from Jacques Maritain's book called Moral Philosophy.

The text of Lev Shestov's Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy.

From a 1945 issue of The New Republic, Jean Wahl's 'Existentialism: A Preface'.

Two pdf's: Merold Westphal's 'Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate' and Alastair Hannay's 'Kierkegaard: the pathologist'.

William McDonald's 'Love in Kierkegaard's Symposia'.

John Updike's 2005 review of a Kierkegaard biography in the New Yorker. The first part of Joakim Garff's biography.

From First Things in 2004: 'Kierkegaard for Grownups' by Richard John Neuhaus. Earlier this May, William Doino, Jr. has a piece on Kierkegaard in the same journal.

'Kierkegaard the Novelist and Three Kierkegaardian Novels: The Moviegoer, The Sportswriter and Rabbit, Run'.

Two items of interest in the NY Times.

Several volumes edited by Jon Stewart on Kierkegaard's influence.

A lot more Kierkegaard links.
 

Whither the philosophical novel ...

Witold Gombrowicz

Martin Walser interviewed by Alexander Görlach on 'the old wound of lacking justification': 'The authors Franz Kafka and Karl Barth have quite a bit to say on that question.'

On Aussie radio, Alan Saunders interviews Henry Sussman about Kafka and philosophy.

Zdenka Pregelj on 'Kant's Aesthetics in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground'

 A Guardian list of philosophical novels. From 2010, Rebecca Goldstein's top five 'novels of ideas'.

Jennie Erdal's April 7 article on whether it's still possible to write a philosophical novel; a central European response. And James Ryerson's Jan., 2011 NY Times article on this topic (with much about David Foster Wallace).

Added May 1:  Daniel Kehlmann has a new play about Gödel called 'Ghosts in Princeton': 'The play is about the Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), who by age 24 revolutionized the logic of mathematics. ... Kehlmann follows the giant footsteps of Gödel and Adele on their journey from Vienna to Princeton. Breakthrough thinking, brilliant logic and a self-destructive rationalism characterized Gödel’s remarkable history.' (via Literary Saloon)

Milan Kundera in a 1989 interview (first published in Review of Contemporary Fiction): 'I’m not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I don’t like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself.'


Added May 1: From David Winters' review of Eli Friedlander's new book on Walter Benjamin as a philosopher: 'Friedlander advanced a similar argument in previous books on Rousseau and Wittgenstein, contending that these authors' "literary" inclinations—for instance, Rousseau's accounts of his personal reflections and religious reveries—are inseparable from their philosophical systems.' Winters adds, 'Friedlander claims that Arcades is a work of "philosophical history" whose style and substance are systematically interwoven. ... By reframing "the truth that philosophy has traditionally aimed at" as a matter of "the presentation of historical material," the project redefines philosophical practice as an activity grounded in concreteness.'

Ben Hutchinson reviews George Steiner's The Poetry of Thought: 'If the relationship between philosophy and poetry underlies much of Steiner’s work, The Poetry of Thought tackles the Arnoldian “and” head-on. From Parmenides and Heraclitus to Sartre and Heidegger, Steiner traces a typically ambitious arc through the history of Western thought, arguing that what defines philosophy is its manner as much as its matter.' Hutchinson adds, 'Steiner sees in Wittgenstein’s paratactic, aphoristic style a conscious attempt at “counter-rhetoric”.'

'[William] Gass is also a philosopher. He did his graduate work at Cornell after serving in the Navy for three years during World War II. ... The effects of his admiration [for Wittgenstein] are most evident in the nuts and bolts of his own prose style. He has made sure to weed out the cant and jargon from his sentences. But even more revealing is his handling of the evidence. It’s not just that every abstraction is matched to a concrete example; whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, Gass will connect an initial example to a second one, and from the second will derive a third.'

From an IEET blog, 'The Hierarchy of Exclusion in “Ender’s Game” — a starting point for thinking about personhood'

More KBBC posts

The Barth blog conference has some new posts, including one on Paul Tillich and one on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Barthian blogfest

The 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference has begun with an exchange about Barth's relation to Schleiermacher.

August religion links

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University has a good collection of articles on the civil rights movement and on King's theological influences (inc. entries on Barth, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel movement, a tradition that wielded much influence in my home and native land). King's work is situated in the tradition of African-American preaching in Preaching With Sacred Fire, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Here's an NPR interview (ht) with Simmons. The interview includes a recording from a sermon by C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father).

The influence of this same tradition on President Obama is analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, and it's the subject of this CNN piece, which features quotations of Gustav Niebuhr, Richard Crouter (whose new book on Reinhold Niebuhr was just released), and former Senator John Danforth.

Two more reviews of Newman's Unquiet Grave, one by Terry Eagleton and one by Anthony Kenny
Francisco Ayala: 'Evolution can be religion's friend'

Siris has an interesting treatment of James' 'Will to Believe'

Gary Gutting poses challenges to theists and to atheists

Laura Miguélez reviews Stephen Williams' The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity

From Gordon Marino's article on Kierkegaard: 'Philosophers gravitate toward epistemological problems such as what makes a belief true or false. Kierkegaard, however, is unusual in that he fixes his attention firmly on the belief or appropriation side of knowledge: on our personal relationship to ideas.'

Martin Gardner, a 'whys' man

Martin Gardner died on May 22 at the age of 95. He wrote the 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American for 35 years and was an accomplished critic of pseudo-science.

I first became aware of Gardner by way of his work on C. L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), especially as evidenced in his Annotated Alice (see also his Universe in a Handkerchief). Of all Gardner's works, though, my favourite one is his Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (wise indeed). Here's a review from the New Criterion (where Gardner himself published several reviews).

If philosophy begins in wonder, then Whys is a great entryway into philosophy. The index is loaded with names like Wittgenstein, Russell, Reichenbach, Carnap, Rudolf Otto, Tillich, Barth and F. R. Tennant, but Gardner never introduces the philosophy cold (in textbook fashion). Instead, he makes the philosophical questions seem like the most natural and enticing explorations on which to embark. He works up to this effect by way of more literary reflections, sometimes making his approach through passages from children's literature.

For this purpose, Carroll and L. Frank Baum (author of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz) seem to have been Gardner's favourites. I particularly like Gardner's use of an episode from The Marvelous Land of Oz in connection with the concept of the numinous (on p. 342 of Whys). In this episode, Tip is startled when the wooden Saw-Horse comes to life. Gardner notes that the Saw-Horse is even more startled, rolling its eyes and "taking a first wondering view of the world in which he had now so important an existence" (Gardner quoting Baum, p. 342). Gardner then asks whether this (and other) quotations have not stirred in the reader "a similar sense of surprise and wonder." "Have you never," he continues, "felt amazed to find yourself not only living in an Ozzy world but, more incredibly, aware of the fact that you are alive?"

It was in Whys that Gardner announced his 'philosophical theism'. He later characterized himself as "a mystic in the Platonic sense."

I have found two nice blog tributes that focus on Whys, one by Julia Galef and one by William M. Briggs (from whom I've learned that Gardner studied at Chicago with Rudolf Carnap).

One of the best on-line resources concerning Gardner can be found at the Cambridge University Press blog, which includes a 5-part interview from 2008.

Here are several obituaries and tributes: the Guardian, the NY Times, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Lewis Carroll Society, Discover, the Skeptical Inquirer, one by James Randi, one by Roger Kimball, a video clip at BoingBoing, and several items at Scientific American (inc. a contribution by Douglas Hofstadter).

Here's an older article from the Wall Street Journal (last April 2) and an interview of Gardner by Alex Bellos.

Update (May 26, 2010): More tributes to Gardner are being tracked here (in English & Spanish).