Sundry items of philosophy (in the loose & popular sense)

Lives of famous Scottish philosophers.

Carrie Figdor interviews Richard Fumerton about his book Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism. Fumerton mentions a course that he took as an undergrad at Victoria University in the University of Toronto, where he took philosophy courses with Francis Sparshott and Peter Hess. I attended Vic in the late 80's and took several courses with Hess, who completed his doctoral work at Brown under Roderick Chisholm (who supervised a lot of good philosophers).

From 2009: 'Moral and political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, honoured at [University College Dublin]' (inc. a 50-minute talk by MacIntryre).

Michael Rosen reviews Onora O'Neill's Acting on Principle: an Essay on Kantian Ethics.

From the Nordic Wittgenstein Review, Hans-Johann Glock's paper 'Reasons for Action:Wittgensteinian and Davidsonian Perspectives in Historical and Meta-Philosophical Context'.

Here's a bio of mathematician Karl Menger, son of economist Carl Menger. 

Dale DeBakcsy on Ludwig Feuerbach.



From last July, Habermas interviewed about the 'Internet and Public Sphere: What the Web Can't Do'.

Edith Ackermann interviewed by Urs Hirschberg on 'Talent, intuition, creativity: on the limits of digital technologies'.
Ancient commentators on Aristotle.

Parts 1 and 2 of  Mohammed Hashas' reflections on Islamic philosophy.

Richard J. Bernstein on 'The Pragmatic Roots of Cultural Pluralism'.

Seyla Benhabib in the NY Times: 'Who’s On Trial, Eichmann or Arendt?'

From last July, Benhabib on 'Human Rights and the Critique of “Humanitarian Reason”':

This prevalent mood of disillusionment and cynicism among many concerning human rights and humanitarian politics is understandable; but it is not defensible. Developments in international law since 1948 have tried to give new legal meaning to "human dignity" and "human rights". Admittedly, these developments have in turn generated the paradoxes of "humanitarian reason"....

Eric Posner's Twilight of Human Rights Law will be released in October. 

Margaret Somers and Fred Block on 'The Return of Karl Polanyi'. Karl Polanyi had a home in Pickering, the suburb of Toronto in which I was raised. Karl taught in the USA, but his wife Ilona Duczynska (more here) wasn't allowed to live there due to her socialist past. Karl Polanyi's daughter Kari Levitt was an economics professor at McGill University. Karl's nephew John won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry and taught at the University of Toronto. John's father (and Karl's brother) Michael Polanyi was an accomplished philosopher who anticipated some of Thomas Kuhn's ideas. There needs to be an at least three-volume work of historical fiction about this family.

'David Flusfeder’s novel John the Pupil follows three students of the medieval philosopher-savant Roger Bacon who make a secretive journey from England to the seat of the papacy at Viterbo'.

Jonathan Israel and Lynn Hunt trade blows over her review of his book Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre:'Hunt roundly berates me for the significance I attribute to Diderot, d’Holbach, and Helvétius, making one mistake after another.'

Marcus du Sautoy on Borges' appeal to mathematicians. Includes a mention of Cantor and a clip of Borges being interviewed in 1971. Borges 'read all Bertrand Russell's books on logic and maths'. Rebecca DeWald reviews a couple of companions to Borges.

From a thought-provoking post by sociologist Thomas Sheff:

The discipline of psychology, for example, has become Brahean, committed to systematic studies, even if they don’t work. One example: more than twenty thousand studies using self-esteem scales. These studies are systematic, but they don’t predict behavior and are therefore useless.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister tackles one of the biggest pseudo-scientific frauds of our day, the unsupported rhetoric about the importance of self-esteem.

From last June, 'A Philosopher Refutes the "Stuck in Time" Hypothesis of Amnesia' (about a paper by Carl F. Craver).

Here's a short poem by Edgar Lee Masters -- 'Imanuel Ehrenhardt' -- that manages to fit mentions of philosophers Sir William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart, Locke, Descartes, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Schopenhauer into its first five lines. Masters sets aside these philosophers in favour of John Muir.

Quotations about Hume by 2 economists, an epidemiologist, Borges & Hamann

Amartya Sen:

Hume's influence on the nature and reach of modern thinking has been monumental. From epistemology to practical reason, from aesthetics to religion, from political economy to philosophy, from social and cultural studies to history and historiography, the intellectual world was transformed by the enlightening power of his mind. ('The Boundaries of Justice' New Republic [December 14, 2011])

Mervyn Susser:

Like Plato and George Berkeley who epitomize idealist philosophy, Hume constructed a view of the world that gives primacy to the sentience and thought of the individual: truth can be said to exist only in the subjective perceptions of an observer. For Hume, the apparent sequence of events in the external world is in fact the sequence of perceptions in the mind. ('Rational Science Versus a System of Logic' in Causal Inference, ed. K. J. Rothman [Epidemiology Resources, 1988], p. 190)

Jorge Luis Borges:

It is a bit like what Hume says of Berkeley: “His arguments admit of no refutation and produce no conviction.” Solipsism admits of no refutation and produces no conviction. (“Merely a Man of Letters” Jorge Luis Borges: an interview, Philosophy and Literature 1 (1977): 337-41)

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.:

From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume’s marvelous essays of 1752, Of Money and Of Interest, conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected. [p. 246] .... The passages on dynamics that I cited from Hume in Section 1 could be slipped into Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) or Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933 ) without inducing any sense of anachronism. [p. 253] (Lucas' Nobel Prize Lecture, 'Monetary Neutrality', Dec. 7, 1995)

Johann Georg Hamann:

This much is certain that without Berkeley there would have been no Hume, just as without Hume no Kant. Yet finally everything comes down to tradition just as all abstraction comes down to sensuous impressions. (from a letter to Herder, 1782)

 

Extraordinary philosophy links

Erik Desmazieres' illustration for Borges' 'Library of Babel'

Source of above image.

From Philosopher's Zone, 'We need to talk about Hegel' -- Joe Gelonesi talks to Paul Redding about Hegel.

On John Stuart Mill's annotations of Emerson's Essays:

When Mill turned to the Essays themselves, there was a good deal of marking up in the margins – which confirms that a passage caught his attention – and frequent asides, many of them simply a damning word or two .... If ‘sense’ was present, the more heavily annotated essays suggest that Mill thought ‘nonsense’ prevailed.

On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg talks to David Wootton, Michael Moriarty, and Michela Massimi about Pascal.

From the same source, Mel Bragg, Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk, and Julia Tanney on ordinary language philosophy.

Ever the Leibnizian, Borges countenanced extraordinary language philosophy:

There was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. (Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel')

From the mid-1980s, an article on 'Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy' by L. E. Goodman. Some of the medieval Islamic philosophers influenced Ramón Llull (whose ars combinatoria was to have captured the 'interrelationships of Platonic forms'). Llull's ideas influenced Leibniz's notion of a characteristica universalis, which was essential to Lebniz's dreamed of unified and universal science. Llull, Leibniz, and Borges figure prominently in William Woof's 'Borges, Cervantes & Quine. Reconciling Existence Assumptions and Fictional Complexities in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”', which appeared in the 1999 volume of Variaciones Borges.

On WHY? Radio, Joseph Margolis on 'The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?'

From Philosophy Bites, 'Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy' and John Tasioulas on human rights.

Steven Nadler on why Spinoza was excommunicated.

Samuel Moyn on dignity in recent books by Jeremy Waldron and Michael Rosen.


The Mind Body Problem: An interview with Ned Block from Imaginal Disc on Vimeo.

Cheer up, Arty! It's your birthday

I recently read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's work. He was a first-rate aphorist who, unfortunately, diluted his pithy wisdom with mediocre metaphysics (a sentiment shared by Isaiah Berlin).

Here's some of George Carlin's wisdom: 'Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.' No one more clearly epitomizes this truth than Schopenhauer. He was 'cynical' in the everyday sense of that term (as opposed to the technical, philosophical sense). Schopenhauer's cynicism was an aspect of his pessimism. He held out no great hope for humankind, which is one reason why he recommended resignation and renunciation -- resign yourself to our collective failure to advance morally beyond our predecessors, resign yourself to the fact that romantic love is generally a cruel joke, etc. etc. and, accordingly, renounce your worldly hopes. Such world-denying pessimism must be grounded in idealism (Carlin's point), for only against the backdrop of very high, ideal standards can such a sweeping condemnation of worldly endeavour make sense. And Schopenhauer was an idealist with a vengeance. He damned the chilly shadow-land of history as forever farcical and, shunning it, sought the perfect luminescence of Plato's ideal forms. Since he eschewed any divine agent of vengeance, Schopenhauer took its expression upon himself. From his disillusion flew the cutting aphorisms.

Schopenhauer set his idealism in a metaphysical nightmare. He tried to bring together Kant's noumenon, the Platonic forms, and the will ... oops (cue the Beethoven) ... the WILL. A volatile mixture, to be sure -- I just hope he had good insurance. Somehow, the really real is supposed to be noumenal (hence beyond time and plurality) and ideal in Plato's sense (also beyond time but apparently plural despite the Form of the Good's best efforts) and volitional (and thus essentially temporal). Moreover, for Schopenhauer, each person's deeds arise from her character. But character, for Schopenhauer, is noumenal, which puts it beyond the reach of causation and, indeed, beyond any application of the principle of sufficient reason. So how can anything 'arise' from it? Also, being noumenal, it admits of no plurality. But then how can there be several characters, each accounting for our diverse acts? Perhaps the really real was also beyond arithmetic. Ah well, whereof one cannot speak ....

[Update (added Feb. 23): The status of Platonic Ideas in Schopenhauer's system is tricky, to say the least. They're the focus of pp. 232-4 of v. 1 of the World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer there says that the Platonic Ideas are beyond any application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, in his system, suggests that they're noumenal. Nevertheless, he also says that that the Ideas are essential to an objectification of the will, which suggests that they're phenomenal. The most thorough investigation of this matter that I know of is in a paper by James and Dale Snow: 'Was Schopenhauer an Idealist?' (Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (4) 1991). They conclude that Schopenhauer's 'Platonic' Ideas are meant to be in time; the Ideas are sempiternal rather than eternal.]

Still, the metaphysical train wreck should not detract so much from Schopenhauer's accomplishment. He advanced good criticisms of Kant's ethics (and anticipated some of G. E. M. Anscombe's points) and developed our notion of the unconscious (along with Fichte and Schelling). No other second-rate philosopher (but first-rate aphorist) has had such a profound influence. Among those whom Schopenhauer influenced the most are Wagner, Wittgenstein, Borges, Burckhardt, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Richard Taylor, and Thomas Mann. (Mann wrote an adulatory piece about Schopenhauer in 1938.) And on and on. Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Huysmans had intense Schopenhauer phases but eventually opted for more life-affirming views. And though he denied it, there has long been a suspicion that Freud must have read Schopenhauer earlier in his life. Finally, here's Albert Einstein in 1933 with one of my favourite Shopenhauer quotations:

I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense…. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘A man can do what he wants, but not will what he wants,’ has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. This realization mercifully mitigates the easily paralyzing sense of responsibility and prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it is conducive to a view of life which, in part, gives humour its due.

Schopenhauer was one of the earlier western philosophers to take seriously an eastern philosophical tradition and he was among the first prominent intellectuals to take seriously the ethical status of animals. These advances, together with the list of luminaries who admired Schopenhauer, lead me to suspect that the above metaphysical objections may well derive from misunderstandings on my part. 

11 philosophy, literature, & music links

T. E. Hulme

Roger Kimball on T. E. Hulme: 'Hulme was more subtle, and perhaps more effective, in his attacks on the pacifism of Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell in “War Notes,” the miscellaneous commentaries he wrote while convalescing in 1915–16.'

Christopher J. Voparil's 'Rorty and the democratic power of the novel ... On Richard Rorty's definition of the novel as "characteristic genre of democracy"'

From Scientific American, 'Borges and Memory'

Mark Thwaite on Karl Knausgaard and the unheimlich (according to which Adam Phillips omits Freud's essay on the uncanny from an updated version of a Penguin Freud anthology)

From last November, Stoic week at the Guardian: 'An interdisciplinary team of psychotherapists, philosophers and classicists are working together to find out the uses of stoicism for the modern day'.

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé's 'The Everyday's Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein'
 
2013 German Book Splurge (new English translations of German books)

'Minor Soseki work gets first English translation' Nowaki, by Natsume Soseki

A series of posts on classic CanLit books (mostly before Atwood and Munro)

Here's a nice collection of 'Lit Rock' on the Portable Homeland blog (videos inc.).

If you like retro photos (with a focus on the UK), check out the Library Time Machine.

Neuro-lit

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary neuroscientist, and Gabriel Garcia Márquez described the symptoms of semantic dementia before they were recognized in neurology.

I posted a while ago on some 'philosophy of mind' connections in two of Ian McEwan's novels. ManWithoutQualities recommends two novels that concern recent cog-sci work on consciousness, and there was this post last fall on "the rise of the neuronovel."

There might be something faddish about more recent neuro-lit, but if it leads authors to engage with old philosophical concerns in their new, souped-up neuro form (such as determinism), that's all to the good.

Incidentally, Jonathan Bennett has posted his new translation of de la Mettrie's Man a Machine.

Update (Feb. 11, 2010): MTB reminds us of an earlier book on this theme, Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist, about which MTB has several posts.

This song by Raffaella Carrà bears little relation to the rest of this post, except that it exemplifies (for me at least) an interesting psychological phenomenon, which has been dubbed the 'earworm'.