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 link-o-rama

Here are the podcasts from an Oxford conference on 'Religious Epistemology, Contextualism, and Pragmatic Encroachment'.

From Philosophy TV, Gregg Caruso and Neil Levy on consciousness and moral responsibility; and Al Mele and Eddy Nahmias on free will and science.

Over the past few months, Siris has developed an epic series of posts on the Platonic corpus (including writings that used to be in that corpus but which are now doubted to have been written by Plato). Here's a list of what had been covered by August 1. Since then, there have been posts on the Symposium and the Republic. Also, there have been four thorough posts on Plato's letters as well as posts on Alcibiades Minor, Clitophon, Hippias Major, Xenophon's Symposium, and Plato's Epigrammata.

At Partially Examined Life, the hosts 'walk a live audience through Plato’s dialogue [Symposium] about love, sex, self-improvement....'. They also have a recent item about 'Maimonindes on God'.

Elisa Freschi has a series of posts about a conference on Buddhist philosophy (inc. one on Buddhism and philosophy of mind).

Cambridge have posted podcasts for several symposia, including the following: Ian Rumfitt and Gary Kemp on truth and meaning, Hallvard Lillehammer and Roger Crisp on moral testimony, Gideon Rosen and Marcia Baron on culpability, duress, and excuses, Amber Carpenter and Stephen Makin on the ethical significance of persistence, and Tamar Szabó Gendler and Jennifer Nagel on self-regulation.

Cambridge have also posted Alan Millar's Inaugural Address and Michael Bratman's Routledge Lecture.

From Elucidations, Jeff Buechner's podcast on Kripke and functionalism.


David Auerbach has a series of posts on Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Barry Stocker has a series of posts in the field of 'philosophy and literature', including several on Vico. See also his posts at NewApps.

At In Our Time (BBC), Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of solitude with Melissa Lane, Simon Blackburn, and John Haldane.

From The Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 'Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Moral Growth'.

From Philosophy Bites, Amia Srinivasan on Nietzschean genealogy and Roger Scruton on the sacred.

Some Roger Scruton quotations.

From the bio of Polish philosopher Henryk Elzenberg (who taught the poet Zbigniew Herbert):

Besides being motivated by his own philosophical inquiries, he took part in classes run by H. Bergson, F. Rauh, E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl and V. Delbos .... Elzenberg spent the years 1913-1917 on intensive studies on the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. ... In the autumn of 1916 ... his work Foundations of Leibniz's Metaphysics was presented .... It was followed by his third book (habilitation) entitled Marcus Aurelius. On History and Psychology of Ethics (1922).

John Gray on Kenan Malik's history of ethics and John Gray on Michael Oakeshott.

Ádám Tamás Tuboly's review of Greg Frost-Arnold’s Carnap, Tarski and Quine at Harvard.

Timothy Yu on 'Wittgenstein, Pedagogy, and Literary Criticism'.

Wittgenstein links from the British Wittgenstein Society.

The IEP entry for Victor Kraft; the SEP entry for Ludwig Fleck; and the University of Iowa's bio for Gustav Bergmann.

Historian George Mosse on Bergmann: 

Gustav Bergmann in philosophy was the most visible refugee on campus, a distinguished logical positivist, yet a difficult person, opionated and combative. ... Hardly any of his colleagues managed to get along with him. We clashed straight away about the Western Civilization course and much else besides. (George L. Mosse, Confronting History: a Memoir, p. 144)

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Consciousness, Buddhism & human nature

Alan Saunders interviews David Chalmers about 'zombies and consciousness'

Does possibility entail conceivability? See the comments for points about Davidson's reliance on this entailment in his argument against the possibility of a language that isn't translatable into our own.

On Philosophy Bites, Frank Jackson is interviewed about 'what Mary knew'

William Seager reviews a posthumous collection of papers by idealist and panpsychist T. L. S. Sprigge (The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays in Metaphysics and Ethics)

Mr. Waggish on Buddhism and Galen Strawson's panpsychism

Pain reduction through meditation? 'The degree of concordance between these studies suggests that meditative practices may indeed reduce pain through a unique neural mechanism, one corresponding to increased attention and reduced evaluative/emotional responses'

From last March, David Weisman on Buddhism's anticipation of key findings in modern neuroscience.

Tim Thornton's neat-looking course, 'Meaning, understanding and explanation'

Adrian Owen's detection of consciousness in people previously thought not to have it (people in vegetative states).

From the Abstract for a paper called 'What is a "mood-congruent" delusion? History and conceptual problems': 'This article investigates the history of the concept of mood-congruent delusions and the problems accompanying this concept. In the late nineteenth century, there were conflicting views regarding the relationship between the contents of an individual’s delusional thought and his/her affective state.'

Edge's 'Master Class' on the science of human nature (with Daniel Kahneman, Michael Gazzaniga, Steven Pinker, etc.).

Unfortunately, Kate's performance is cut off in this clip, so if you want the whole of her song, the original video is on YouTube.