(1st of 3 link lists posted between Dec. 12 & 14)
The first issue of Argumenta has articles by Brandom, Audi, Hochberg, Hacker, and Kriegel.
Announcement of Nora Hämäläinen's new book, Literature and Moral Theory.
Audio and video of Steven E. Hyman's 2015 Loebel Lectures in Psychiatry and Philosophy (Oxford).
A first draft of a new deciphering of Carnap's diaries (to 1935, in German) by Brigitta Arden and Brigitte Parakenings, who are working for Christian Damböck's project, via the Carnap blog.
Elijah Millgram in Aeon: 'Orwell taught us to fear technocratic jargon that doesn’t let us say what we mean. But that is language at its best.'
Via the Sociological Imagination:
Sadia Habib reviews Michel Foucault’s 1981 Louvain lecture series ‘Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling’.
Mark Carrigan on the 'culture of competitive sleep deprivation'.
Via Political Theory - Habermas and Rawls:
Jonathan White's 'The Riptide of Technocracy: Can there be a democratic EU?'
Jeremy Waldron's 'The Vanishing Europe of Jurgen Habermas'
Showing posts with label Carnap. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carnap. Show all posts
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Some philosophy links (February)
Chad Hansen's new MOOC 'Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought'.
'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'
In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg talks with Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsby, and Crispin Wright about truth. and with Simon Glendinning, Joanna Hodge, and Stephen Mulhall about phenomenology.
Julie Allard on 'Ronald Dworkin: Law as Novel Writing'.
A collection of new papers on Jaegwon Kim will be available this month from Cambridge University Press.
Harald Sack on Pierre Gassendi.
Gary Saul Morson: 'On Toulmin, Tolstoy, & the Dawkinsization of the humanities'.
Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'
Richard Zach on 'Carnap on "Syntax" vs. "Semantics"'.
Elucidations podcasts: from October, Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition; and from December, Episode 66: Haim Gaifman discusses mathematical reasoning.
Krista Tippett interviews Paul Elie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robin Lovin discuss Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy. Audio recordings of some of Niebuhr's sermons and lectures.
At Philosophy Bites, Christine Korsgaard on the status of animals.
'Ethics and Aesthetics are One: The Earnestness of High Modernism in Wittgenstein and Musil' by Genese Grill.
At Philosophers Zone, Joe Gelonesi talks to David Papineau about consciousness and the brain.
Nicholas Maxwell on 'what philosophy ought to do'.
Colin Strang's obituary.
Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a student of Kant's -- well, he attended some of Kant's lectures -- wrote some early science fiction tales. Michael Hauskeller has a blog post on Hoffmann's tale 'Sandman'. Another blog post about 'Sandman'. In his chapter of Wiley's Companion to Science Fiction, 'The Origins of Science Fiction', George Slusser devotes a section to Hoffmann's 'Sandman'.
'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'
In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg talks with Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsby, and Crispin Wright about truth. and with Simon Glendinning, Joanna Hodge, and Stephen Mulhall about phenomenology.
Julie Allard on 'Ronald Dworkin: Law as Novel Writing'.
A collection of new papers on Jaegwon Kim will be available this month from Cambridge University Press.
Harald Sack on Pierre Gassendi.
Gary Saul Morson: 'On Toulmin, Tolstoy, & the Dawkinsization of the humanities'.
Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'
Richard Zach on 'Carnap on "Syntax" vs. "Semantics"'.
Elucidations podcasts: from October, Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition; and from December, Episode 66: Haim Gaifman discusses mathematical reasoning.
Krista Tippett interviews Paul Elie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robin Lovin discuss Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy. Audio recordings of some of Niebuhr's sermons and lectures.
At Philosophy Bites, Christine Korsgaard on the status of animals.
'Ethics and Aesthetics are One: The Earnestness of High Modernism in Wittgenstein and Musil' by Genese Grill.
At Philosophers Zone, Joe Gelonesi talks to David Papineau about consciousness and the brain.
Nicholas Maxwell on 'what philosophy ought to do'.
Colin Strang's obituary.
Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:
During the fall of 1921 [Bell] returned to academia and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and within the same time frame made an application to have his doctorate from Göttingen University re-instated. The formal doctorate was finally issued to Dr. Bell in May of 1922. His tenure in Toronto was to be short-lived and he resigned after the spring semester. In the fall of 1922 he took up teaching in the philosophy department at Harvard University.Rebecca Suter reviews Matthew Strecher's The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami: 'According to Strecher, the metaphysical realm in Murakami’s work is the place where individual subjects are able to connect to their “inner narrative,” get in touch with their innermost feelings and (re)construct a worldview that is closer to their true self than the false myths or “collective narratives” produced by society.'
Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a student of Kant's -- well, he attended some of Kant's lectures -- wrote some early science fiction tales. Michael Hauskeller has a blog post on Hoffmann's tale 'Sandman'. Another blog post about 'Sandman'. In his chapter of Wiley's Companion to Science Fiction, 'The Origins of Science Fiction', George Slusser devotes a section to Hoffmann's 'Sandman'.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
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):
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:
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)The panda ads:
Monday, August 18, 2014
Cafes Reichsrat and Arkaden
Six years ago, I posted on some interwar Viennese cafés of historical interest, including the Arkaden and the Reichsrat. I noted the significance of the Reichsrat in connection with Viennese logicians and Wiener Kreis positivists. Specifically, Kurt Gödel presented some of his incompleteness results there in 1930 (to Carnap, Feigl, and Waismann).
In that post, I ventured a hypothesis about the location of the Reichsrat. It turns out that I was just plain wrong. The excellent logician Richard Zach, has found Café Reichsrat's location 'at the north-west corner of Stadiongasse and Reichsratsstraße/Rathauspark'.
There's a new book on Viennese cafés: The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller [Berghahn Books, 2013]). The book's coverage reaches beyond Vienna to include papers about early 20th-century coffeehouses in Zagreb and Krakow. Also, there's a paper by Edward Timms called 'Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud's Vienna and Virginia Woolf's London'.
The book primarily explores the cafés' contribution to Vienna's intellectual firmament. Central European coffeehouses were great, semi-public venues (what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a 'third place') in which poets, mathematicians, politicians, journalists, psychiatrists, etc. etc. rubbed shoulders and shared ideas. Timms charts some of the relations among the Viennese café Kreise (circles) by means of a diagram (p. 207) that looks like a reproduction of the one he made for the first volume (Fig. 1, p. 8) of his magnificent biography of Karl Kraus. It's a good diagram, but Timms put a more complex one in volume 2 of his Kraus biography (p. 108). The latter diagram locates some of the Kreise in their preferred cafés and has the interesting label 'Vienna Circles: the Field of Cultural Producton'.
(For more about the many Vienna circles, see '"Wiener Kreise": Jewishness, Politics, and Culture in Interwar Vienna' by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman, in Interwar Vienna Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes [Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2009].)
There's very little about philosophers in the above-mentioned The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture. All I could find was an endnote in Shachar Pinsker's contribution (p. 96 n. 36, where Pinsker says that Wittgenstein and members of the Wiener Kreis frequented the Arkaden Café) as well as a brief mention of Otto Neurath in Steven Beller's paper (p. 56, where Beller says that Neurath and members of the Wiener Kreis often hung out in Café Herrenhof).
Pinsker's article is called 'The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism'. It has sections devoted to cafés in Lemberg and in Berlin, but the largest section concerns the coffeehouses of Vienna. In that part of his paper, Pinsker mentions the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, about whom Elias Canetti wrote. (Canetti referred to this author as Dr. Sonne.) Pinsker situates Ben Yitzhak in an important group of Yiddish and Hebrew writers who congregated in the Arkaden Café before and during WWI. Based on the memoirs of some of these authors, Pinsker characterizes this café as 'the place in which Jewish immigrants from Galicia felt at home' (p. 86). (The index entry for 'Arkaden Café' doesn't include a reference to Pinsker's discussion.)
Added (August 20, 2014): I noted in my post on Lviv/Lemberg/Lwow that the mathematicians and logicians of that city did much collaborative (and solitary) work in the Scottish Café. Some of those thinkers received part of their education in Vienna, so it wouldn't be surprising if Viennese logicians and mathematicians did some collaborative work in the cafés (as the physicists did).
In that post, I ventured a hypothesis about the location of the Reichsrat. It turns out that I was just plain wrong. The excellent logician Richard Zach, has found Café Reichsrat's location 'at the north-west corner of Stadiongasse and Reichsratsstraße/Rathauspark'.
 |
| In Café Griensteidl before 1897 (photo by Carl von Zamboni) |
There's a new book on Viennese cafés: The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller [Berghahn Books, 2013]). The book's coverage reaches beyond Vienna to include papers about early 20th-century coffeehouses in Zagreb and Krakow. Also, there's a paper by Edward Timms called 'Coffeehouses and Tea Parties: Conversational Spaces as a Stimulus to Creativity in Sigmund Freud's Vienna and Virginia Woolf's London'.
The book primarily explores the cafés' contribution to Vienna's intellectual firmament. Central European coffeehouses were great, semi-public venues (what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls a 'third place') in which poets, mathematicians, politicians, journalists, psychiatrists, etc. etc. rubbed shoulders and shared ideas. Timms charts some of the relations among the Viennese café Kreise (circles) by means of a diagram (p. 207) that looks like a reproduction of the one he made for the first volume (Fig. 1, p. 8) of his magnificent biography of Karl Kraus. It's a good diagram, but Timms put a more complex one in volume 2 of his Kraus biography (p. 108). The latter diagram locates some of the Kreise in their preferred cafés and has the interesting label 'Vienna Circles: the Field of Cultural Producton'.
(For more about the many Vienna circles, see '"Wiener Kreise": Jewishness, Politics, and Culture in Interwar Vienna' by Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lisa Silverman, in Interwar Vienna Culture between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Deborah Holmes [Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2009].)
There's very little about philosophers in the above-mentioned The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture. All I could find was an endnote in Shachar Pinsker's contribution (p. 96 n. 36, where Pinsker says that Wittgenstein and members of the Wiener Kreis frequented the Arkaden Café) as well as a brief mention of Otto Neurath in Steven Beller's paper (p. 56, where Beller says that Neurath and members of the Wiener Kreis often hung out in Café Herrenhof).
Pinsker's article is called 'The Central European Café as a Site for Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism'. It has sections devoted to cafés in Lemberg and in Berlin, but the largest section concerns the coffeehouses of Vienna. In that part of his paper, Pinsker mentions the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak, about whom Elias Canetti wrote. (Canetti referred to this author as Dr. Sonne.) Pinsker situates Ben Yitzhak in an important group of Yiddish and Hebrew writers who congregated in the Arkaden Café before and during WWI. Based on the memoirs of some of these authors, Pinsker characterizes this café as 'the place in which Jewish immigrants from Galicia felt at home' (p. 86). (The index entry for 'Arkaden Café' doesn't include a reference to Pinsker's discussion.)
Added (August 20, 2014): I noted in my post on Lviv/Lemberg/Lwow that the mathematicians and logicians of that city did much collaborative (and solitary) work in the Scottish Café. Some of those thinkers received part of their education in Vienna, so it wouldn't be surprising if Viennese logicians and mathematicians did some collaborative work in the cafés (as the physicists did).
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Links to scintillating excogitations, largely Wittgensteinian
From the BBC: Raymond Tallis and Ray Monk on Wittgenstein (it starts about 57 seconds into the audio file). From the BBC in 2003, Melvyn Bragg interviews Monk, Barry Smith, and Marie McGinn about Wittgenstein.
Arthur W. Collins reviews Paul Horwich's book Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy.
Andrew Lugg reviews Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation (ed. Sullivan & Potter).
Matthew Frost's notes on his continuing project of translating Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
Duncan Richter's two posts about Tractarian elucidation.
Reshef Agam-Segal on 'thinking and willing subjects in the Tractatus'.
Philip Cartwright on propositional form.
From last March, Lars Hertzberg on talking (non)sense about nonsense (good comment thread), and a follow-up (with further interesting comments).
Duncan Richter's two posts about Wittgenstein on 'good'.
Gavin Kitching on Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences.
'Why on earth is it so difficult to describe the Contents of my Consciousness?'
A. C. Grayling on 'Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty'.
Henrik Lagerlund's 'Science and Reason', Part 1 ('Rationality of Modern Science') and Part 2 ('Pessimism and the Myth of Progress') -- lots on G. H. von Wright.
From Siris -- 'In Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy'.
Last May and June, SOH-Dan put up several posts on Dummett's Frege, McDowell on cog-sci, and Sebastian Rödl on Kant's first analogy.
MWQ quotes a lengthy passage from Steven Tester's new translation of Lichtenberg. The quoted passage focuses on Lichtenberg's philosophy of mind. Here's one of my favourite passages from Lichtenberg; it's about the mind-body relation and seems to anticipate Ryle's 'ghost in the machine':
Long before we could explain the common phenomena of the physical world we ventured to explain them through the agency of spirits. Now [that] we know better how they are linked together we explain one phenomenon by means of another; but we nonetheless have two spirits left to us, a god and a soul. The soul is thus even now, as it were, the ghost that haunts our body’s fragile frame. (G. C. Lichtenberg, c. 1776; trans. R. J. Hollingdale)The Stanford Encyclopedia finally has entries for Moritz Schlick and Heinrich Rickert. Still no entries for Sir William Hamilton, Wilhelm Windelband (who influenced not only Rickert and Max Weber but also Samuel Beckett), Georg Simmel, Susan Stebbing, Friedrich Waismann, Rudolf Carnap (!), Ruth Barcan Marcus (!), William Dray, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley (though they're of course referred to in other entries). I don't mean this to be any strong criticism of the editors, who have likely already commissioned entries for many of the above-named figures. I know that the editors have launched an initiative to give more coverage to female philosophers.
Philosopher's Zone interviews Simon Blackburn about human nature; and Hubert Dreyfus and David Deutsch on AI. Here's Blackburn's Alan Saunders Memorial Lecture (also available here).
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Philosophy links & Beckett's film
Here's a podcast in which Robert Zaretsky discusses the friendship and dispute involving Hume and Rousseau.
A review of Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment.
Two new entries in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one on Shaftesbury, one on Goethe
A review of Janice Carlisle's book about John Stuart Mill's 'character and sense of self.'
Jonathan Rée on William James: 'He favoured philosophy too, but not the dreary timidity encouraged by what he called “the PhD Octopus”, nor the stupefying smugness and philistine cleverness propagated by a posh young Englishman called Bertrand Russell.'
Turning from the history of philosophy to the philosophy of history, my library finally has access to the relatively new Journal of the Philosophy of History, a recent issue of which includes Celina María Bragagnolo's paper, 'Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate'.
Re. the history of the philosophy of history: W. H. Walsh wrote one of the standard introductory books on the philosophy of history. Daniel Little has posted a discussion of it, as well as a second item, situating Walsh in the idealist tradition.
A new, open-access journal on Wittgenstein (ht Language Goes on Holiday), and Oxford University Press has made several journal articles on Wittgenstein publicly available, as has the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
David Auerbach posts some quotations that illustrate how Rudolf Carnap viewed his philosophy in the context of contemporary artistic and political movements.
Here's a short film by Samuel Beckett with the following description: 'A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film ... in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts.'
Paul Boghossian argued against moral relativism in a NY Times piece, in which he objected to a 2001 article by Stanley Fish. Fish replied to Boghossian. Now, Boghossian has posted a masterful reply.
In that debate, Fish said that philosophy doesn't much matter outside the classroom. Bookforum's 'Omnivore' has posted a series of links under the heading 'Does philosophy matter?'
'Does Anything Matter?' by Peter Singer.
Mark Oppenheimer on Charles Taylor on 'how the Western liberal can reconcile a preference for liberal democracy with the illiberalism necessary for cultural preservation or self-preservation, which many accept as understandable goals.'
James Wood discourses on Taylor, Virginia Woolf, The Tree of Life, Max Weber, Philip Kitcher, etc. while reviewing The Joy of Secularism.
A podcast of Alan Saunders' interview with Martha Nussbaum.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Philosophy on the net from approx. the last 3 or 6 months
Marilynn Robinson on William James: 'In James's understanding, it is theism that places us in the cosmos whole and wholly human.'
The Journal of Humanistic Psychology's special issue on William James
A new biography of Moses Mendelssohn
A website devoted to C. D. Broad (with his 'Autobiogrraphy' and several of his papers)
Ned Block reviews Damasio's new book
From Philosophy Bites: Helen Beebee on laws of nature and Philip Pettit on group agency, Peter Singer on the life you can save
Kurt Gödel's ontological argument
A website devoted to Rudolf Carnap
Pierre Wagner on 'linguistic turn and other misconceptions about analytic philosophy'
Ben Granger on Hazlitt: 'He was prophetic in his critique of commerce, and of the narrow, selfish spirit of laissez faire individualism which it generates. Libertarian to the core in the true sense of this much-abused word, he saw straight through the gossamer thin arguments of those who use the word to defend big business, the lie that economic liberty for the rich few results in true liberty for society.'
On YouTube, Simon Blackburn on why Sam Harris is wrong
Margaret Midgley against humanism
Rouven Steeves on Augustine, Calvin, Tolkien, Tocqueville, Hans Christian Andersen, etc. on evil (pdf)
Roger Scruton: 'The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.'
John Haldane objects to Stephen Hawking's dismissal of natural theology
Christopher Howse on Dummett's claim that 'a man's philosophy ought not to be controlled by his religious beliefs' and a putative example from Elizabeth Anscombe's life; and Howse on Anscombe's use of the doctrine of the double effect (see esp. the comments by Allectus)
Here's a podcast of Alan Saunders' discussion of the doctrine of the doube effect with a cancer surgeon and an ethics professor
Saunders' interview with Robert Wallace on 'Hegel and Hegel's God', a new sketch of Hegel's views at the Goethe Institute, and Saunders' conversation with Steven Nadler on the problem of evil
Videos of Don Marquis and Michael Tooley on abortion, Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson on philosophy in literature, and Barry Loewer and Tim O'Connor on emergence, quantum mechanics and consciousness
John Cornwell on Alasdair MacIntyre on money
Margot Lurie on Beauvoir's relation to Nelson Algren: 'A bit of cognitive dissonance sets in when one learns that The Second Sex was written while Beauvoir was romantically involved with a man whose calling card was his working-class virility, his easy assumptions of male superiority.' Rachel Kwan's review of Toril Moi's book about Beauvoir
Martha Nussbaum reviews a book on the history of US feminism: 'Modern feminist economists such as Amartya Sen (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development work) have argued that no theory of development based on the satisfaction of people's preferences could ever be normatively adequate: such a theory would always be an unwitting accomplice of an unjust status quo.'
Podcast interviews with Nussbaum, Sen and others from Chicago, and here's Nussbaum speaking on the value of the humanities, and here's the text of Jeffrey Williams' 2008 interview with Nussbaum
From December, 2010: Nussbaum interviewed in The Telegraph (Calcutta)
Madame de Staël as quoted in Ruth Scurr's review of a new book about her: 'This new kind of authority in the State, of which neither the nature nor the strength was as yet known, astonished the greater part of those who had not reflected on the rights of nations.'
Andy Lamey on Montreal Marxist, G. A. Cohen
Habermas in the NY Times on the recent hotheadedness over multiculturalism in Germany
Nicholas Xenos on Leo Strauss: 'The prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.'
'Ernest Gellner: an Intellectual Biography'
'A Fresh Look at Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science'
David Kaufmann on Walter Benjamin: 'Benjamin ... wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one.'
Gordon Marino on Kierkegaard
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
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).
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).
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
On-line philosophy works
In my philosophy classes I try to use on-line readings when possible. It saves students some money and it provides one with a searchable text. There are many sites where these philosophical texts can be found, but they vary in quality (esp. when the texts are translated).
I'm listing here some of the sites with classic texts in philosophy that I like to consult. I won't link to Episteme since, though it has been an excellent resource, that site became corrupted and I haven't heard that it has recovered.
A. Early Modern
First, it appears that the more important philosophical texts in the early modern era are the most widely available on-line. Here are some of the relevant sites:
1. This Marxist site has lots of texts by Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. (They also have works by Heidegger, Carnap, Godel, etc.).
2. This Idaho site has many early modern works, including lots of Locke, Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Latta's translation of Leibniz's Monadology, and works by several of the lesser figures of that period. In fact, the list of texts runs into the 1800's (ending with Schelling). Translations tend to be older, but respectable. I noticed, though, that some of the links are broken.
3. Jonathan Bennett's early modern texts are very helpful, especially for students. Bennett has posted several texts on-line "with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought." Works by the six big early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) are included, as are works by Adam Smith, Richard Price, Newton, Thomas Reid, Hobbes, Malebranche, Anne Conway, Jonathan Edwards, etc. There are even excerpts from Kant's first Critique and a few texts by John Stuart Mill.
4. Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.
5. Finally, here are the complete works of David Hume.
B. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard & Nietzsche
As mentioned, some of Immanuel Kant's works are available at the above sites. One can also find a recent translation of the Critique of Pure Reason by George Macdonald Ross. Here is the orginal German version, and here's another copy of Kemp Smith's 1929 translation; this last version includes a "PERL driven search engine." Stephen Palmquist has put together a glossary for this work.
For Hegel, here is a recent translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard.
Here are some of Kierkegaard's books and several works by Nietzsche.
Walter Kaufmann's lecture, 'Sartre and the Crisis in Morality'.
C. Analytic Philosophy
Much of Bertrand Russell's work is on-line.
Selections from Dewey, James and several philosopher-psychologists (inc. Wundt & Stumpf)
'Scholarly editions of Wittgenstein's works and Nachlass' from the University of Begen's archives, along with many essays about Wittgenstein. Other 0n-line works by Wittgenstein appear in the right menu of the blog 'Methods of Projection'.
Lots of Wilfrid Sellars' works are available, including Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, among other Sellarsian texts and resources. There's also a pdf of Sellars' Notre Dame lectures (of which there's an incomplete audio recording).
The HIST-Analytic site has many papers and books (or parts of books). Many, but not all, are pdf's. There are several selections from works by Mach, Russell, G. F. Stout, Pritchard, Moore, Broad, C. I. Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Ramsey, H. H. Price, Dray, D. C. Williams, Hart, Grice, Rawls, etc. Elsewhere, there's Herbert Spencer's First Principles.
Volumes 1-14 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science are now on-line.
I found the penultimate draft of John Searle's 'Minds, Brains, and Programs'. Many recent on-line papers in the philosophy of mind are linked to at David Chalmers' site.
If I teach formal logic again, I'll consult this Handbook of Modal Logic as well as Ryckman's Logic Works.
D. Ancient & Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion
I don't teach ancient or medieval philosophy, but here are two good lists of resources (the latter of which includes many links to modern texts on religion as well). Here's a site that has 'Christian classics', including many medieval texts. This Fordham site gathers links to medieval humanities texts.
I'm sure there are lots of other on-line translations of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' works, but this is a good start. I found only some old translations of Plato (inc. Jowett's translations) via these two sites. And here are some of Jowett's Plato translations for the iphone. I also found W. D. Ross's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. John Holbo has posted his new translation of Plato's Euthyphro, Meno and Book 1 of The Republic.
This site lists more than 200 modern philosophy of religion texts that are on-line (including many books), including some by Tillich and some by William James. Speaking of James, here's his Varieties of Religious Experience. The Mead Project has posted excerpts from some of A. N. Whitehead's books. Whitehead's Religion in the Making is available elsewhere.
Here's a pdf of Ian Ramsey's paper, 'Talking of God: Models, Ancient and Modern'.
At the Alex site you can search by author's name for e-texts in the humanities, including many philosophical works. I'm not sure how widely the searches range -- many of the above sites don't turn up there -- but it does at least locate works that are available on Gutenberg. Also, the University of Adelaide's library has a list of e-texts in the humanities (again with many of the great works in western philosophy) that are accessible via that library and via other sites, too (inc. Gutenberg). Finally, many on-line classic philosophy works can be located at the Online Books Page.
I'm listing here some of the sites with classic texts in philosophy that I like to consult. I won't link to Episteme since, though it has been an excellent resource, that site became corrupted and I haven't heard that it has recovered.
A. Early Modern
First, it appears that the more important philosophical texts in the early modern era are the most widely available on-line. Here are some of the relevant sites:
1. This Marxist site has lots of texts by Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. (They also have works by Heidegger, Carnap, Godel, etc.).
2. This Idaho site has many early modern works, including lots of Locke, Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Latta's translation of Leibniz's Monadology, and works by several of the lesser figures of that period. In fact, the list of texts runs into the 1800's (ending with Schelling). Translations tend to be older, but respectable. I noticed, though, that some of the links are broken.
3. Jonathan Bennett's early modern texts are very helpful, especially for students. Bennett has posted several texts on-line "with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought." Works by the six big early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) are included, as are works by Adam Smith, Richard Price, Newton, Thomas Reid, Hobbes, Malebranche, Anne Conway, Jonathan Edwards, etc. There are even excerpts from Kant's first Critique and a few texts by John Stuart Mill.
4. Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.
5. Finally, here are the complete works of David Hume.
B. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard & Nietzsche
As mentioned, some of Immanuel Kant's works are available at the above sites. One can also find a recent translation of the Critique of Pure Reason by George Macdonald Ross. Here is the orginal German version, and here's another copy of Kemp Smith's 1929 translation; this last version includes a "PERL driven search engine." Stephen Palmquist has put together a glossary for this work.
For Hegel, here is a recent translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard.
Here are some of Kierkegaard's books and several works by Nietzsche.
Walter Kaufmann's lecture, 'Sartre and the Crisis in Morality'.
C. Analytic Philosophy
Much of Bertrand Russell's work is on-line.
Selections from Dewey, James and several philosopher-psychologists (inc. Wundt & Stumpf)
'Scholarly editions of Wittgenstein's works and Nachlass' from the University of Begen's archives, along with many essays about Wittgenstein. Other 0n-line works by Wittgenstein appear in the right menu of the blog 'Methods of Projection'.
Lots of Wilfrid Sellars' works are available, including Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, among other Sellarsian texts and resources. There's also a pdf of Sellars' Notre Dame lectures (of which there's an incomplete audio recording).
The HIST-Analytic site has many papers and books (or parts of books). Many, but not all, are pdf's. There are several selections from works by Mach, Russell, G. F. Stout, Pritchard, Moore, Broad, C. I. Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Ramsey, H. H. Price, Dray, D. C. Williams, Hart, Grice, Rawls, etc. Elsewhere, there's Herbert Spencer's First Principles.
Volumes 1-14 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science are now on-line.
I found the penultimate draft of John Searle's 'Minds, Brains, and Programs'. Many recent on-line papers in the philosophy of mind are linked to at David Chalmers' site.
If I teach formal logic again, I'll consult this Handbook of Modal Logic as well as Ryckman's Logic Works.
D. Ancient & Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion
I don't teach ancient or medieval philosophy, but here are two good lists of resources (the latter of which includes many links to modern texts on religion as well). Here's a site that has 'Christian classics', including many medieval texts. This Fordham site gathers links to medieval humanities texts.
I'm sure there are lots of other on-line translations of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' works, but this is a good start. I found only some old translations of Plato (inc. Jowett's translations) via these two sites. And here are some of Jowett's Plato translations for the iphone. I also found W. D. Ross's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. John Holbo has posted his new translation of Plato's Euthyphro, Meno and Book 1 of The Republic.
This site lists more than 200 modern philosophy of religion texts that are on-line (including many books), including some by Tillich and some by William James. Speaking of James, here's his Varieties of Religious Experience. The Mead Project has posted excerpts from some of A. N. Whitehead's books. Whitehead's Religion in the Making is available elsewhere.
Here's a pdf of Ian Ramsey's paper, 'Talking of God: Models, Ancient and Modern'.
At the Alex site you can search by author's name for e-texts in the humanities, including many philosophical works. I'm not sure how widely the searches range -- many of the above sites don't turn up there -- but it does at least locate works that are available on Gutenberg. Also, the University of Adelaide's library has a list of e-texts in the humanities (again with many of the great works in western philosophy) that are accessible via that library and via other sites, too (inc. Gutenberg). Finally, many on-line classic philosophy works can be located at the Online Books Page.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Godel's Viennese Hangouts -- Cafes Arkaden, Josephinum and Reichsrat
These two photos are of the building in Vienna in which the Cafe Arkaden was located. It's across the street from the Votivkirche. Today, this space is occupied by the Votiv Cafe.The Arkaden was patronized by members of the Vienna Circle. Here's a relevant description from Wittgenstein in Vienna by Allan S. Janik and Hans Veigl ([New York: Springer, 1998] p. 188): "[Kurt Godel] sat frequently with [Rudolf] Carnap in this cafe, which was in the arcaded building built in 1883 ... opposite the university's stately old main building. ... We even see in Carnap's notebook: '[...] In the morning Arkadencafe. Discussion: Godel on propositions of language. Feigl, Waismann, [Marcel] Natkin present (30.11.1928).'"
Members of the Vienna Circle also frequented the Cafe Josephinum. I walked right past its old site without realizing it, which is strange since the same building housed one of Godel's apartments, and his old residences in Vienna have plaques indicating his residency. The building is still there, but is now the Hotel Atlanta (address: 33 Wahringerstrasse). In the 1920's this rather plain-looking structure was an apartment building. Among its residents (from October 1927 until July 1928) were the brothers Kurt and Rudolf Godel (according to John Dawson, Jr. in his biography, Kurt Godel [Logical Dilemmas, p. 33]).
The Cafe Josephinum makes an appearance at the beginning of Janna Levin's novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines: "At the centre of the Circle is a circle: a clean, round, white marble tabletop. They select the Cafe Josephinum precisely for this table. ... The first mark is made, an equation applied directly to the tabletop, a slash of black ink across the marble..." (A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, p. 8).
Another hangout for members of the Vienna Circle was the Cafe Reichsrat (also no longer in existence). In this cafe Alfred Tarski met with Godel on the former's visit to Vienna. The Reichsrat is also notable for being the first place where Godel presented some of his incompleteness results. This is according to John W. Dawson, Jr., who writes, "Specifically, on August 26, 1930, Godel met Carnap, Feigl and Waismann at the Cafe Reichsrat in Vienna, where they discussed their travel plans to Konigsberg. Afterward, according to Carnap's [diary] entry for that date, the discussion turned to 'Godel's Entdeckung: Unvollstandigkeit des Systems der PM; Schwierigkeit des Widerspruchsfreiheitbeweises.' Three days later another meeting took place at the same cafe. On that occasion, Carnap noted 'Zuerst [before the arrival of Feigl and Waismann] erzahlt mir Godel von seiner Entdeckungen'" (quoting from Dawson's article, 'The Reception of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems', PSA, vol. 2 (1984): 253-71).
Cafe Reichsrat is hard to locate, partly because the street name has been changed (from Reichsrat to Rathausplatz). According to Matthias Baaz, the old cafe's site is now occupied by the Konditorei Sluka. I wasn't sure about this at first, since the Sluka itself dates from 1891 (it was mentioned in a play by Thomas Bernhard); but it looks like the Sluka expanded at some time into the Cafe Reichsrat's location. Compare this photo of the Reichsrat's door to this picture of the Sluka's patio. The door under the window in the background of the latter shot (towards the right, behind the lamp) appears to be the same door that appears in the old Cafe Reichsrat picture. More pictures of the Sluka are available at Merisi's Vienna For Beginners.
I wonder if Cafe Reichsrat was owned by Walther Mayer. Mayer was a Privatdozent in mathematics at the University of Vienna, and he later moved to Princeton University as Albert Einstein's assistant. Mayer owned a small cafe near the university. According to Maria Rentetzi (in her article 'The City as a Context for Scientific Activity', Endeavour 28 [March, 2004]), Mayer's cafe was across the campus from the Schottentor cafe, which could put it near the Rathaus. However, Retentzi adds that Mayer's cafe was near the Institute for Mathematics, the current location of which is far from the Rathaus.
Update (Aug 23, 2008): The math institute in Vienna seems to have had the same location when the Vienna Circle was meeting. Karl Menger says, "The meeting place of the Schlick Kreis was a rather dingy room on the ground floor of the building in the Boltzmanngasse that housed the mathematical and physical institutes of the University." (quoted from Friedrich Stadler's The Vienna Circle [Springer, 1997], p. 204 -- Stadler's book includes a photo of the entrance to the math seminar room where the Vienna Circle met)
Update (Sept. 11, 2008): I just bought Kurt Godel: Das Album/The Album (Karl Sigmund, John Dawson and Kurt Muhlberger), a bilingual book with many photos of Godel's old haunts, associates, etc. On p. 27 of this book, there is a picture of the interior of Cafe Josephinum, accompanied by the following description: "The ground floor of Godel's apartment house was occupied by the Cafe Josephinum, which was frequented by students and academics and hosted the post mortem discussions following scientific talks." The authors add that in addition to this cafe, members of the Vienna Circle liked to visit the Arkaden, the Reichsrat, Cafe Central and Cafe Herrenhof. The book also includes a picture of the Reichsrat's main doorway (to which I linked above) on p. 32.
Update (July 24, 2014): I was wrong about the Reichsrat's location. Richard Zach has found its place.
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