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.

Links mostly about German novels

T. T. Heine's poster for a Munich cabaret (depicting Marya Delvard)

The Tablet launches a series of monthly podcasts called 'Long Story Short' with an interview of Vivian Gornick about Rosa Luxemburg

Tom Wolfe on Marshall McLuhan, and Eric Norden's 1969 interview of McLuhan for Playboy

From Robert Zaretsky's review of The Pursuit of Laziness: an Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment: 'Diderot’s Rameau is a loafer for whom artistic creation means mimicry and regret. ... Other creations of Diderot... delight in doing nothing by the traditional standards of the West: the Tahitian natives in his Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville for whom mocking those same western standards is about as busy as they get; or Jacques and his master in Jacques the Fatalist, content with interruptions and detours in their own lives that mock our traditional standards.'

Bomb Magazine's1988 interview of Gregor von Rezzori (via Three Percent), and Three Percent's review of Rezzori's Ermine of Czernopol

Two of Irmgard Keun's books have just been translated into English:

1. From Other Press: 'Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was [Keun's] The Artificial Silk Girl.'

2. From Melville House: 'Now, at last, [Keun's] After Midnight is available in the United States, the first title in Melville House‘s Neversink Library.'

Jenny McPhee discusses both of these books by Keun, and Salonica Monica reviews Artificial Silk Girl. Here's more about Keun by Sarah Bakewell.

Daniel Mendelsohn analyzes the women in Theodor Fontane's novels, and Jane Librizzi reviews Fontane's newly re-issued Irretrievable.

Michael Wood reviews five of Heinrich Böll's books, which have been re-issued by Melville House.

Kenji Fujishima on a performance by the Cleveland Orchestra: 'Whereas Mahler often laid out his struggles right on the surface, to the point where some might find his music impossibly overwrought, Bruckner—in his symphonies, in particular—often finds more serene, if sometimes no less anguished, expressions of his musical quests for God.'

From Glenn Gould's 1979 documentary on Toronto: 'I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colours of any kind depress me.' The documentary is about 48 minutes long. In it, Gould appears to like Toronto mainly because it doesn't much intrude on his consciousness. And he sings Mahler to elephants at the zoo. In case the above link to the documentary doesn't work, here's the first of the six YouTube clips from it.

Here's a passage about a strange crackpot named Alfred Schuler, which I came across while reading about fin-de-siècle Munich: 'Nietzsche was even the intended recipient of Schuler's occult therapy. For two years Schuler made preparations to cure Nietzsche's madness through the freely interpreted rite of an ancient Corybantic dance. It was never implemented, partly because of the difficulty of enlisting suitable youths for the cultic dance.' (Quoted from p. 79 of The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany -- 1890 - 1990, by Steven E. Ascheim)