Links (mostly philosophy)

Rare policy statement: the most comprehensive roundup of philosophy links is the Daily Nous's 'Heap of Links'. In my philosophy link lists, I try to link to items that haven't yet been captured there.

Cass Sunstein uses the development of Star Wars to illustrate points about law and other narratives:

Narrative offers broad lessons not only for movies, but also for creativity of many different kinds, and in areas that include novels, poems, histories, music, and law. Those lessons involve, above all, the impossibility of planning (in literature or law), the eruptive nature of the creative imagination (in literature and law), and the (challenging but blessed) difficulty of achieving coherence.

Peter Singer on 'Effective Altruism'.

Gary Gutting on Michael Ruse's atheism book.

Robert Sapolsky on how language influences thought.

Open Culture gathers several of the Open University's philosophy cartoons, narrated by Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson.

David Byrne interviewed by Jules Evans on 'music, ecstasy and catharsis':

As ER Dodds pointed out in The Greeks and the Irrational, ecstatic cults (with drumming!) were always around…but when did they lose acceptance? With the triumph of the Enlightenment?... I began to sense that rhythmic and repetitive music could do something more that just be an outlet for my unspoken unheard self- it could gradually change that self….and it seemed to be most effective in music rooted in a something that had been repressed or cast aside by western culture.

Ether Wave Propaganda on Agassi, Feyerabend, and Lakatos.

Philosopher Irving Thalberg, Jr. with his Hollywood exec father (Irving, Sr.) and his mother, actress Norma Shearer:

Irving Thalberg, Sr., Jr., and Norma Shearer

Neuroskeptic applies Popperian theory to see if science is broken.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter on teleology in nature and culture. 

Andrew Manns on Girolamo Cardano: 'Much like other creatives in history, such as Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, and Carl Jung, Cardano’s visions were coincidental with his mental exhaustion and anxiety.'

Danny Heitman on Montaigne, who '...Pioneered the Personal Essay and Made Candor Literary'.

A Five Books entry in which John Gray recommends books on utopia and apocalypse. 

The Taylor & Francis Philosophy Hall of Fame.

Melvyn Bragg interviews Peter Adamson, Carole Hillenbrand, and Robert Gleave about Al-Ghazali; in February, Bragg interviewed Richard Whatmore, Donald Winch, and Helen Paul about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here's a list of Bragg's recent BBC interviews.

Audio from Eugene Wigner's 1964 interview on the Manhattan Project. 

From the CBC Archives: A televised interview of Northrop Frye (1973).

Some Desert Island Discs (BBC) episodes: Ian Fleming ('All history is sex and violence'), Tennessee Williams, Roald Dahl, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Tariq Ali, Randy Newman, Zadie Smith, and Barbara Pym.

Frye, YouTube intelligence, & a new Schrödinger bio

Northrop Frye in 1970: 'All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.' Of course, the RCMP kept a file on Frye, as they did on Sartre and Tommy Douglas.

From David Winters' review of Marek Bieńczyk's Transparency: 'Nowadays, as with shop windows, seeing through things is what stops us from seeing beyond them.'

Here's a neat new YouTube channel: the Intelligent Channel, which features Richard Belzer's interviews and Paul Holdengräber's new show (in which he interviews Colum McCann, Elizabeth Gilbert, etc.).

'There's nobody who writes better about failure than Thomas Bernhard':


Piece of Monologue quoting Claire Messud on Bernhard: 'Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death. It is a book about anger. A book without paragraphs, which in its very form enacts anger. A book prone to wildly long sentences, preposterously violent judgments and enraging constructions.'

From Johns Hopkins University Press, Steven Gimbel has a new book called Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion: 'You cannot understand Einstein's science, Gimbel declares, without knowing the history, religion, and philosophy that influenced it.'

A review of John Gribbin's new biography of Erwin Schrödinger: 'Gribbin’s coup is to trace the origins of what is now called the Many-Worlds Interpretation to a lecture delivered by Schrödinger in Dublin in 1952, some five years before a paper by Hugh Everett more usually credited with the idea.'

Jennifer Egan's 'Book Bag' at Daily Beast.

I made my first Amazon list, in which I listed great non-fiction works that are available on Kindle for less than $20 and that were published between 1970 and 1985 (with one Bill Bryson exception). I focused on books that are accessible to non-specialists and that were produced by good publishers (as opposed to the e-book publishers who sell typo-ridden, public domain works).

The Complete Review rates Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the novel on which the amazing Hitchcock movie was based.


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Newly discovered letter shows what a great guy Hemingway was. He offered to help fund the publication of Morley Callaghan's novel, even though Callaghan beat him in a boxing match: “I’d be glad to go 50-50 with you on the cost of publishing it [said Hemingway] because I think once he gets published it will clear things up and he can go on and not worry about this stuff.”

The letters of Montreal poet A. M. Klein have been published. 'Literature was only one of Klein’s pursuits. By profession he was a lawyer, and from 1938 to 1955 he served as editor of the Canadian Jewish Chronicle. He was a speechwriter and publicity consultant for whiskey magnate Samuel Bronfman, and for three years he was a lecturer in poetry at McGill University.'

'July 14, 2012 will mark the centenary of Northrop Frye’s birth, and the Frye Festival is commemorating the 100th anniversary with a series of special events throughout the year.' Frye was still teaching in the English Department when I was an undergrad at Victoria College (in the University of Toronto). Since I was young and stupid, I didn't take any of his courses, but I frequently saw him on campus and was fascinated by his ideas. Frye was an ordained United Church minister who preached at churches in Saskatchewan (as was the president of Victoria University, A. B. B. Moore, a good friend of Frye's). Here's the trailer for a series called 'Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature':



Jay Macpherson, another literary personage at Victoria College, died last month. Macpherson, a poet, taught in the English Department and was strongly influenced by Frye. Before that, she was an associate of Robert Graves'.

Here's Graves shaving and reading his poem 'Man in the Mirror':

Northrop Frye on the teaching machine

Northrop Frye in 1970:

All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.

McLuhan in the Walrus

The latest issue of the Walrus has an article on Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer. I knew that McLuhan converted to Roman Catholicism, but I hadn't realized how strong was his antipathy towards Protestantism. Heer says that McLuhan blamed pretty much all that's wrong in modern western culture on Protestant attitudes. For McLuhan, the Reformation was a long, slippery slide into a real slough of despond. According to Heer, McLuhan reached this conclusion during his sojourn in a vast, blighted waste that the Protestants had left in their path (Winnipeg). I wonder if his dislike of Protestantism is one of the sources of the friction between McLuhan and some of his United Church colleagues in the English Department at the University of Toronto (such as Northrop Frye and N. J. Endicott).

Heer refers to some McLuhan clips on YouTube. However, the one from which Heer quotes most extensively is a longer piece on Google Video in which McLuhan goes head to head with Norman Mailer. The discussion was recorded by the CBC's The Summer Way in 1968. Heer includes this neat quotation of McLuhan from that broadcast:

Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

 Here's the whole discussion:


While poking around on the Walrus' site, I found this older piece on McLuhan by Lewis Lapham. Lapham quotes McLuhan as follows:

Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something that I’m resolutely against…it seems to me that the best way of opposing it is to understand it and then you know where to turn off the button.

Finally, here's a reminiscence of McLuhan by an acquaintance of his.