January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.

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'.

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).

Whither the philosophical novel ...

Witold Gombrowicz

Martin Walser interviewed by Alexander Görlach on 'the old wound of lacking justification': 'The authors Franz Kafka and Karl Barth have quite a bit to say on that question.'

On Aussie radio, Alan Saunders interviews Henry Sussman about Kafka and philosophy.

Zdenka Pregelj on 'Kant's Aesthetics in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground'

 A Guardian list of philosophical novels. From 2010, Rebecca Goldstein's top five 'novels of ideas'.

Jennie Erdal's April 7 article on whether it's still possible to write a philosophical novel; a central European response. And James Ryerson's Jan., 2011 NY Times article on this topic (with much about David Foster Wallace).

Added May 1:  Daniel Kehlmann has a new play about Gödel called 'Ghosts in Princeton': 'The play is about the Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), who by age 24 revolutionized the logic of mathematics. ... Kehlmann follows the giant footsteps of Gödel and Adele on their journey from Vienna to Princeton. Breakthrough thinking, brilliant logic and a self-destructive rationalism characterized Gödel’s remarkable history.' (via Literary Saloon)

Milan Kundera in a 1989 interview (first published in Review of Contemporary Fiction): 'I’m not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I don’t like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself.'


Added May 1: From David Winters' review of Eli Friedlander's new book on Walter Benjamin as a philosopher: 'Friedlander advanced a similar argument in previous books on Rousseau and Wittgenstein, contending that these authors' "literary" inclinations—for instance, Rousseau's accounts of his personal reflections and religious reveries—are inseparable from their philosophical systems.' Winters adds, 'Friedlander claims that Arcades is a work of "philosophical history" whose style and substance are systematically interwoven. ... By reframing "the truth that philosophy has traditionally aimed at" as a matter of "the presentation of historical material," the project redefines philosophical practice as an activity grounded in concreteness.'

Ben Hutchinson reviews George Steiner's The Poetry of Thought: 'If the relationship between philosophy and poetry underlies much of Steiner’s work, The Poetry of Thought tackles the Arnoldian “and” head-on. From Parmenides and Heraclitus to Sartre and Heidegger, Steiner traces a typically ambitious arc through the history of Western thought, arguing that what defines philosophy is its manner as much as its matter.' Hutchinson adds, 'Steiner sees in Wittgenstein’s paratactic, aphoristic style a conscious attempt at “counter-rhetoric”.'

'[William] Gass is also a philosopher. He did his graduate work at Cornell after serving in the Navy for three years during World War II. ... The effects of his admiration [for Wittgenstein] are most evident in the nuts and bolts of his own prose style. He has made sure to weed out the cant and jargon from his sentences. But even more revealing is his handling of the evidence. It’s not just that every abstraction is matched to a concrete example; whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, Gass will connect an initial example to a second one, and from the second will derive a third.'

From an IEET blog, 'The Hierarchy of Exclusion in “Ender’s Game” — a starting point for thinking about personhood'

Philosophy podcasts & negative book reviews

Otto Neurath

Galen Strawson gives Nicholas Humphrey's new book a negative review, and Humphrey retaliates with some nasty remarks in the comments section

Colin McGinn takes a relatively mild tone (compared to some of his other reviews) in this reflection on V. S. Ramachandran's latest book.

Scott Atran comes down hard on Sam Harris's book, and Gary Wills is not impressed by that book about 'whooshing' by Dreyfus and Kelly. Here's a brief reply by Kelly.

A BBC podcast in which Melvyn Bragg talks to Simon Blackburn, Helen Beebee, and Galen Strawson on free will, and here's Bragg talking to Grayling, Millican, and Keefe about logic

From Philosophy TV, here are Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson discussing 'philosophy and literature'. Here's an article by Boylan on the use of fiction for the exploration of philosophical questions.

From North Dakota, there's an impressive archive of interviews for the radio show, 'Why?'. For example, there are hour-long interviews with Arthur Danto, Charles Taylor, Rebecca Goldstein, Martha Nussbaum, etc.

Two podcasts on the Philosopher's Zone: one on the philosophy of music (with A. J. Hamilton), the other on Kurt Gödel (with Mark Colyvan)

And two from philosophy bites: one on Montaigne (with Sarah Bakewell) and one on F. P. Ramsey (with Hugh Mellor -- there's a link there to Mellor's BBC documentary on Ramsey from the late 1970's in which Mellor interviews A. J. Ayer, I. A. Richards, R. B. Braithwaite, etc.). Here's Anthony Appiah's discussion of Bakewell's book on Montaigne. And there's now another book on Montaigne, this time by Saul Frampton.

Here are several audio files from a Philosophy of Literature meeting at Royal Holloway University (ht OLP)

Here's the text of an interview with Julia Kristeva

A video of Baroness Mary Warnock in a panel discussion of roles for philosophy in politics. Warnock recently made the Guardian's list of the top 100 women in writing and academia, as did another philosopher, Onora O'Neill.

A Guardian piece on Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which influenced Sebald

Here's the 2nd hour of CBC's 'Sunday Edition', in which Michael Enright interviews Jason Brennan, a philosophy prof at Brown University, about not voting

At 24:30 of that CBC podcast, Enright begins his interview with 'Debo' Mitford. It isn't about philosophy but I highly recommend it. I LOL'd at 36:10 and 37:25. Here's a description of the whole program.

Philosophy on the net from approx. the last 3 or 6 months

Carl Stumpf

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

The passing of two eminent philosophers of religion

Antony Flew (1923-2010)

Jordan Howard Sobel (1929-2010)

Two leading figures in the philosophy of religion recently died: Jordan Howard Sobel and Antony Flew.

Here are some reminiscences about Flew by colleagues and students, and here are some more by Michael Ruse.

I first heard of Professor Sobel in connection with the ontological argument. He was one of the first people to write about Kurt Godel's version of that proof.

A memorial service for Professor Sobel will be held in Toronto on April 25.

Gödel, Platonov, Brautigan, Goldstein and more

Kurt Gödel, whom P. D. Smith described as 'an uneasy amalgam of Einstein and Kafka'

Alan Saunders interviews Mark Colyvan on Aussie radio about Gödel. There's also this BBC4 radio interview on Gödel, but I can't get it to play

Can you imagine walking with Gödel and Einstein while they talked about Kant? Ah, but, you see, it is doubtful in our enlightened day that Kant was such a great philosopher after all

Peter Smith's site is the go-to resource for those who want an introduction to Gödel's theorems

Rebecca Goldstein recommends five novels of ideas -- Synchronicity! It so happens that I had just begun reading two of her picks, Herzog and Middlemarch, when I saw this. Herzog is among the many US bestsellers in this impressive database

Here are two reviews of Goldstein's book against God. She also had a book about Gödel, and here she is in dialogue with David Eagleman

And here are two reviews of Jerry Fodor's (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's) book against some elements of evolutionary theory, presaged by Fodor's 2007 article in the LRB. According to the publisher's page, Noam Chomsky likes this book (which isn't to say that he agrees with its arguments). More here

Here's an Antipodean radio interview of Tzvetan Todorov about his defence of the Enlightenment, and here's John Gray dissecting the saccharine distortions in Todorov's book

Was Andrei Platonov Russia's greatest modern prose stylist? His book Soul was among Elif Batuman's four alternative modern Russian classics

Thomas Bernhard's publisher correspondence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Bernhard, Sebald and M. Amis

Last year, I linked to a spate of posts about Richard Brautigan and now there's been another spate, with pieces by Michelle Quinn, Robert Pincus and Billy Colllins

Fearing anarchy, Hobbes embraced tyranny

Fed up with tyranny, 19th-Century anarchists resorted to terrorism. Here are two reviews of Alex Butterworth's new book on them

Andrew Pessin's book, The God Question, looks like a good introductory text

Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity looks good, too

Seamus Heaney interviewed

Travel stories by poets and novelists

Joseph Epstein on Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience (ht Books, Inq.)

Literary translators in Germany face funding cuts

"To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, [John] Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings."

Update (March 15, 2010): WRW on Daniel Medin's TLS review of Robert Walser's The Tanners

Gleanings

Hedy Lamarr (image source)

Steven Nadler reviews a book on Spinoza and Maimonides.

'Anyone who enjoys the company of a provocative intelligence will want to pick up Night Music, a challenging collection of scattered Adorno essays. And pick a fight with it.'

Boyd Tonkin reviews Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind.

Cyril Connolly's '100 Key Books of the Modern Movement'

From the Guardian in 2002: '"We love only once," Connolly wrote, "and on how that first great love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives." "Nonsense," Waugh mocked in the margin.'

Since kickstarting his career with his acclaimed travel bestseller, In Xanadu, at the age of 22, [William] Dalrymple has kept to writing about India and the Middle East consistently for 25 years. "Religion is a constant," he happily admits. "It seems to be something I can't quite escape."'

"On a steep slope overlooking Brno stands a modernist architectural masterpiece: the Tugendhat House. It is this remarkable building that provided Simon Mawer with inspiration for his most recent novel, The Glass Room."

More about Brno (which was the birthplace not only of Kundera but also of Kurt Godel, Adolf Loos, Erich Korngold, Pavel Tichy and Lorenz Eitner and in the environs of which were born Gregor Mendel, Ernst Weiss and Maurice Strakosch, AND which was the childhood home of Robert Musil) -- it has given Milan Kundera honorary citizenship.

David Sexton reviews The Letters of T. S. Eliot, and Josephine Hart reviews his tragic first marriage.

Amos Oz interviewed: “It's always a living miracle when I meet a reader. A reader is a co-producer of a book. I write the musical score, he plays it."

Footage of a John Nash interview.

Largehearted Boy and Fimoculous track the 'books of the year' lists.

More about the influence of Conan Doyle's medical background on his fiction ('more' in addition to this previously linked item).

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.

Cafes Schottentor and Victoria am Schottentor

This photo is of Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Ring 12, which is by the Schottentor subway station, across the street from the main University of Vienna building (and adjacent to the Palais Ephrussi). There's little of interest in this building (which includes a McDonald's), but I tentatively conjecture that it's where Cafe Schottentor was once located. [NOT! see 2nd update below]

The Schottentor Cafe is one of the cafes preferred by Godel and other members of the Vienna Circle. It is mentioned by Elias Canetti in The Play of the Eyes. He says, "It was amazing how often I ran into Friedl [Benedikt] .... I'd take my seat in the empty No. 38 streetcar, look up, and there she'd be .... She always rode as far as Schottentor .... I went to the Schottentor Cafe. When I entered, she was already there, sitting at a table with friends." (p. 240)

Additionally, in her paper in Endeavour, Maria Rentetzi says that in the 1920's Cafe Schottentor was "a meeting point of Vienna's scientific, political and artistic circles, including women such as the journalist Hilde Spiel." (p. 44, n. 22) Spiel, it turns out, met Canetti at Cafe Schottentor.

It was also a favourite haunt of the poet Theodor Kramer, who is quoted as saying in 1945 that the cafe was opposite the University. Assuming he meant by 'the University' the main university building, the above location is the most likely site of the Schottentor Cafe.

I had initially thought that 'Cafe Schottentor' was an abbreviation of 'Cafe Victoria am Schottentor', the full name of a cafe which used to be at Schottengasse 10 (in the same building as the one pictured below). However, that cafe's name seems instead to have been shortened to 'Cafe Victoria' (which Godel visited with visiting family members, according to John Dawson, Jr.).

Update (Sept. 11): I've learned from Diane Silverthorn that there was another Cafe Victoria in Vienna. It was in the Hotel Victoria on Favoritenstrasse. So, I'm not sure if Professor Dawson's reference is to that cafe or to the Victoria am Schottentor.

Update (Sept. 15): Cafe Schottentor might have been a short block further from the university than I believed. This is according to Professor Karl Sigmund (from the Math Dept. at the University of Vienna), to whom I was referred by Professor John Dawson. Professor Sigmund informs me that there was until recently a Pizza Hut in the Schottentor's old location, but that a new cafe has opened there (at Schottengasse 2). It's called the Café im Schottenstift . The last cafe in that location before the Pizza Hut was Cafe Haag (Hague), which closed in 1997.

Update (Feb. 24, 2009): It looks like my original conjecture wasn't so far off. Here's a pdf copy of a 1936 weekly paper, Die Neue Welt (Feb. 7, 1936), which lists a number of cafes on p. 6 (right column). Cafe Schottentor is listed there as being located at Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 10, which would put it just to the right of the above pictured McDonald's (the address for which is Dr. Karl-Lueger-Ring 12). This location is now the site of a cafe called Coffee Day. The building in which it's located looks like a relatively new annex joined to the older structure that houses the McDonald's. I wonder if the part of the structure that housed Cafe Schottentor was wrecked during the war, with the result that the cafe re-located to Schottengasse 2.

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.