Links to philosophy book reviews

Tim Whitmarsh reviews Rowan Williams' On Augustine and Robin Lane Fox's Augustine: Conversions to Confessions.

Five recent reviews with philosophical content from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

Matthew V. Novenson reviews Christine Hayes' What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (2015).

Gerald A. Press reviews The Platonic Art of Philosophy (ed. Boys-Stones, El Murr & Gill, 2013).

Scott Carson reviews Anna Marmodoro's Aristotle on Perceiving Objects (2014).

Anders Klostergaard Petersen reviews G. E. R. Lloyd's Analogical Investigations. Historical and Cross-cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning (2015).

From Antonio Donato's review of Philosophy and the Ancient Novel (ed. Pinheiro & Montiglio, 2015):

The papers may be taken to reach the following conclusions: 1. Ancient novels provide convincing ways of exploring the challenge of conducting a philosophical life .... 2. Ancient novels offer necessary (Smith) or effective (Fletcher) ways to identify tensions within philosophical theories that abstract analyses may overlook. 3. Ancient novels show that in the Greco-Roman world assessments of philosophical theories often extended beyond the limited confines of philosophical works .... 4. The literary genre of the ancient novel is an excellent vehicle to convey philosophical ideas in more accessible or entertaining ways ....

Anthony Gottlieb reviews James A. Harris' Hume: An Intellectual Biography.


Northwestern University Press has published Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein (2015) by Henry Pickford. Here is the Table of Contents.

The April, 2016 issue of Philosophy in Review (some items there are not behind a pay-wall).

Michael Lazarus reviews Mehmet Tabak's Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy, Vol. 1.

Nicholas Lezard reviews Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café, which is also reviewed by Ron Slate and by John Gray and by Andrew Hussey.

Anthony Kenny on Bryan Magee's Ultimate Questions.

Adam Carter reviews Marcus Morgan's Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge (2016).

Two items from Literary Hub:

Ed Simon's 'What Was Shakespeare’s Central Philosophy?'

Steve Toutonghi's 'How Science Fiction Redefines Who We Are, and What We’re Becoming'.

Fact-opinion 10, Opinions and matters of opinion

Let's begin with a quotation of Raymond S. Nickerson, a psychologist who uses 'opinion' as another term for taste:

We might say that a belief is something that, at least in principle, can be shown to be either true or false. It does not make sense to say that an opinion is true or false, because people differ greatly in their preferences and tastes. ... Here, an effort will be made to use beliefs to represent our ideas about what is objectively true, and opinions to represent such subjective matters as preferences and tastes. (Nickerson, Reflections on Reasoning [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1986], p. 21)

Granted, Nickerson's claims have an air of stipulation. Still, why limit opinions to taste? Previous posts show that 'opinion' hasn't historically been defined in terms of taste. Indeed, before the 20th century, authors generally kept tastes out of the extension of 'opinion'. For example, here's a bit from Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757):

Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. In all matters of opinion and science, the case it opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance. An explanation of the terms commonly ends the controversy; and the disputants are surprised to find, that they had been quarreling, while at bottom they agreed in their judgment. (italics added)

In the first part of this passage, Hume is talking about taste (about which 'critics' dispute). He then turns to 'opinion and science', which are not matters of taste. His use of 'matters of opinion' as being different from matters of taste seems sensible in view of the meaning of 'opinion'. In his time, 'opinion' had come to mean something like a belief for which the justification was less than certain. The opinion would concern some matter of fact (on our more modern use of 'matter of fact'); e.g., it might concern whether all ideas originate in the senses. So, opinions were true or false, even if there was no consensus about their truth value.

Hume's use of 'matters of opinion' fits with the definitions of 'opinion' in today's general dictionaries (addressed in an earlier post). For example, the most recent edition of Webster's has it that an opinion is 'a belief, judgment, or way of thinking about something'. Hume's use is also in synch with the definition of 'opinion' in the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology, in which an opinion is said to be 'an attitude, belief, or judgment' ^{(2007, p. 648)}.

Hume wasn't alone in keeping tastes out of the domain of matters of opinion. Consider these sentences by Jeremy Bentham:

There is no incident imaginable, be it ever so trivial, and so remote from mischief, from which this principle [of sympathy and antipathy] may not extract a ground of punishment. Any difference in taste: any difference in opinion: upon one subject as well as upon another. No disagreement so trifling which perseverance and altercation will not render serious. (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. 2, sec. 16 [1789])

Bentham is making a general claim about all disagreements. To cover such a wide range, he conjoins differences in taste with differences in opinion, implying that the former are not already included among the latter.

In recent fact-opinion distinctions, it has been customary to categorize expressions of taste as matters of opinion or even to equate opinions with tastes (as Nickerson does). I maintain that before the 20th century, matters of opinion were not equated with, or even taken to include, matters of taste. Matters of opinion concerned beliefs that were true or false and that were subject to logical principles. By contrast, rightly or wrongly, many authors from the 18th century to our own time have subscribed to the adage de gustibus non est disputandum ('there is no disputing about tastes') and have accordingly regarded matters of taste as lying outside the domain of logic and truth claims.

It's difficult to support my contention by finding old (pre-20th-century) examples of authors explicitly distinguishing between matters of opinion and matters of taste. So, I'll have to rest content with the less direct support that I've taken from the above quotations of Hume and Bentham, supplemented by two quotations from less famous sources. First, in his study of the New York Public Library's history, Tom Glynn says that near the end of the 19th century, the library's administrators took the view that 'there is a great distinction between matters of opinion and matters of taste' and that the library's holdings should include materials that represented both sides in debates over conflicting opinions ^{(Glynn, Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754-1911 [New York: Fordham University Press, 2015], p. ???)}. Next, there is a line in a memorial to a Unitarian preacher, James Freeman, where the author says that Freeman 'carried [his] freedom of mind into matters of taste as well as matters of opinion' ^{(James Freeman Clarke, Annals of the American Unitarian Pulpit [1865], p. 169)}. The author is compelled to mention matters of taste because they are not included among matters of opinion.

At some point in the 20th century, authors began to include tastes among matters of opinion and even, in some cases, to use 'matters of taste' interchangeably with 'matters of opinion'. For example, in a 1958 article, David Peace writes that '"Matters of taste" are matters of opinion' ^{(Peace, 'Planning and the Promotion of Good Taste' The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 78 [1958]: pp. 339-40)}.

Similar views are evident in empirical research about when children are able to distinguish between statements of fact and of opinion. In one study, the authors say, '3-year-olds acknowledge and understand disagreements between individuals about matters of taste and opinion more readily than disagreements about matters of fact' ^{(Larisa Heiphetz et al. 'What do Different Beliefs Tell us? An Examination of Factual, Opinion-Based, and Religious Beliefs' Cognitive Development 30. April - June 2014 [2014]: 15–29)}. Here, statements of taste and opinion are lumped together as being mere subjective expressions that must be distinguished from statements concerning objective matters of fact (claims about what's true independently of us). In the 'Appendix' to Heiphetz et al., all of the 'statements of opinion-based belief' that were used in their research are expressions of taste (e.g., 'Oranges are the tastiest fruit', 'Monopoly is the most fun game'). Something similar happens in this report about an article by G. P. Goodwin and J. M. Darley ^{('The psychology of meta-ethics: Exploring objectivism' Cognition 106 [March 2008], pp. 1339-1366)}. (One sometimes gets an impression of similar uses of 'matters of opinion' in the literature on faultless disagreement, though contributors to that literature are generally more careful about the phrase.)

Even if we set aside its deviance from the pre-20th-century use of 'matters of opinion', this recent equation of matters of opinion with matters of taste is puzzling. After all, one today hears occasionally about opinions as including primitive prejudices that stand in the way of science. That seems to account for the popularity of this Hippocratic line: 'There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.' (For more about this quotation, see the end of this post.) But if opinions were mere tastes, then how could they obstruct science? After all, claims about what is the most fun or the tastiest don't pose any apparent threat to scientific data or theories. Clearly, if opinions are to include anti-scientific prejudices, they can't be mere expressions of personal taste; they must involve (wrong-headed) truth claims about something other than tastes.

Somehow, the phrase 'matters of opinion' slipped its moorings and drifted away from the standard meaning of 'opinion'. This slippage has prompted some authors to consider the possibility that many opinions (even those that do not count as knowledge) do not concern matters of opinion ^{(Reuben Stern and Sam Wilkinson, '“That’s Just Like, Uh, Your Opinion, Man”: Jesus, the Dude, and Ordinary Language Philosophy', in The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom, ed. Peter S. Fosl [Wiley, 2012], p. 244)}.

As an antidote to this frankly screwed-up change in the use of 'matters of opinion', I recommend Michael Scriven's 1971 contribution to the Diablo Valley Education Project in Orinda, California. Scriven's paper is called 'Values and the Valuing Process' (pdf). Scriven there writes, 'Matters of opinion are issues where the possibility of the opinion being right or wrong exists; matters of taste are not' (p. 3).

There's also a 2009 psychology paper in which the authors try to make sense of some recent data by distinguishing between matters of opinion and questions of taste. They say, 'we define matters of taste as essentially arbitrary preferences that therefore have no intrinsic power or prestige associated with them, whereas opinions (like beliefs) refer to views that can at least in principle be evaluated at some level for their correctness' ^{(Russell Spears, Naomi Ellemers, and Bertjan Doosje, 'Strength in Numbers or Less Is More? A Matter of Opinion and a Question of Taste' Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 [2009]: pp. 1099-1111)}.

Poetic Berkeley, prosaic Hume

Wolfgang Breidert has a paper about some of the many poems that refer to Bishop Berkeley ('Berkeley Poetized' in Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy, 2007) . Berkeley's referred to in poems by Alexander Pope, C. H. Sisson, Kenneth Rexroth, etc.

There's this bit from one of Lord Byron's poems: 

When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
       And proved it—'twas no matter what he sald:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
       Too subtle for the airiest human head  (from Don Juan, Canto 11)

And Berkeley pops up in two poems by W. B. Yeats: 'The Seven Sages' and 'Blood and the Moon'.

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme  (from 'Blood & the Moon', 1928)

All of these poems are noted by Breidert. 

Breidert doesn't discuss poetic invocations of David Hume, but my own googling has turned up few lyrical mentions of the great skeptic. Poor Hume is 'ungrateful Hume' in a poem about whist (Whist: a poem in twelve cantos by Alexander Thomson, 1791); and, in a poem written upon his demise, Hume is condemned as 'the modern Midas' ('On the Death of David Hume' by William Julius Mickle, 1776) chiefly because he had bad-mouthed Spenser's poetry. Thomas Blacklock sang Hume's praises but that doesn't count -- Blacklock was impoverished and received financial support from Hume.

Granted, Paul Muldoon's Madoc: a Mystery has sections headed 'Berkeley' and 'Hume' (and 'Kant', and 'Frege', and 'Meinong', and 'Husserl', and 'Putnam', etc.etc.), but those headings seem to have little to do with the poetry.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired by Hume but seems not to have let this show in his poetry. Was Hume too toxic even in Shelley's day? If so, couldn't Shelley have fit Hume into a private poem (with an eye to posthumous publication)?

If I'm not mistaken, Berkeley has had more attention from the poets than most other early modern philosophers. Is the attraction due to his philosophical views? If so, one would expect Hume to have featured in more poems owing to the similarity between his and Berkeley's ideas. Or does Berkeley get the poetic limelight because he drew Dr. Johnson's ire?

Update (June 22, 2014): Byron's Don Juan is loaded with philosophers. Locke's referred to in the 15th and the 17th cantos. Other philosophers in the poem are Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Machiavelli, both Bacons (Francis and Roger), and 'Professor Kant'. No Hume, though. I guess in Byron's time, Hume was primarily remembered (if at all) as a historian rather than as a philosopher (even though it was Hume's philosophy that influenced Shelley). 

Here's a nifty site where you can enter searches for "poems about...." For example, poems about Kant, about Hegel, and about Hume. Only 6 of the 10 search results for Hume are about David Hume. Four of the remaining poems are of little interest and two are by George Crabbe. Hume gets no love from the poets. I don't see Thomson's, Mickle's, or Blacklock's lyrics among the search results.

Update (June 23, 2014): John Koethke mentions Hume in a poem called 'The Constant Voice' (2002), which has a line about Hume on sympathy. Koethke's a philosophy professor. (In 'Like Gods' Koethke refers to David Lewis and Frank Jackson. Koethke's 'Book X' is about Plato and quotes a line of J. L. Austin's.)

Quotations about Hume by 2 economists, an epidemiologist, Borges & Hamann

Amartya Sen:

Hume's influence on the nature and reach of modern thinking has been monumental. From epistemology to practical reason, from aesthetics to religion, from political economy to philosophy, from social and cultural studies to history and historiography, the intellectual world was transformed by the enlightening power of his mind. ('The Boundaries of Justice' New Republic [December 14, 2011])

Mervyn Susser:

Like Plato and George Berkeley who epitomize idealist philosophy, Hume constructed a view of the world that gives primacy to the sentience and thought of the individual: truth can be said to exist only in the subjective perceptions of an observer. For Hume, the apparent sequence of events in the external world is in fact the sequence of perceptions in the mind. ('Rational Science Versus a System of Logic' in Causal Inference, ed. K. J. Rothman [Epidemiology Resources, 1988], p. 190)

Jorge Luis Borges:

It is a bit like what Hume says of Berkeley: “His arguments admit of no refutation and produce no conviction.” Solipsism admits of no refutation and produces no conviction. (“Merely a Man of Letters” Jorge Luis Borges: an interview, Philosophy and Literature 1 (1977): 337-41)

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.:

From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume’s marvelous essays of 1752, Of Money and Of Interest, conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected. [p. 246] .... The passages on dynamics that I cited from Hume in Section 1 could be slipped into Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) or Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933 ) without inducing any sense of anachronism. [p. 253] (Lucas' Nobel Prize Lecture, 'Monetary Neutrality', Dec. 7, 1995)

Johann Georg Hamann:

This much is certain that without Berkeley there would have been no Hume, just as without Hume no Kant. Yet finally everything comes down to tradition just as all abstraction comes down to sensuous impressions. (from a letter to Herder, 1782)

 

Links without any intended unifying theme

Image source

Richard Nixon in an undergrad paper at Whittier College in 1933:

In making a short study of English philosophers during the past year I became an intense admirer of David Hume.

From an exam answer at Boston University by Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Jan. 1952) (via a comment by 'dmf' at NewApps):

As for me, I have found a solution of this problem in the thought of men like Karl Gross, Brightman and Hocking.

Who's Karl Gross? I have heard of Hocking. My late uncle on my mother's side (a Whitehead fan) often spoke of Hocking with reverence. There's a recent Harper's piece by John Kaag on Hocking's excellent library.

King's student paper on Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr's 1965 telegram to King.

Rheinhold Niebuhr.

The 1984 BBC documentary series Sea of Faith is on YouTube, with installments on Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein (among others). The house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister appears at 6.35 of this episode. The host, Don Cupitt, gives a partial tour of the house and mentions its 'geometrical tranquility', which reminded me of The Cone in Thomas Bernhard's novel Correction (a very difficult book).

From Cupitt's 2002 Guardian piece on Iris Murdoch:

In the metaphysical tradition it had always been assumed, ever since Parmenides and Plato, that the really real must be one, and perhaps also must be unchangeably perfect. But from Schelling and Schopenhauer onwards, a new tradition develops which, on the contrary, depicts ultimate reality as being at odds with itself, divided and even malignant.

Rowan Williams' lecture 'Faith and Human Flourishing: religious belief and ideals of maturity'.

The latest issue of Humanities (the journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities) has some good literary pieces, inc. Danny Heitman's 'The Quiet Greatness of Eudora Welty', Mark Athitakis' 'The Otherworldly Malamud', and Kathleen B. Jones' 'The Trial of Hannah Arendt'.

Clive James' piece on Robert Frost (from a recent issue of Prospect).

The Japan Times has a series on essential reading for Japanophiles.

Quotes on the self

Bishop Berkeley:

Philonous--.... I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 1713) 

William James:

This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation. (The Principles of Psychology, Ch. 10, p. 296, 1890)

David Hume:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. (Book I, Part 4, Section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739)

Thomas Szasz:

People often say that this or that person has not yet found him or herself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates. (The Second Sin, p. 49, 1973)

Sartre:

Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. ('Existentialism is a Humanism', 1946)

  Schopenhauer:

According to the latter view, he need only reflectively consider how he would most like to be, and he would be it; that is its freedom of the will. Thus it really consists in a person being his own work.... I, to the contrary, say: .... He cannot resolve to be such or such a person, nor can he become another, but he is once and for all, and after that recognizes what he is. (The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Fourth Book, sect. 55, 1819, Aquila-Carus translation)

 Simon Gray:

[I]in order to reinvent, you have to invent, and who therefore is this self-inventing and self-reinventing self, rather like that definition of God as thought thinking on itself, yes, that’s it, I suppose, people who say they have reinvented themselves are thinking of themselves as god-like, and people who describe other people as reinventing themselves are attributing god-like powers to the self, which is a poor, miserable, partly suffocated thing, on the whole. (The Smoking Diaries, p. 163)

This song was written by Leonard Bernstein for a production of Peter Pan, but Simone added some of her own lyrics. 

Nicolai Hartmann, Hume, and moksha

Nicolai Hartmann (who now has an entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia)

Russell Stannard: 'The job of science is to describe the world we find ourselves in -- what it consists of, and how it operates. But it appears to fall short of explaining why we are presented with this kind of world rather than some other -- or why there should be a world at all.' Shades of Hume ('The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer, as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it.')

Nicholas Basbanes interviewed by Pradeep Sebastian: 'A new, updated edition of Nicholas Basbanes' A Gentle Madness — that modern classic on bibliomania and book collecting — is just out from Fine Books Press.'

Julian Barnes on his life-long bibliomania and his belief that bookshops will survive.

Geist ran one of my favourite articles from last year. It's about a rare-book dealer in Vancouver named Don Stewart.

'Many of [Patrick] White’s preoccupations, for example, his concern with “nothingness” and the destruction of the Self, are likely to find acceptance with an Indian audience familiar with the concept of moksha. The belief he projects, that there is no difference between the human and the divine essence, is common to all faiths.'

A recording of Flannery O’Connor reading from ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ in 1959.

Here are a couple of pieces on the new rock autobiography by Mike Scott (of Waterboys fame). What follows is high ART!

Philosophy links & Beckett's film

Georg Reimers

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.

More philosophy bits

Simone de Beauvoir

Katie Roiphe on the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

Melvyn Bragg talks to Jonathan Rée, John Haldane & Gwen Griffith-Dickson about William James' Varieties of Religious Experience
A review of a new book on Cardinal Newman

Two finds: the Goethe Institute has a set of introductions to German philosophers (from Leibniz to Tugendhat), and a list of the articles in the 'How to Believe' series at the Guardian

A review of two philosophy books about J. M. Coetzee's work

A review of Paisley Livingston's new book, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy
An article on Hannah Arendt in the Tehran Review

A look at Hans Sluga's 2008 study of Arendt & Carl Schmitt

Historian Isaac Kramnick on Lockean liberalism & the American Revolution

Historian Jeffrey Collins on Perez Zagorin's new book about Hobbes

Historian Samuel Moyn on some recent books about the Enlightenment: "[Jonathan] Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating" -- Moyn prefers Dan Edelstein's Terror of Natural Right

Brendan Boyle on Raymond Geuss' Politics and the Imagination. Here's a podcast of Geuss discussing utopian thinking

A. C. Grayling on Emerson

An April, 2010 article on Adam Smith by Amartya Sen (and here's a pdf of Sen's April, 2009 talk on Smith at the University of Glasgow)

Hume, Smith and Burke on 'dirty hands' ("the view that some forms of power, used properly, lead to guilt and bad actions")

Leibniz and the science of happiness. Here's an Aussie podcast in which Alan Saunders interviews Paul Redding & Simon Duffy about Leibniz

More recently, Saunders interviewed Ruth Abbey about Nietzsche

Martha Nussbaum on gay marriage & John Stuart Mill

A nice article on long-time religious skeptic Paul Kurtz

Here's a Philosophy Talk podcast in which Rebecca Goldstein discusses philosophy in fiction

All the Wittgenstein links you could ever want
H/t for some of these links to Bookforum's 'Omnivore' blog

Quite the brouhaha in the National Interest

John Gray and A. C. Grayling go toe-to-toe at the National Interest's site. Gray wrote the initial, longer attack piece. Both authors fight dirty. That is, ad hominems all over the place! Indeed, Grayling's rebuttal consists of little else -- I hope he posts a longer rebuttal than the quick one he's offered.

I'm more sympathetic to Gray's position. Grayling, Hitchens and the others take a too simplistic view of religion's historical influence. One example is their neglect of abolitionism's roots, especially in the UK. Even those British philosophers, like Hume, who opposed slavery, tended still to be racist. Their opponents were British writers who appealed to the Biblical notion that we're all equal in the eyes of God.

Gray notes the positive influence of some English philosophers (such as Locke) in promoting toleration and respect for freedom of expression, but he doesn't mention Milton. Is that a deliberate omission? Regardless, while Milton the Puritan likely wouldn't measure up to our current ideals of toleration, he played an important role in their development.

Gray points to the malign influence of 20th-Century atheistic regimes, noting that so far, atheists in power have been illiberal. His approach reminds me of that of Marilynn Robinson. Both authors round up the usual benighted, wannabe rationalists (usually Marxists), document their crimes, and then add: 'Sure, most rationalists will deny that these characters are what they had in mind when talking about reason, but that's the same move that we religious folks make when we disavow the Crusaders. See? How do you like it?'

Some of Gray's points on this score reminded me of Paul Tillich's application of the notion of idolatry to recent history. Tillich itemized the terrors that follow when one's ultimate concern is invested not in a forever transcendent, divine target but, rather, in some finite, wholly immanent object (such as a human leader or the state).

Here's where a point can be made in support of Grayling's side of the debate. Granted, the atheistic rulers of the past century left a sad legacy, but that is because they extended their devotion to a concrete, historical object (such as the state). By contrast, Grayling's more liberal brand of atheism takes as its focus the ideal of reason. Given our inevitable failure to be perfectly rational, to do so is to direct one's trust towards an ever-receding, transcendent ideal (rather than towards any historical figure).

So, many religious and atheistic ideologies of the past were equally dangerous because their trust, loyalty or ultimate concern resided in a concrete, contemporary figure in the government or church instead of in a never wholly manifested ideal (secular reason or an infinite God) that stands forever in judgment of our historical, fallible efforts.

Gray would likely acknowledge something like this point but reiterate that most ideologies, whether religious or atheistic, have an equally sorry track record when put into practice.

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.