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 on Jane Austen's moral philosophy

Thomas Rodham on Austen as a moral philosopher. (Here's Rodham's earlier post on Austen at his blog, Philosopher's Beard.)

Rose Woodhouse responds to Rodham's claim that Austen's insights as a virtue ethicist came 'at the expense of psychological insight'.

Sarah Emsley's book, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, is reviewed by Peter Graham.

Maria Comanescu on 'Aristotelian Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels'.

From Alice MacLachlan's review of E. M. Dadlez' Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume:

Many philosophers, most famously Gilbert Ryle and Alastair MacIntyre, have argued for an Aristotelian reading of Austen: in doing so, they draw on themes of moderation, the importance of habituation, the happiness that comes from practicing virtue with moderate resources, and the role granted to pleasure in the good life. Dadlez grants these Aristotelian elements in Austen, but argues that insofar as they are present in Austen, they are also present in Hume.

From Karen Stohr's 'Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility' (pay wall, via Muse): 'I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing.' Stohr's paper is in Philosophy and Literature, a search of which turns up several more papers on Austen and philosophy.

Mark Canuel focuses on the character of Fanny in Mansfield Park in 'Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong' (pay wall, via JSTOR).

Philosophy professor Theodore M. Benditt on 'Fanny's Moral Limits'.

Sticking with Mansfield Park, Lorrie Clark follows up Ryle's suggestion (in 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' [pdf]) that Austen's novels take a stance similar to Shaftesbury's moral philosophy: Shaftesbury's Art of "Soliloquy" in Mansfield Park.

In his 'Jane Austen: a Female Aristotelian' (pay wall, via Sage), John Ely says, 'Through her novels, she reforms an Aristotelian ethics. She Christianizes it-again largely following the influence of Shaftesbury.'

On Austen's religious stance, here's a review (to which I liked in an earlier post) of L. M. White's Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Siris thinks the relevance of Shaftesbury is overestimated.

In his After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre compared Austen with William Cobbett. There's an essay by MacIntyre called 'Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues' in this study guide for Mansfield Park (published by Ignatius Press). I can't identify its provenance.

Sarah Emsley on Mansfield Park.

In 2010, Joyce Kerr Tarpley published (with Catholic University of America Press) Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Eric Lindstrom in 'Austen and Austin' (pay wall, via T & F): 'Not until [J. L.] Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.'

A new collection on Austen's aesthetics from Rowman & Littlefield:

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen’s understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen’s connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art.

In 2004, Cambridge University Press published Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, which is the focus of this brief review.

Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher -- The Schleiermacher blog is back in action with new material on Troeltsch

According to Joseph Bottum, Charles Taylor believes that 'Selves are formed in community, even when the community has ... decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.'

Mark Vernon on Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics

Pat Devine reviews a new book on Karl Polanyi's economics

A video of Chris Hedges speaking about his new book, the Death of the Liberal Class

George Prochnik on Vienna's 'Kaffeehaus Canon' (inc. a photo of Cafe Hawelka)

Matthew Gallaway on the 'city of dreams' in Musil's Man Without Qualities

Brad Johnson on Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé

Lesley Chamberlain on a collection of Karel Capek's short pieces
 

This fall, Random House will release Robert Walser's Berlin Stories as an e-book (trans. S. Bernofsky) (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Rudy Rucker on Cronenberg's Naked Lunch

Hari Kunzru's interview with Michael Moorcock
 
Recommended books for a novice reader of Rebecca West

Pamela Norris reviews Kathleen Jones' book on Katherine Mansfield

Lavinia Greenlaw on the Nova Scotian background of Elizabeth Bishop

Ange Mlinko on Robert Duncan and H. D.

The University of Chicago Press has released Powell's Dance to the Music of Time as 12 e-books

Murakami's 1Q84 to appear in English this year

Shashi Tharoor reviews Nelson Mandela's Conversations With Myself

Rare footage of the Ballets Russes

Another review of Kristin Hersh's memoir

P. J. Harvey reads Joyce, Pinter and T. S. Eliot

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