November philosophy links

Marilynne Robinson on 'Jonathan Edwards in a New Light: Remembered for Preaching Fire and Brimstone, He Was Actually One of the Great Intellectuals of His Era'.

'The Jewish Exiles Return to Germany -- Jürgen Habermas recalls philosophers and sociologists of Jewish background as returnees in the early Federal Republic Of Germany'.

Philip Bricker's new SEP entry on ontological commitment.

'John Stewart Bell: the nature of reality'. Bell's bio.
 
Debunking pop-science bogosity about Aristotle.

Interesting issue of Historical Reflections (on religion and the French Enlightenment).

At Philosopher's Zone, John Sellars and Kerry Sanders on the 'Return of the Stoics'.

'Remembering Derrida: A Forum by Peggy Kamuf, Gil Anidjar, Elisabeth Weber, Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray'.

The Dictionary of Untranslatables assumes the task of providing a comprehensive discussion of words significant in European philosophy whose "translation, into one language or another, creates a problem" (in the words of Barbara Cassin, its editor). In this it is astonishingly successful: comprehensive entries on hundreds of words, running to 1400 dense pages in the English edition, incorporating the work of 150 scholars in the original French and dozens more in the English translation.

'The most troublesome case is that of the expression “the priority of the right over the good,” which is untranslatable into French, and not solely because French lacks an equivalent for “right,” but also because of English’s lack of rigor.' (Translation by Jacques Lezra)

Added (Nov. 18): From the Partially Examined Life, 'Kant: What is Beauty?'

'Grace Notes: Eriugena and the Predestination Controversy'.

Siris has just posted a list of links: 'Links of Note, Noted'. [end of Nov. 18 addition]

Stellar performance of 'School Days' on YouTube (not a good video though).

Emmylou singing a Neil Young tune:

Marilynn Robinson, Calvin and Stefan Zweig

I've just received Marilynn Robinson's new book, Absence of Mind, an excerpt from which can be found at the Guardian. There's a review of this new work by Tim Teeman at the Times of London, and a very favourable review of it by the Archbishop of Canterbury. For more reviews, see this Complete Review page.

Calvin doesn't figure much in Robinson's new book; he's mentioned in passing once (in the chapter on Freud). Robinson wrote extensively on Calvin in her collection of essays, The Death of Adam, and she wrote the Preface for John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant. Here's a good article on her treatment of Calvin.

Another sympathetic expositor of Calvin in popular forums is Paul Helm, who wrote the Guardian's series on Calvin last year. And here's Melvyn Bragg's BBC podcast on Calvin.

Remarkably, there's a relevant link to Stefan Zweig (who's become a lurking presence on this blog), since Zweig wrote a book called The Right to Heresy: Castellio Against Calvin (I think this is Zweig's book on-line but with a slightly different title). Calvin's Geneva served as Zweig's dystopia, with Calvin and his minions playing the role of Big Brother. The protagonist was Sebastian Castellio, who had the temerity to disagree with Calvin over Biblical interpretation.

Castellio has since become a sort of saint for liberal Protestants such as the Unitarian minister Duncan Howlett, who wrote an essay called 'Sebastian Castellio: Neglected Saint of the Liberal Church', and the Quaker scholar Roland Bainton, who contributed a paper on Castellio to a volume called Persectution and Liberty.

Zweig is blamed even now for Calvin's bad image in Germany.

Sebald, Shakespeare, Josipovici, Bentham's mummy and so on

Theda Bara

A neat article on Prague and Kafka

An interview with Susan Bernofsky on translating Robert Walser

A roundup of choice Walser links from the past few years

Another review of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future

A new translation of Theodor Fontane's poem, 'The Tragedy of Afghanistan' (1859)

A review of Hannay's translation of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Gladstone: the grandest of old men

Via Maitresse, the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex has errors, hopefully to be corrected in time for the US release of this work

Will Self's Sebald Lecture

'Weavers, scholars, and writers, Sebald claims, tend “to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, [and] it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.”'

The Mookse & the Gripes on Sebald's Rings of Saturn

'Love Across the Borders' by Gabriel Josipovici

Notes on Josipovici's Everything Passes by Paul Griffiths, Mr. Waggish, Stephen Mitchelmore, Richard Crary, and Dan Visel.

Aussie radio is on to Albert Camus, the James Dean of philosophy

More antipodean radio -- this time on David Eagleman, neuroscientist & novelist

Bellow-ing away at depression

A brief review of Breon Mitchell's new translation of The Tin Drum

Herta Müller's folk (with a tantalizing remark in the 4th paragraph about the roots of the Dracula story)

A three-week workshop on writing theology with Marilynn Robinson in Princeton (ht F&T)

Issa rocks out with a jukebox full of lit rock (ht Books, Inq.)

Bentham's mummy, Ginsberg and Kafka in one post

'There are more things in heaven and earth than ...,' -- okay, now let's look at some philosophers on Shakespeare. Here's a review (via Books, Inq.) of Colin McGinn's book on the bard, and McGinn's review of a book on Iago, and Martha Nussbaum's review from last year of McGinn's book along with Nuttall's and Zamir's

The state, the arts, gossip & accomplished nephews

Ludwig Feuerbach

On Aussie radio, Alan Saunders interviews Moira Gatens on Spinoza, Feuerbach and George Eliot's Middlemarch

More radio from Oz -- Parts 1 and 2 of a program on dreams (interviews with a Jungian [Part 1] and a neuroscientist [Part 2])

'Wallace Stevens, Armchair Visionary' (ht Books, Inq.)

'Aufklärung für Kinder' -- Walter Benjamin wrote 30 German radio broadcasts for kids between 1929 and 1932

The new English translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

A long excerpt from Marilynn Robinson's 2006 article, 'Onward Christian Liberals'

The Glorious Revolution and the making of the modern state

Review of Jon Elster's book on disinterested action

Joseph Margolis on his 2009 book, The Arts and the Definition of the Human

Mary Midgley reviews The Master and His Emissary

'Dark secrets about Charlie Chaplin's mother'

'Fuss over English egghead' -- the strange twists of Colin Wilson's career, including his meeting with Marilyn Monroe ("I had been told she was bookish")

Vintage crime fiction -- Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson

A Scotsman summit on Montaigne

Jan Morris -- "I've been egocentric. Egocentric all my life."

I discovered Edward Bernays (a nephew of Freud) while teaching a course in media ethics a few years ago -- here's a piece on his relation to consumer culture. More about Bernays from Mind Hacks

One of Willard van Orman Quine's nephews, Robert Quine, was a great guitarist who gave up tax law for punk rock -- he worked with Lou Reed and Brian Eno among others

June Christy performs 'How High the Moon' with Nat King Cole and Mel Tormé: