Links (mostly philosophy)

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

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

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

Peter Singer on 'Effective Altruism'.

Gary Gutting on Michael Ruse's atheism book.

Robert Sapolsky on how language influences thought.

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

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

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

Ether Wave Propaganda on Agassi, Feyerabend, and Lakatos.

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

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

Neuroskeptic applies Popperian theory to see if science is broken.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter on teleology in nature and culture. 

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

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

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

The Taylor & Francis Philosophy Hall of Fame.

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

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

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

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

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.

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: