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 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.

New philosophy links and unrelated video

Erich Mühsam

Erich Mühsam

David Auerbach on Hans Blumenberg: 'It is rare for [Hans Blumenberg] to “take sides” explicitly because he is often preoccupied with showing that the sides are not what we think they are.'

From a review of Interpretation: Ways of Thinking about the Sciences and the Arts: 'If Machamer, Wolters and their contributors have their way, [the topic of interpretation] should also figure importantly in various areas of the philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and action, and practical aesthetics.' Some chapters of this book are on Google Books.

Michael Sandel is interviewed about his interest in political theory

Paul Feyerabend's critique of rationalist models of scientific method (ht Siris)

Here's a podcast of an interview with Robert Pasnau about his book Metaphysical Themes: 1247-1671

Robert Brandom's Munich Hegel Lectures are available on-line

Here are videos of the Frankfurt Lectures on normativity going back to 2008, including talks by Brandom, Robert Pippin, Sabina Lovibond, etc.

Pippin is interviewed about Hegel and art: 'With Hegel, the official answer to that question is that art is an intuitive, sensible mode of intelligibility of the Absolute.'

Jerome E. Copulsky reviews two books on Moses Mendelssohn

From an interview with David Cartwright, Schopenhauer's most recent English-language biographer: 'If you observe the behavior of a bulldog ant cut in two, you can understand some of Schopenhauer’s basic claims.'

Peter Thompson's series on Karl Marx in the Guardian



Richard Sennett on humanism: 'Here a contrast between Pico and Spinoza is all important. Spinoza emphasized unities transcending time—timeless unities in mental space—whereas Pico dwelt on the fact of shifting time, and shifting time in everyday experience.'

A 33-minute video of Francis Fukuyama on the origins of the political order

In the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, David M. Johnson reviews the Cambridge Companion to Socrates, and Eleni Kaklamanon reviews The Demands of Reason: an Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism.

Alan Saunders interviews Peter Adamson: 'Who was Plotinus?'

At Philosophy Bites, Peter Singer talks about Henry Sidgwick's ethics.

At Virtual Philosopher, Julian Savulescu discusses moral enhancement technologies.

Duncan Richter has a series of posts on Richard Joyce's Myth of Morality

In a blog post about the perils of using 'and/or' in legal writing, there is this quote from a 1942 case: 'The expression “and/or” is unfortunate. I do not think I have met it before in a will, and I hope I shall never meet it again.' And from a 1976 case: '[T]he commonly accepted meaning is that "and/or" means either "and" or "or," or both.'

I like Raymond Chandler, but never have I so desired to rip a cigarette out of someone's mouth as when I heard this 1958 interview of Chandler by Ian Fleming:


Ian Fleming Talks to Raymond Chandler 1958 from 33hirtz on Vimeo.