Follow-ups on earlier posts

Follow-up 1: Almost one year ago, I posted a list of UK philosophers who were among the combatants in WWI. I've added another name to that list: Leon Roth, who served in the Jewish Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. Like Rupert Clendon Lodge (see previous post), Roth won Oxford's John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy and taught at Manchester University before leaving England. Roth then taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

It's been easier to identify French or German philosophers who fought in WWI. I guess that's because France and Germany sent higher percentages of their male populations to one of the fronts, including many more middle-aged men, who were old enough to have begun a career in academic philosophy.

Follow-up 2: In October, I posted a note on Caporetto. Since then, Mark Thompson has written in the TLS about Hemingway's sources for descriptions of the battleground in A Farewell to Arms. Other American writers who volunteered for ambulance duty in WWI include John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. John McGrath Morris has written a book about Hemingway and Dos Passos: The Ambulance Drivers.

Follow-up 3: I ended my recent post on Hegel in Canada with a note about Rupert Clendon Lodge. As I noted in 2016, one of Lodge's undergrad students was Marshall McLuhan. Lodge also taught the novelist W. O. Mitchell, who based a character (Dr. Lyons) partly on Lodge in Since Daisy Creek. So, add this to my "philosophers in fiction" set of posts.

Also, while there's no Wikipedia entry for Rupert Clendon Lodge, his relatives are certainly well represented there. One of his uncles was a physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge. Another uncle was a historian, Sir Richard Lodge. Rupert's aunt was also a historian, Eleanor Constance Lodge (CBE). A third uncle was the mathematician Alfred Lodge. Rupert's grand-uncle was Rev. Samuel Lodge. Among Rupert's 1st-cousins were Alexander Lodge and Oliver W. F. Lodge. Still more of his relatives have Wiki entries.

A no foolin' philosophy link list (now with more videos)

A New Yorker article in which Jill Lepore applies some of the insights of Michael Lynch and Barbara Shapiro.

Joe Gelonesi interviews Noam Chomsky on Aussie radio.

Viggo Mortensen will read Albert Camus' 'The Human Crisis' (part of the festivities commemorating the 70th anniversary of Camus' visit to New York). Robert Zaretsky on NY's Camus festival.

Zadie Smith on Schopenhauer. I've heard that Tolstoy was into Schopenhauer while writing Anna Karenina. Here's a Schopenhauerian passage from that novel (Rosamund Bartlett's translation):

[Vronsky] soon began to feel that the fulfilment of his desires had given him no more than a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he had been expecting. This fulfilment had shown him the error people invariably make when they imagine happiness to be the fulfilment of desires. In the initial period after joining his life to hers and putting on civilian clothes, he experienced the full delights of freedom in general, which he had not known before, and also the freedom of love, and he was content, but not for long. He soon felt desires for desires, and tedium arising in his soul. Independent of his will, he began grasping at every passing whim, perceiving it as a desire and a purpose. (Oxford University Press, trans. Rosamund Bartlett [2014], p. 467)

Christopher Donohue: 'Herbert Spencer on Instinct and Intelligence: The Background of the “Cambridge Mind”'.

Dwight Garner reviews a new English translation of Carlo Rovelli's physics book. Rovelli was interviewed at Philosophy Bites last November. Rovelli's conversation with Lee Smolin in 2012. And here's Rovelli in 2014 on philosophy's relevance (ht Wayne Myrvold).

At the Edge, Janna Levin on gravitational waves. Also at the Edge, Rebecca Goldstein on 'pursuing a coherent human life' and an entry on the late Verena Huber-Dyson.

At the LARB, Matthew Stanley reviews Marcelo Gleiser's The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning; Daniel Hirschman reviews Harry Frankfurt's On Inequality; and Robert L. Kehoe III reviews Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. Finally, Aurelian Craiutu on Michael Oakeshott's Notebooks, 1922-1986.

A translation of a 1969 conversation with Adorno from Der Spiegel.


A bio of Angela Davis by Miranda Bain at The Heroine Collective.

'Lev Shestov.: Russia's answer to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche' by Sergei Tseytlin.

Mike Rottmann: 'Reestablishing Philosophy in a Destroyed Country: Karl Löwith’s Return to Germany'.

Stephen Cowley summarizes the introduction to Pierre Osmo's French translation of Rudolf Haym's Hegel and his Time. (German bio for Haym) Here's a blurb on Haym's book from an 1857 issue of The Christian Examiner.

Interesting site on Caroline Schelling. The project was NEH-funded and seems to have run approx. from 2005 till 2007.

'Kant gives love advice to a heartbroken young woman (1791)'.

Cambridge University Press has released a collection of Onora O'Neill's essays on Kant.

In the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature, Theodore Ziolkowski has a brief item called 'Philosophers into Fiction', in which he documents fictional treatments of philosophers (esp. Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Both Pea Soup and (more recently) Daily Nous have threads on philosophers in fiction (to which I contributed under my tag 'praymont'). Here's another instance: Andre Malraux's novel Man's Fate includes a character based on Bernard Groethuysen (according to p. 292 of a piece by Daniel Gordon in History & Theory 36 [1997]).

From Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), with Karl Johnson as Ludwig and Tilda Swinton as Lady Ottoline Morrell: 


Lady Constance Malleson (Colette), an actress and writer who was romantically involved with Bertrand Russell, wrote a roman à clef which featured Russell, Joad, Lady Ottolline Morrell and others. Here's a decoder key for the novel from John Slater's biographical article (in Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies [1975]): 'In fact the book is a very thinly disguised account of her relationship with Russell. He appears as Don Gregorio del Orellano,a Cambridge astronomer;... Lady Ottoline is Magdalena, the Marquesa de Santa Segunda; C.E.M. Joad is Owen West; Dora Black, Russell's second wife, is Gertrude West; T. S. Eliot is T. C. Maynard; Clifford Allen is Jevons; and Maurice Elvey, a director of silent pictures in whose [film] Hindle Wakes Colette starred, ... is Marcus Beazely.'

Julie Crawford reviews Danielle Dutton's novel Margaret the First, which is based on the life of Margaret Cavendish; Dutton's novel is also reviewed by Sian Norris and by Natalie Helberg. Dutton interviewed.

More about Cavendish: Lara Dodds on Virginia Woolf's criticism of Cavendish's style; Woolf wrote about Cavendish in A Room of One's Own and in The Common Reader; and Lisa Sarasohn's review (pdf) of Anna Battigelli's 1998 book, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (also reviewed here).

Interview with Luc Foisneau, who directed the publication of the Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle.

Gary Wills reviews Robin Lane Fox's Augustine: Conversions to Confessions. Fox replies, and so does Wills.

Paul E. Meehl's videos on philosophical psychology.

'Kenneth Garden, Associate Professor at Tufts University, reexamines al-Ghazali’s work from an historical hermeneutical [stance] in The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2014)'.

Last 12 minutes of Jarman's Tempest (1979), with a performance by Elisabeth Welch:

Fragments on WWI and philosophers

1. In an earlier post, I mentioned a paper by Jack Reynolds about the impact on philosophy of WWI. It turns out that Reynolds' paper is on-line at Academia.

2. Among philosophical schools of thought, perhaps neo-Kantianism suffered the most as a result of WWI. Prominent neo-Kantians, such as Alois Riehl and Wilhelm Windelband, signed the infamous 'Manifesto of the Ninety-Three' (1914), in which professors defended Germany's war effort (inc. the invasion of Belgium). Eventually, approximately four thousand German academics endorsed the claims of the manifesto, including many more philosophers. I'm not aware of any neo-Kantians who opposed the War. This might be one reason why the neo-Kantians didn't appear in histories of analytic philosophy until recently: after the War, anglo-philosophers didn't want to read them.

3. To get a sense of how philosophers (and some religious thinkers) in the UK and its allied nations viewed the War during its early stages, look at volume 13 (Oct. 1914-July 1915) of the Hibbert Journal, which includes papers by Norman Kemp Smith, G. Dawes Hicks ('German Philosophy and the Present Crisis'), Henri Bergson, Evelyn Underhill, Count Hermann Keyserling, and E. F. Carritt. Nietzsche -- er, straw-Nietzsche -- takes a beating.

4. One of the most Hegelian British philosophers of that era was Sir James Black Baillie, who translated Hegel's Phenomenology. In A Hundred Years of British Philosophy ^{(1938, pp. 317-8)}, Rudolf Metz wrote that the War prompted Baillie to abandon idealism. Metz based this claim largely on Baillie's Studies in Human Nature. Recently, Peter Hoerres has repeated Metz's claim. ^{(Hoerres, 'Idealism as Transnational War Philosophy, 1914-1918', in Anglo-German Scholarly Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ellis and Kirchberger [Brill, 2014])} However, Metz's claim is disputed on p. 51 of the Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers.

More about Baillie: Too old to join the army in WWI, Baillie served in the Admiralty's Intelligence Division for a couple of years and also was on a London conscientious objector tribunal. After the War, Baillie held several administrative positions. He was a labour arbitrator and lawyer and was knighted in 1931. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'Baillie is presented as Sir John Evans in Michael Innes's novel The Weight of the Evidence (1944).' For more about Baillie, see David Charlston's dissertation, Hegel's Phenomenology in Translation: A comparative analysis of translatorial hexis. ^{(2012, University of Manchester)}

5. In response to the vilification of German philosophy, J. H. Muirhead defended some German philosophers (esp. Hegel) in German Philosophy in Relation to the War.

6. Outside the UK, other philosophers who served on the WWI front lines include: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Tillich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Löwith, Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Alfred Schutz, Michael Polanyi, Gaston Bachelard, André Maurois, Alexander Koyré, Alain.

Thomas Dewar ('Harry') Weldon

In WWII, philosopher T. D. Weldon was Sir Arthur ('Bomber') Harris' assistant in Bomber Command. He helped Harris formulate the arguments and draft the documents that would promote the program of area bombing. Weldon was also a philosophy tutor in Magdalen College at Oxford University.

My interest in Weldon was piqued by C. S. Lewis' description of him. Lewis and Weldon were colleagues at Magdalen. They seem not to have been fond of each other. Here's some of what Lewis has to say about Weldon:

...determined to be a villain. ... a frequent and loud laugher .... carries a great deal of liquor without being drunk. ... He is insolent by custom to servants and to old men .... He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He gives no quarter and would ask none. He believes that he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom. ... Contempt is his ruling passion: courage his chief virtue. (Lewis, All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927, ed. Walter Hooper [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1991], pp. 482-3)

Lewis modeled a fictional character partly on Weldon in two scifi novels, Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength. The character in question is Dick Devine (aka Lord Feverstone), who is supposed to reflect Weldon's atheism and rationalism (in the loose and popular sense).

Before teaching at Oxford, Weldon served on the western front in WWI. He joined the Royal Field Artillery in France in 1915. From humble beginnings, Weldon was promoted to the rank of 'acting captain' ^{('Weldon, Thomas Dewar (1896–1958),' Mark J. Schofield in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Lawrence Goldman [Oxford: OUP, 2004[)}. He was wounded and awarded 'the Military Cross and bar' ^(Ibid.). According to R. W. Johnson, 'Those familiar with the mores of the British Army will recognize that this meant that he was quite insanely brave and clearly on the verge of a Victoria Cross' ^{(Johnson, 'Exploring the Secret Garden', chap. 4 in Look Back in Laughter: Oxford's Postwar Golden Age [Newbury, UK: Threshold Press, 2015])}

Weldon was a philosophy tutor at Magdalen College from 1922 until his death in 1958. He was known to have a good rapport with his students. According to the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he was 'not only accessible but also hospitable to his students, rewarding their efforts with a glass of sherry or a tankard of beer.' ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} (Weldon was a drinker. Another student, Robert Paul Wolff, recounts a discussion with a 'clearly inebriated' Weldon.) One of Weldon's more well known students was John ('Jack') Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden of the Wolfenden Report. Weldon was the godfather of Baron Wolfenden's son, the brilliant, tragic journalist and spy Jeremy Wolfenden. (Incidentally, in his biography of Wolfenden (the younger), Sebastian Faulks says that Weldon took the nickname 'Harry' from a 'music-hall comedian' ^{(Faulks, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives, [NY: Vintage, 2002], p. 212)}.)

In WWII,  Weldon worked in the civil service from 1939 until 1942, at which time he became Sir Arthur Harris' Personal Staff Officer at Bomber Command. ^{('Weldon', Schofield, ODNB)} Wing Commander Weldon was tasked with defending Bomber Harris' program of bombing German cities. The program had been challenged by a Cabinet Minister and Christian socialist, Sir Stafford Cripps. On Dec. 8, 1944, Cripps gave a lecture at Bomber Command Headquarters, in which he condemned area bombing as a decidedly un-Christian thing to do. Harris wasn't there, but the officers who attended the lecture were quite put out. In response, Harris had Weldon give a lecture the following night in defense of area bombing. ^{(Jonathan Glover, Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001], p. 86)} In his lecture, 'The Ethics of Bombing', Weldon denied that area bombing was terrorism, arguing that its purpose was to save lives by shortening the war. (My information about Weldon's lecture is drawn from Glover's above-cited book and from David I. Hall, '“Black, White and Grey”: Wartime Arguments for and against the Strategic Bomber Offensive', Canadian Military History 7 [1998]: 7-19). Among Weldon's critics at the time was the Rev. John Collins, the Anglican chaplain at Bomber Command who referred to Weldon's talk as the 'bombing of ethics' (and who would later be instrumental in forming the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). (C. S. Lewis also was opposed to Harris' policy.)

It's odd that Weldon should have resorted to such a rationale, for he appears to have been a Kantian. A. J. Ayer characterized him as such. Actually, what Ayer says (in the course of explaining why neither he nor J. L. Austin won the John Locke Prize in 1933) is that Weldon was 'a Fellow of Magdalen, who was later to become an inflexible linguistic philosopher but was then an orthodox Kantian'. ^{(Ayer, Part of My Life [London: Collins, 1977], p. 152)} So, Weldon was an orthodox Kantian in 1933 but might not have been by the time WWII rolled around. Also, while Weldon was in some sense a Kantian, I don't know if he ever endorsed Kantian ethics.

There's a consensus among those who have written about him that Weldon was psychologically maimed by his battle-field experience in WWI. This comes through in C. S. Lewis' characterization of Weldon (as one who had the air of having 'seen through everything and [who] lived at rock bottom') as well as in a note about Weldon by a former student (Canadian-born Anthony King). R. W. Johnson says that Weldon 'was a man of steel who, in both wars, had had to face appalling situations and ultimate questions'. ^{(Johnson, Ibid)} Perhaps, then, Weldon's willingness to advocate area bombing was a case of brutalized (in WWI) and brutalizing (in WWII). Kantian and other alternatives to utilitarianism were fine for discussions at Magdalen College, but in the horrifying world of 20th-century warfare, it's massacre or be massacred.The anger, the drinking, talk of a suicide (though that's disputed)* -- today, Weldon would be in treatment for PTSD. In his day, he was wheeled out as a mouthpiece for the designers of terror bombing.

A few more notes about Weldon:

His Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason ^{(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1945)} was enlarged and republished 1958 under a shortened title (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason). R. G. Collingwood (for whom Weldon had been a teaching assistant) appears to have refereed the 1945 version of Weldon's Kant book -- at least, he expressed approval for the text in a letter that he wrote to Clarendon Press in 1939 (Nov. 17), where Collingwood wrote that the book 'tackles the subject in the one and only right way, i.e. as an historical subject'. ^{(R. G. Collingwood: A Research Companion, James Connelly, Peter Johnson, and Stephen Leach [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015], p. 90)}

Weldon was active in the administration of Magdalen. Margaret Simons reports that he 'was, according to his biographers, responsible not only for forming the Modern Greats curriculum, but also for transforming Magdalen from an easygoing place, in which wealth and family position were key selection criteria, to an academic meritocracy'.

On Weldon's death, Ayer says that Gilbert Ryle had intended to drive to Venice with 'his friend Harry Weldon' to attend the 12th International Congress of Philosophy in 1958, but Weldon died, and Ryle invited Ayer 'to take his [Weldon's] place'. ^{(Ayer, More of My Life [London: Collins, 1984], p. 157)}

*The official cause of death was a brain hemorrhage.

January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.

Wittgenstein and some German novelists

I linked in my previous post to some items that connect Wittgenstein to literary themes.

Duncan Richter has a post about Wittgenstein and Kafka. In the comments to that post, there are recommendations of some additional work that involves Kafka and Wittgenstein. Richter refers to Rebecca Schuman's paper, ‘"Unerschütterlich": Kafka’s Proceß, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and the Law of Logic', which has now appeared in The German Quarterly. I know of one fictional work that puts Kafka and Wittgenstein together (very briefly). It's a story by Guy Davenport called The Aeroplanes at Brescia.

Last fall, Ben Ware published 'Ethics and the Literary in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' in the Journal for the History of Ideas. Ware there 'explores the connections between the literary and the ethical in the book,' and argues that 'Wittgenstein hoped to achieve a practical rather than cognitive transformation in his readers' lives.'

On another German lit front that involves Wittgenstein, Gwyneth Cliver's 2008 dissertation, Musil, Broch, and the mathematics of modernism, has two chapters on Wittgenstein.

Whither the philosophical novel ...

Witold Gombrowicz

Martin Walser interviewed by Alexander Görlach on 'the old wound of lacking justification': 'The authors Franz Kafka and Karl Barth have quite a bit to say on that question.'

On Aussie radio, Alan Saunders interviews Henry Sussman about Kafka and philosophy.

Zdenka Pregelj on 'Kant's Aesthetics in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground'

 A Guardian list of philosophical novels. From 2010, Rebecca Goldstein's top five 'novels of ideas'.

Jennie Erdal's April 7 article on whether it's still possible to write a philosophical novel; a central European response. And James Ryerson's Jan., 2011 NY Times article on this topic (with much about David Foster Wallace).

Added May 1:  Daniel Kehlmann has a new play about Gödel called 'Ghosts in Princeton': 'The play is about the Viennese mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), who by age 24 revolutionized the logic of mathematics. ... Kehlmann follows the giant footsteps of Gödel and Adele on their journey from Vienna to Princeton. Breakthrough thinking, brilliant logic and a self-destructive rationalism characterized Gödel’s remarkable history.' (via Literary Saloon)

Milan Kundera in a 1989 interview (first published in Review of Contemporary Fiction): 'I’m not thinking of the so-called "philosophical novel" that really means a subordination of the novel to philosophy, the novelistic illustration of ideas. This is Sartre. And even more so Camus. La Peste. This moralizing novel is almost the model of what I don’t like. The intent of a Musil or a Broch is entirely different: it is not to serve philosophy but, on the contrary, to get hold of a domain that, until then, philosophy had kept for itself.'


Added May 1: From David Winters' review of Eli Friedlander's new book on Walter Benjamin as a philosopher: 'Friedlander advanced a similar argument in previous books on Rousseau and Wittgenstein, contending that these authors' "literary" inclinations—for instance, Rousseau's accounts of his personal reflections and religious reveries—are inseparable from their philosophical systems.' Winters adds, 'Friedlander claims that Arcades is a work of "philosophical history" whose style and substance are systematically interwoven. ... By reframing "the truth that philosophy has traditionally aimed at" as a matter of "the presentation of historical material," the project redefines philosophical practice as an activity grounded in concreteness.'

Ben Hutchinson reviews George Steiner's The Poetry of Thought: 'If the relationship between philosophy and poetry underlies much of Steiner’s work, The Poetry of Thought tackles the Arnoldian “and” head-on. From Parmenides and Heraclitus to Sartre and Heidegger, Steiner traces a typically ambitious arc through the history of Western thought, arguing that what defines philosophy is its manner as much as its matter.' Hutchinson adds, 'Steiner sees in Wittgenstein’s paratactic, aphoristic style a conscious attempt at “counter-rhetoric”.'

'[William] Gass is also a philosopher. He did his graduate work at Cornell after serving in the Navy for three years during World War II. ... The effects of his admiration [for Wittgenstein] are most evident in the nuts and bolts of his own prose style. He has made sure to weed out the cant and jargon from his sentences. But even more revealing is his handling of the evidence. It’s not just that every abstraction is matched to a concrete example; whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, Gass will connect an initial example to a second one, and from the second will derive a third.'

From an IEET blog, 'The Hierarchy of Exclusion in “Ender’s Game” — a starting point for thinking about personhood'