Philosophy of/in Literature links

Nicole Im interviews philosophical novelist Joanna Kavenna.

Viorica Patea on 'Ana Blandiana and Hölderlin's Eternal Question'.

Erin Blakemore on 'Jane Austen and the Value of Flaws'. 

Duncan Richter on 'War and Peace and Wittgenstein'. From 2015, Henry W. Pickford's book Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art.

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock on 'Wittgenstein and Leavis: Literature and the Enactment of the Ethical'.

'Showing and Saying: An Aesthetic Difference' by Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte.

E. F. Mooney on 'Melville’s Moby Dick: Between Philosophy and Literature'.

From 2013, a conversation between E. F. Mooney and Dean Dettloff on 'Philosophical Style, Lyricism, Intimacy'.

Peter E. Gordon reviews Daphne Hampson's Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique.

Patrick J. Murray reviews recent books on Montaigne. 

Josephine Livingstone on Rachel Kadish's Weight of Ink. 

The latest issue of Philosophy of Literature has a symposium on "Literature and Moral Vision" (paywall).

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:

Some philosophy links (February)

Chad Hansen's new MOOC 'Humanity and Nature in Chinese Thought'.

'Stanford scholar explores Arabic obsession with language....Key also found that the early scholars benefited from a holistic perspective. The ancients lacked the modern methodological divide between arts and sciences, and so were able to see language as a cognitive function shared between poetry and logic.'

In Our Time - Melvyn Bragg talks with Simon Blackburn, Jennifer Hornsby, and Crispin Wright about truth. and with Simon Glendinning, Joanna Hodge, and Stephen Mulhall about phenomenology.

Julie Allard on 'Ronald Dworkin: Law as Novel Writing'.

A collection of new papers on Jaegwon Kim will be available this month from Cambridge University Press.

Harald Sack on Pierre Gassendi.

Gary Saul Morson: 'On Toulmin, Tolstoy, & the Dawkinsization of the humanities'.

Steven Shapin: 'The new scientism, for all its claims that there is a way science can make you good, shares one crucial sensibility with its opponents: having secularized nature, and sharing in the vocational circumstances of late modern science, the proponents of the new scientism can make no plausible claims to moral superiority, nor even moral specialness.'

Richard Zach on 'Carnap on "Syntax" vs. "Semantics"'.

Elucidations podcasts: from October,  Episode 64: James Conant and Jay Elliott discuss the analytic tradition; and from December, Episode 66: Haim Gaifman discusses mathematical reasoning.

Krista Tippett interviews Paul Elie, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Robin Lovin discuss Reinhold Niebuhr's legacy. Audio recordings of some of Niebuhr's sermons and lectures.

At Philosophy Bites, Christine Korsgaard on the status of animals.

'Ethics and Aesthetics are One: The Earnestness of High Modernism in Wittgenstein and Musil' by Genese Grill.

At Philosophers Zone, Joe Gelonesi talks to David Papineau about consciousness and the brain.

Nicholas Maxwell on 'what philosophy ought to do'.

Colin Strang's obituary.

Winthrop Pickard Bell: 'Husserl asked his Canadian student to write his dissertation on Royce, and when completed he praised it. ... [Bell] received his degree in 1922. Bell was the first teacher of phenomenology at Harvard from 1922-1927; his students included Dorion Cairns and Charles Hartshorne.' More about Bell:

During the fall of 1921 [Bell] returned to academia and taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and within the same time frame made an application to have his doctorate from Göttingen University re-instated. The formal doctorate was finally issued to Dr. Bell in May of 1922. His tenure in Toronto was to be short-lived and he resigned after the spring semester. In the fall of 1922 he took up teaching in the philosophy department at Harvard University.

Rebecca Suter reviews Matthew Strecher's The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami:  'According to Strecher, the metaphysical realm in Murakami’s work is the place where individual subjects are able to connect to their “inner narrative,” get in touch with their innermost feelings and (re)construct a worldview that is closer to their true self than the false myths or “collective narratives” produced by society.'

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, a student of Kant's -- well, he attended some of Kant's lectures -- wrote some early science fiction tales. Michael Hauskeller has a blog post on Hoffmann's tale 'Sandman'. Another blog post about 'Sandman'. In his chapter of Wiley's Companion to Science Fiction, 'The Origins of Science Fiction', George Slusser devotes a section to Hoffmann's 'Sandman'.

Some resources on sci-fi & philosophy

Eric Schwitzgebel has invited several philosophers and sci-fi authors to post lists of their favourite philosophical sci-fi stories. He's posted four batches so far (batch 1, batch 2, batch 3, and batch 4).

Schwitzgebel's inspiring effort got me thinking about other sources that may be relevant to the topic. Here's what I've found so far.

First, there are five six anthologies:

1. Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010), its table of contents, a teacher's guide; it was reviewed by Matthew Cheney;

2. Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, by retired philosophy prof Steven M. Sanders;

3. Philosophy Through Science Fiction: A Coursebook with Readings, by Ryan Nichols, Nicholas D. Smith, Fred Miller. (It's an update of Thought probes: philosophy through science fiction literature.) Reviewed by Liz Stillwaggon Swan;

these two collections from Prometheus Books:

4. Philosophy and Science Fiction, ed. Michael Phillips;

5. Feminist Philosophy And Science Fiction: Utopias And Dystopias, ed. Judith A. Little; and...

Added (Oct. 13): 6. Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, ed. Susan Schneider.

Next, there are several items by David Auerbach on his great Waggish blog (inc. 'SciFi novels for liberals' as well as posts on the Gollancz SF list, Olaf Stapledon's Flames, exceptional science fiction, and Gene Wolf).

Auerbach wrote an article about Thomas Disch at The Millions: 'The Prescient Science Fiction of Thomas M. Disch' (followed by an Appendix and a note on Disch's death at Waggish).

Here are two more especially apt items by Auerbach: one on Joanna Russ' 'We Who Are About To…'; the other on Robert Sheckley's 'Warm' (which Auerbach relates to P. F. Strawson's 'Freedom and Resentment'). 'Warm' is on Gutenberg.

Re. Sheckley, there is also this WaPo piece by Michael Dirda, as well as an item by Steve Danziger. One of Sheckley's stories, 'The Seventh Victim' (pdf), was the basis of The 10th Victim (with Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress).

There's some relevant material at Science Fiction Studies (here are some abstracts from a recent issue). This journal has made available the full texts of some old volumes; e.g., the Le Guin issue from 1975 and, from the same year, the Philip Dick volume (with contributions by Lem, Aldiss, and Fredric Jameson).

Also at Science Fiction Studies, one can find Roy Arthur Swanson's paper 'The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical Science Fiction' (1976). Swanson was Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

There's some relevant material at Matthew Cheney's Mumpsimus. Cheney's an English professor who sometimes makes use of continental philosophy, as in this post about novels by M. John Harrison (which inc. references to Derrida and Deleuze).

At io9, there's a post by Charlie Jane Anders on 'The Philosophical Roots of Science Fiction'.

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.

Philosophy in the wider world

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a site devoted to theories of causal history. The site has entries for many ancient and early modern philosophers as well as for Russell, Schlick, Popper, Reichenbach, Hempel, Mackie, Suppes, David Lewis, Marjorie Grene, Paul Humphreys, Nancy Cartwright, James Woodward, and Christopher Hitchcock.

It's always interesting to find philosophers being cited in the medical sciences literature. Last July, I noted Carl Hempel's influence on the DSM. There is also Karl Popper's impact in epidemiology. For instance, Mervyn Susser and his partner, Zena Stein, made use of Popper's work. Susser also made reference to the work of Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, and Mario Bunge (among other philosophers).

The journal History of Psychiatry has an article on 'Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and its impact on the theory of psychopathology' by Norbert Andersch and John Cutting.

The same journal also has published 'Karl Jaspers on the disease entity: Kantian ideas and Weberian ideal types' by Chris Walker.

Blossom Dearie:


I posted last June about Berkeley's popularity among the poets. Peter Brooke reviews a book from 2010 called ‘We Irish’ in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone by W. J. McCormack. According to the book, somehow the Italian fascists (esp. Giovanni Gentile) co-opted Berkeley for their awful ideology. McCormack's book is also reviewed in Berkeley Studies by Tom Jones.

Wuthering Expectations has a post about Schopenhauer's influence on the French Decadents (something to which I alluded in a couple of posts). If I ever get the time, I'd like to look more closely at Schopenhauer's influence on Anna Karenina.

From the Huffington Post: 'The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business'.

The BBC Radio 4 has a series called Baldi, which is about a 'Franciscan priest and philosophy lecturer [who] turns amateur sleuth to solve murder mysteries'.

BBC Radio 3's series 'Wagner's Philosophers' (with broadcasts on Adorno, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the German idealists).

Blossom Dearie performed the Adjectives song ('Unpack Your Adjectives' -- it's on YouTube) for Schoolhouse Rock. This next song of hers' never made it onto children's TV:

Link roundup mostly on literary Prussians & Berliners

Brecht portrait by Rudolf Schlichter (1926)

Michael Hofmann on Wolfgang Koeppen:

The one exception, the single oasis in thirty-five years of literary-commercial desert, the very last of the Sibylline books, is Jugend (Youth), which was first published in 1976 as number 500 in the iconic Bibliothek Suhrkamp series (there was really no limit to Unseld's generosity and thoughtfulness), when Koeppen turned seventy. "Dear Wolfgang," wrote the gallant [and long suffering Siegfried] Unseld as late as 1 July of that year, "I'm awaiting Youth every day, with the sort of intensity with which one only and always waits for youth." This time, for whatever reason, Koeppen didn't disappoint him. 

Adam Thirlwell on Michael Hofmann's translation of Gottfried Benn's poems:

Benn’s late style is one of literature’s great inventions, and the composition of this selection conditions its reader to concentrate on that phenomenon: from 1912 to 1947, a period of 35 years, Hofmann offers just twenty-four poems, while from 1949 to 1955, the last six years of Benn’s life, there are a lavish forty-eight.

Rebecca Schuman has three posts this week on Heinrich von Kleist. She focuses on his Kant crisis and the Marquise of O.

Steven Howe remarks on Kant in connection with Kleist's Schroffenstein Family:

Here one can detect the influence of Kleist’s encounter with Kantian philosophy, which appears to have shattered his faith in the possibilities of absolute truth and knowledge. The fallibility of perception emerges, as a consequence, as a dominant theme and subject of reflection in Kleist’s work, and remains so across his entire literary corpus. In Schroffenstein, this manifests itself through the frequent recurrence of error and confusion, bred by the characters’ inability to communicate and their attendant susceptibility to misreading reality.

Trevor Berrett on Theodor Fontane's Irretrievable.

Last year, H. B. Nisbet published a 736-page book on Lessing. Reviewed in the LRB by Jonathan Rée.

In BOMB, Richard Foreman reviews Philip Glahn's new book on Bertolt Brecht. Here's the publisher's site for the book. It's also reviewed by Gregory Sholette at Brooklyn Rail.


A bigger Brecht book, by Stephen Parker, is reviewed by Donald Sassoon, and by John Yargo, and by David Blackbourn, and by Alison Flood.

Ingrid Rowland reviews Emily J. Levine's Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School:

Focusing on Aby Warburg’s library and two of its most illustrious users, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art historian Erwin Panofsky, [Levine] reveals the ways in which the distinctive qualities of a single place conditioned the development of ideas in a larger sense to create a “Hamburg School” of thought, a school intimately connected with Jewish experience in Imperial and Weimar Germany.

Quotations on language as a city

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. ('Quotation & Originality' in Letters and Social Aims [Cambridge, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1884], pp. 189-90; essay was composed c. 1840)

Fritz Mauthner:

Language came about like a big city. Room upon room, window upon window, flat upon flat, house upon house, street upon street, quarter upon quarter, and all that packaged into one another, tied together (Gershon Weiler, Mauthner's Critique of Language [London: Cambridge University Press, 1970], p. 109; Weiler is translating a passage from Mauthner's Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache v. 1 [1901], p. 25)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal:

Below, the sleeping city. Places with endless significance, quite unlike reality; districts I've never seen, but which I know are thus and such. ("Dream Death" in The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, tr. Joel Rotenberg [New York: New York Review Books, 2005], p. 13; the fragment was composed in 1892)

Julio Cortázar:

“Oh, the edge of the city,” Juan said. “Nobody knows where it is, you know.” “In any case [said Tell], the street turned out to be familiar to me because other people had already walked along it." (62: A Model Kit, tr. Gregory Rabassa [New York: Pantheon, 1972], pp. 65-6; appeared in Spanish in 1968)

Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958], s. 18)

W. G. Sebald:

If language may be regarded as an old city, full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further in to the surrounding country, then I was like a man who had been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or an street junction, an avenue or a bridge. (Austerlitz, tr. Anthea Bell [Vintage Canada, 2002; first published 2001], pp. 123-4)

Links without any intended unifying theme

Image source

Richard Nixon in an undergrad paper at Whittier College in 1933:

In making a short study of English philosophers during the past year I became an intense admirer of David Hume.

From an exam answer at Boston University by Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Jan. 1952) (via a comment by 'dmf' at NewApps):

As for me, I have found a solution of this problem in the thought of men like Karl Gross, Brightman and Hocking.

Who's Karl Gross? I have heard of Hocking. My late uncle on my mother's side (a Whitehead fan) often spoke of Hocking with reverence. There's a recent Harper's piece by John Kaag on Hocking's excellent library.

King's student paper on Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr's 1965 telegram to King.

Rheinhold Niebuhr.

The 1984 BBC documentary series Sea of Faith is on YouTube, with installments on Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein (among others). The house that Wittgenstein designed for his sister appears at 6.35 of this episode. The host, Don Cupitt, gives a partial tour of the house and mentions its 'geometrical tranquility', which reminded me of The Cone in Thomas Bernhard's novel Correction (a very difficult book).

From Cupitt's 2002 Guardian piece on Iris Murdoch:

In the metaphysical tradition it had always been assumed, ever since Parmenides and Plato, that the really real must be one, and perhaps also must be unchangeably perfect. But from Schelling and Schopenhauer onwards, a new tradition develops which, on the contrary, depicts ultimate reality as being at odds with itself, divided and even malignant.

Rowan Williams' lecture 'Faith and Human Flourishing: religious belief and ideals of maturity'.

The latest issue of Humanities (the journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities) has some good literary pieces, inc. Danny Heitman's 'The Quiet Greatness of Eudora Welty', Mark Athitakis' 'The Otherworldly Malamud', and Kathleen B. Jones' 'The Trial of Hannah Arendt'.

Clive James' piece on Robert Frost (from a recent issue of Prospect).

The Japan Times has a series on essential reading for Japanophiles.

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.

Extraordinary philosophy links

Erik Desmazieres' illustration for Borges' 'Library of Babel'

Source of above image.

From Philosopher's Zone, 'We need to talk about Hegel' -- Joe Gelonesi talks to Paul Redding about Hegel.

On John Stuart Mill's annotations of Emerson's Essays:

When Mill turned to the Essays themselves, there was a good deal of marking up in the margins – which confirms that a passage caught his attention – and frequent asides, many of them simply a damning word or two .... If ‘sense’ was present, the more heavily annotated essays suggest that Mill thought ‘nonsense’ prevailed.

On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg talks to David Wootton, Michael Moriarty, and Michela Massimi about Pascal.

From the same source, Mel Bragg, Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk, and Julia Tanney on ordinary language philosophy.

Ever the Leibnizian, Borges countenanced extraordinary language philosophy:

There was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. (Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel')

From the mid-1980s, an article on 'Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy' by L. E. Goodman. Some of the medieval Islamic philosophers influenced Ramón Llull (whose ars combinatoria was to have captured the 'interrelationships of Platonic forms'). Llull's ideas influenced Leibniz's notion of a characteristica universalis, which was essential to Lebniz's dreamed of unified and universal science. Llull, Leibniz, and Borges figure prominently in William Woof's 'Borges, Cervantes & Quine. Reconciling Existence Assumptions and Fictional Complexities in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”', which appeared in the 1999 volume of Variaciones Borges.

On WHY? Radio, Joseph Margolis on 'The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?'

From Philosophy Bites, 'Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy' and John Tasioulas on human rights.

Steven Nadler on why Spinoza was excommunicated.

Samuel Moyn on dignity in recent books by Jeremy Waldron and Michael Rosen.


The Mind Body Problem: An interview with Ned Block from Imaginal Disc on Vimeo.

Popper, Middlemarch, and Phrenology

A couple of years ago, I noted an interesting passage in George Eliot's Middlemarch. In it, Eliot seemed to anticipate the Popperian insight that a truly scientific theory must be falsifiable. I've learned from NewApps that Victor Gijsbers has also noticed the Popperian theme in that passage. The passage, again, runs as follows:

But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. (George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 48)

Mr. Gijsbers' post got me wondering about the provenance of this idea.

Other nineteenth-century theorists stressed the importance of trying to falsify our beliefs in our quest for truth. In an article in the Monist in 1982, Susan Haack identified this theme in C. S. Peirce's work (and pointed out differences between Peirce's and Popper's views), and others take William Stanley Jevons to have emphasized  the importance of attempts at falsification in our belief-forming regimen.

I doubt that Eliot was influenced by either of these theorists. Peirce's work was published too late to have influenced Eliot and it looks like Jevons and Eliot developed their thinking independently of each other. (Update [Sept. 23]: Eric Schliesser asked why I don't think that Jevons influenced Eliot on this matter. Eliot published Middlemarch in 1871-2, but Jevons' statement on the importance of seeking a theory's falsification ['objections' and 'discordance'] appeared in his Principles of Science, which was published in 1874.)

Eliot was influenced by Auguste Comte's positivism, but Comte doesn't seem to have recognized falsifiability as a hallmark of good epistemology (let alone of specifically scientific theory). Nonetheless, the Comtean background is relevant. Comte endorsed phrenology, which was ridiculed as a quack pseudo-science. It looks like some of phrenology's nineteenth-century critics were put off by the phrenologists' capacity to dispense with any and all seemingly recalcitrant bits of behavioral evidence by means of arbitrary stipulations. My source for this claim is G. N. Cantor ('The Edinburgh Phrenology Debate: 1803-1828', Annals of Science 32 [1975]: 195-218, see esp. 212 and 213).

Cantor attributes the objection to Francis Jeffrey and to P. M. Roget.  Jefffrey's critique appeared in a book review in an 1826 issue of the Edinburgh Review, (v. 44 [Sept 1826]: 253-318). According to Jeffrey,

It is quite plain ... that these admissions ...reduce this whole 'science of observation,' to a series of mere evasions and gratuitous suppositions. We produce, for example, a person whose whole conduct indicates great Benevolence, but who happens to have a very small bump in the place where the organ of that propensity is said to be situated. Is not this a proof of the fallacy of the system? Oh no—by no means. The individual has had the good luck to be trained up among very benevolent people, and has had his small original stock prodigiously increased by their precepts and example, aided perhaps' by his own large endowment of the faculty of Imitation!—or, his organ of benevolence has perhaps been excited to a diseased activity by some internal inflammation,—or at all events, as he has Love of Approbation and Cautiousness very large, nothing is so probable as that his apparent benevolence is merely put on, to gain the good opinion of the world, or to secure some advantage to himself!  We next produce another person with an enormous bump of Benevolence on his forehead; and, offering to prove that he is, notwithstanding, notoriously cruel, oppressive, and uncharitable, we ask, again, how this is to be reconciled with the truth of the system? O, nothing in the world so easy! First of all, he has probably had no training in the paths of benevolence, and the field, though naturally fertile, has therefore been actually barren; But besides, you have only to look, and you will most probably find the organs of Combativeness, and Destructiveness, and Acquisitiveness, still larger than that of Benevolence. These, of course, make him quarrelsome, and cruel, and avaricious: and how then can his poor benevolence find means to display itself? (Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 44 [1826]: 298-299)

Jeffrey concluded that 'the phrenological theory, though absolutely incapable of any clear or satisfactory proof, abounds in those equivocations and means of retreat, by which it may often escape from. direct refutation'. (Ibid.)

As Cantor says, the response of critics like Jeffrey and Roget

resembles Popper's reaction to Adler's theory a century later. In his Encyclopaedia Britannica article P. M. Roget noted the difficulty of falsifying phrenology since its proponents employed ad hoc assumptions which covered all contingencies. (Cantor,  213)

George Eliot had endorsed phrenology but later came to see its limitations. By the 1860's, she was poking fun at the theory in Felix Holt: the Radical (1866). As T. R. Wright has pointed out, Eliot's ridicule plays upon phrenology's apparent immunity to falsification. ('From Bumps to Morals: The Phrenological Background to George Eliot's Moral Framework', The Review of English Studies, New Series 33 [1982]: 34-46)  In Chapter 5 of Felix Holt, the eponymous character echoes Jeffrey's above objection:

A phrenologist at Glasgow told me I had large veneration; another man there, who knew me, laughed out and said I was the most blasphemous iconoclast living. 'That,' says my phrenologist, 'is because of his large ideality, which prevents him from finding anything perfect enough to be venerated.' (Felix Holt, ch. 5)

In addition to the critique of phrenology, another possible influence on Eliot's thinking was the methodological work of Claude Bernard. In 1865, Bernard published his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, the first part of which was devoted to methodological considerations. Bernard's reflections occupied Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes, in the 1870's while Eliot was writing Middlemarch and Lewes was working on his multi-volume Problems of Life and Mind (which was completed by Eliot after Lewes' death). I don't know much about Bernard's methodology, but at least one philosopher, Jean-François Malherbe, finds close parallels between it and Popper's views.

So, Eliot's remark about 'Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements' places Casaubon's theory in the same pseudo-scientific wastebasket as phrenology. Scientists, for Eliot, are better advised to follow the example of Lydgate, who 'was enamored of that arduous invention which is the very eyes of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exact relation.' (Middlemarch, ch. 45)

May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair

Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern'.

While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction. Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement'. Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

Philosopher's Zone is back and other philosophy news

'School of Athens' by Raphael. Epicurus is on our left.

After Alan Saunders' death, the Australian radio show about philosophy, Philosopher's Zone, was on a hiatus. It is back, now hosted by Joe Gelonesi. In  the first new broadcast, Professor Bonnie Honig discusses democracy and public space.

On Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, Bragg discusses Epicurus with Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, and James Warren.

At the Guardian, Peter Thompson of the University of Sheffield has a five-part series on the Frankfurt School. Here they are: one, two, three, four and five.

On YouTube, the presentations from the 2012 Sellars Centenary Conference.

A 'journeyman Barthio-Lutheran theologian' tries his hand at translating the first part of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

On seeing Beckett in terms of analytic philosophy and 'Beckett the Nietzschean hedonist'.

Several posts on Kierkegaard by Barry Stocker.

From Truth Tableaux, 'On Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays'

On MOOCs, and more. On a 'we've-been-here-before' note, there's this.

Advice sought concerning what logic textbooks to use for a course on symbolic logic.

Help sought in listing novels about philosophers philosophical theories.

I love this couple's YouTube clips. They're from a 60's German TV show, in which Cherry Wainer and Don Storer played during the intermissions. In some clips you can see Cherry working the Hammond organ peddles with her white go-go boots. In others you can see German existentialist dancing. In most clips, you catch a glimpse of the lethargic little dog that sat next to Cherry. One of my favourite clips is this one, but I've opted to include this next clip chiefly because it shows Don in some of his best spontaneous vocal and facial expressions. (Update, Aug. 2, 2013): Dammit! Most of their videos have been pulled. This is the only one still on YouTube.