Philosophy, lit, etc.: Sartre

Showing posts with label Sartre. Show all posts

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Links to philosophy book reviews

Tim Whitmarsh reviews Rowan Williams' On Augustine and Robin Lane Fox's Augustine: Conversions to Confessions.

Five recent reviews with philosophical content from the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

Matthew V. Novenson reviews Christine Hayes' What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (2015).

Gerald A. Press reviews The Platonic Art of Philosophy (ed. Boys-Stones, El Murr & Gill, 2013).

Scott Carson reviews Anna Marmodoro's Aristotle on Perceiving Objects (2014).

Anders Klostergaard Petersen reviews G. E. R. Lloyd's Analogical Investigations. Historical and Cross-cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning (2015).

From Antonio Donato's review of Philosophy and the Ancient Novel (ed. Pinheiro & Montiglio, 2015):

The papers may be taken to reach the following conclusions: 1. Ancient novels provide convincing ways of exploring the challenge of conducting a philosophical life .... 2. Ancient novels offer necessary (Smith) or effective (Fletcher) ways to identify tensions within philosophical theories that abstract analyses may overlook. 3. Ancient novels show that in the Greco-Roman world assessments of philosophical theories often extended beyond the limited confines of philosophical works .... 4. The literary genre of the ancient novel is an excellent vehicle to convey philosophical ideas in more accessible or entertaining ways ....

Anthony Gottlieb reviews James A. Harris' Hume: An Intellectual Biography.

Northwestern University Press has published Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein (2015) by Henry Pickford. Here is the Table of Contents.

The April, 2016 issue of Philosophy in Review (some items there are not behind a pay-wall).

Michael Lazarus reviews Mehmet Tabak's Dialectic in Hegel’s History of Philosophy, Vol. 1.

Nicholas Lezard reviews Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café, which is also reviewed by Ron Slate and by John Gray and by Andrew Hussey.

Anthony Kenny on Bryan Magee's Ultimate Questions.

Adam Carter reviews Marcus Morgan's Pragmatic Humanism: On the Nature and Value of Sociological Knowledge (2016).

Two items from Literary Hub:

Ed Simon's 'What Was Shakespeare’s Central Philosophy?'

Steve Toutonghi's 'How Science Fiction Redefines Who We Are, and What We’re Becoming'.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Quotes on the self

Bishop Berkeley:

Philonous--.... I know what I mean by the term I and myself; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a colour, or a sound. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 1713)

William James:

This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation. (The Principles of Psychology, Ch. 10, p. 296, 1890)

David Hume:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. (Book I, Part 4, Section 6 of A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739)

Thomas Szasz:

People often say that this or that person has not yet found him or herself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something one creates. (The Second Sin, p. 49, 1973)

Sartre:

Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. ('Existentialism is a Humanism', 1946)

Schopenhauer:

According to the latter view, he need only reflectively consider how he would most like to be, and he would be it; that is its freedom of the will. Thus it really consists in a person being his own work.... I, to the contrary, say: .... He cannot resolve to be such or such a person, nor can he become another, but he is once and for all, and after that recognizes what he is. (The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Fourth Book, sect. 55, 1819, Aquila-Carus translation)

Simon Gray:

[I]in order to reinvent, you have to invent, and who therefore is this self-inventing and self-reinventing self, rather like that definition of God as thought thinking on itself, yes, that’s it, I suppose, people who say they have reinvented themselves are thinking of themselves as god-like, and people who describe other people as reinventing themselves are attributing god-like powers to the self, which is a poor, miserable, partly suffocated thing, on the whole. (The Smoking Diaries, p. 163)

This song was written by Leonard Bernstein for a production of Peter Pan, but Simone added some of her own lyrics.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Frye, YouTube intelligence, & a new Schrödinger bio

Northrop Frye in 1970: 'All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.' Of course, the RCMP kept a file on Frye, as they did on Sartre and Tommy Douglas.

From David Winters' review of Marek Bieńczyk's Transparency: 'Nowadays, as with shop windows, seeing through things is what stops us from seeing beyond them.'

Here's a neat new YouTube channel: the Intelligent Channel, which features Richard Belzer's interviews and Paul Holdengräber's new show (in which he interviews Colum McCann, Elizabeth Gilbert, etc.).

'There's nobody who writes better about failure than Thomas Bernhard':

Piece of Monologue quoting Claire Messud on Bernhard: 'Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death. It is a book about anger. A book without paragraphs, which in its very form enacts anger. A book prone to wildly long sentences, preposterously violent judgments and enraging constructions.'

From Johns Hopkins University Press, Steven Gimbel has a new book called Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion: 'You cannot understand Einstein's science, Gimbel declares, without knowing the history, religion, and philosophy that influenced it.'

A review of John Gribbin's new biography of Erwin Schrödinger: 'Gribbin’s coup is to trace the origins of what is now called the Many-Worlds Interpretation to a lecture delivered by Schrödinger in Dublin in 1952, some five years before a paper by Hugh Everett more usually credited with the idea.'

Jennifer Egan's 'Book Bag' at Daily Beast.

I made my first Amazon list, in which I listed great non-fiction works that are available on Kindle for less than $20 and that were published between 1970 and 1985 (with one Bill Bryson exception). I focused on books that are accessible to non-specialists and that were produced by good publishers (as opposed to the e-book publishers who sell typo-ridden, public domain works).

The Complete Review rates Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the novel on which the amazing Hitchcock movie was based.

s