December philosophy links

Putnam says Husserl got the gist of 'twin earth' in 1911.

Alva Noë on colour as well as Evan Thompson and Stephen Batchelor's new book.

Ivan Ilyin, Putin's philosopher.

'Marcuse Today -- Fifty years later, One-Dimensional Man is more prescient than its author could have imagined' by Ronald Aronson.

'Ernst Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 1)'.

From last November, Amartya Sen: 'Social Choice and Social Welfare'.

'Anne Jaap Jacobson on Mind and Representation'.

From the Abstract for a law paper of philosophical interest: 'The article discusses how negligence doctrine has long distinguished misfeasance (a “misdoing”) from nonfeasance (a “not doing”), purporting to provide that the former occasions liability and the latter does not.'

A new book called Huxley’s Church & Maxwell’s Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science.

Hugh Gough's review of Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment, 1685-1798 by Jennifer Powell McNutt.

'Todd Berzon on Aaron P. Johnson’s Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre: The Limits of Hellenism in Late Antiquity'.

Alan Montefiore's review of Rowan Williams' The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language.

Rowan Williams on some recent books about fairy tales.

A 1996 list of movies with philosophical content (to which yours truly contributed).

At Philosophy Bites, Julia Annas on virtue ethics and Hugh Mellor on probability.

Quotations about Hume by 2 economists, an epidemiologist, Borges & Hamann

Amartya Sen:

Hume's influence on the nature and reach of modern thinking has been monumental. From epistemology to practical reason, from aesthetics to religion, from political economy to philosophy, from social and cultural studies to history and historiography, the intellectual world was transformed by the enlightening power of his mind. ('The Boundaries of Justice' New Republic [December 14, 2011])

Mervyn Susser:

Like Plato and George Berkeley who epitomize idealist philosophy, Hume constructed a view of the world that gives primacy to the sentience and thought of the individual: truth can be said to exist only in the subjective perceptions of an observer. For Hume, the apparent sequence of events in the external world is in fact the sequence of perceptions in the mind. ('Rational Science Versus a System of Logic' in Causal Inference, ed. K. J. Rothman [Epidemiology Resources, 1988], p. 190)

Jorge Luis Borges:

It is a bit like what Hume says of Berkeley: “His arguments admit of no refutation and produce no conviction.” Solipsism admits of no refutation and produces no conviction. (“Merely a Man of Letters” Jorge Luis Borges: an interview, Philosophy and Literature 1 (1977): 337-41)

Robert E. Lucas, Jr.:

From the beginnings of modern monetary theory, in David Hume’s marvelous essays of 1752, Of Money and Of Interest, conclusions about the effect of changes in money have seemed to depend critically on the way in which the change is effected. [p. 246] .... The passages on dynamics that I cited from Hume in Section 1 could be slipped into Keynes’s Treatise on Money (1930) or Hayek’s Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933 ) without inducing any sense of anachronism. [p. 253] (Lucas' Nobel Prize Lecture, 'Monetary Neutrality', Dec. 7, 1995)

Johann Georg Hamann:

This much is certain that without Berkeley there would have been no Hume, just as without Hume no Kant. Yet finally everything comes down to tradition just as all abstraction comes down to sensuous impressions. (from a letter to Herder, 1782)

 

Philosophy on the net from approx. the last 3 or 6 months

Carl Stumpf

Marilynn Robinson on William James: 'In James's understanding, it is theism that places us in the cosmos whole and wholly human.'

The Journal of Humanistic Psychology's special issue on William James

A new biography of Moses Mendelssohn

A website devoted to C. D. Broad (with his 'Autobiogrraphy' and several of his papers)

Ned Block reviews Damasio's new book 

From Philosophy Bites: Helen Beebee on laws of nature and Philip Pettit on group agency, Peter Singer on the life you can save

Kurt Gödel's ontological argument

A website devoted to Rudolf Carnap

Pierre Wagner on 'linguistic turn and other misconceptions about analytic philosophy'

Ben Granger on Hazlitt: 'He was prophetic in his critique of commerce, and of the narrow, selfish spirit of laissez faire individualism which it generates. Libertarian to the core in the true sense of this much-abused word, he saw straight through the gossamer thin arguments of those who use the word to defend big business, the lie that economic liberty for the rich few results in true liberty for society.'

On YouTube, Simon Blackburn on why Sam Harris is wrong

Margaret Midgley against humanism 

Rouven Steeves on Augustine, Calvin, Tolkien, Tocqueville, Hans Christian Andersen, etc. on evil (pdf)

Roger Scruton: 'The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.'

John Haldane objects to Stephen Hawking's dismissal of natural theology

Christopher Howse on Dummett's claim that 'a man's philosophy ought not to be controlled by his religious beliefs' and a putative example from Elizabeth Anscombe's life; and Howse on Anscombe's use of the doctrine of the double effect (see esp. the comments by Allectus)

Here's a podcast of Alan Saunders' discussion of the doctrine of the doube effect with a cancer surgeon and an ethics professor

Saunders' interview with Robert Wallace on 'Hegel and Hegel's God', a new sketch of Hegel's views at the Goethe Institute, and Saunders' conversation with Steven Nadler on the problem of evil

Videos of Don Marquis and Michael Tooley on abortion, Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson on philosophy in literature, and Barry Loewer and Tim O'Connor on emergence, quantum mechanics and consciousness

John Cornwell on Alasdair MacIntyre on money

Margot Lurie on Beauvoir's relation to Nelson Algren: 'A bit of cognitive dissonance sets in when one learns that The Second Sex was written while Beauvoir was romantically involved with a man whose calling card was his working-class virility, his easy assumptions of male superiority.' Rachel Kwan's review of Toril Moi's book about Beauvoir

Martha Nussbaum reviews a book on the history of US feminism: 'Modern feminist economists such as Amartya Sen (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development work) have argued that no theory of development based on the satisfaction of people's preferences could ever be normatively adequate: such a theory would always be an unwitting accomplice of an unjust status quo.'

Podcast interviews with Nussbaum, Sen and others from Chicago, and here's Nussbaum speaking on the value of the humanities, and here's the text of Jeffrey Williams' 2008 interview with Nussbaum 

From December, 2010: Nussbaum interviewed in The Telegraph (Calcutta)

Madame de Staël as quoted in Ruth Scurr's review of a new book about her: 'This new kind of authority in the State, of which neither the nature nor the strength was as yet known, astonished the greater part of those who had not reflected on the rights of nations.'

Andy Lamey on Montreal Marxist, G. A. Cohen

Habermas in the NY Times on the recent hotheadedness over multiculturalism in Germany

Nicholas Xenos on Leo Strauss: 'The prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.'

'Ernest Gellner: an Intellectual Biography' 

'A Fresh Look at Thomas Kuhn's Philosophy of Science'

David Kaufmann on Walter Benjamin: 'Benjamin ... wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one.'

Gordon Marino on Kierkegaard

More philosophy bits

Simone de Beauvoir

Katie Roiphe on the new translation of de Beauvoir's Second Sex

Melvyn Bragg talks to Jonathan Rée, John Haldane & Gwen Griffith-Dickson about William James' Varieties of Religious Experience
A review of a new book on Cardinal Newman

Two finds: the Goethe Institute has a set of introductions to German philosophers (from Leibniz to Tugendhat), and a list of the articles in the 'How to Believe' series at the Guardian

A review of two philosophy books about J. M. Coetzee's work

A review of Paisley Livingston's new book, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy
An article on Hannah Arendt in the Tehran Review

A look at Hans Sluga's 2008 study of Arendt & Carl Schmitt

Historian Isaac Kramnick on Lockean liberalism & the American Revolution

Historian Jeffrey Collins on Perez Zagorin's new book about Hobbes

Historian Samuel Moyn on some recent books about the Enlightenment: "[Jonathan] Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating" -- Moyn prefers Dan Edelstein's Terror of Natural Right

Brendan Boyle on Raymond Geuss' Politics and the Imagination. Here's a podcast of Geuss discussing utopian thinking

A. C. Grayling on Emerson

An April, 2010 article on Adam Smith by Amartya Sen (and here's a pdf of Sen's April, 2009 talk on Smith at the University of Glasgow)

Hume, Smith and Burke on 'dirty hands' ("the view that some forms of power, used properly, lead to guilt and bad actions")

Leibniz and the science of happiness. Here's an Aussie podcast in which Alan Saunders interviews Paul Redding & Simon Duffy about Leibniz

More recently, Saunders interviewed Ruth Abbey about Nietzsche

Martha Nussbaum on gay marriage & John Stuart Mill

A nice article on long-time religious skeptic Paul Kurtz

Here's a Philosophy Talk podcast in which Rebecca Goldstein discusses philosophy in fiction

All the Wittgenstein links you could ever want
H/t for some of these links to Bookforum's 'Omnivore' blog

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

At Bloggingheads, Daniel Schultz and Peter Beinart discuss Reinhold Niebuhr. Elsewhere, Schultz chides David Brooks for misinterpreting Niebuhr (one of President Obama's favourite philosophers). Here's Mike Wallace interviewing Niebuhr in 1958. And here's a discussion of Niebuhr by Gary Dorrien and Kevin Mattson from last November on Minnesota Public Radio

Ernst Cassirer -- Emily Grosholz on his humanism (with a quick survey of the neo-Kantians)

Heidegger makes it into Wired 's science blog

Vivian Gornick reviews Michael Sandel's book on justice, which is also reviewed by Richard Reeves (along with Sen's book on justice). Sen devoted his Demos Annual Lecture to the topic 'Power and Capability'

And here's a justice free-for-all (with Sandel, Walzer, Nussbaum, Pollitt, etc.)

David Harvey's guide to Marx's Capital

Judith Butler interviewed (ht Silliman's Blog)

Alan Saunders interviews Alan Hájek on probability on Aussie radio

On Bernard Baars' 'global workspace' theory of consciousness
A. J. Ayer's doctor has spoken about Ayer's near-death experience
A review of the Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky

Speaking of stimulating Anglicans, John Polkinghorne was interviewed (ht Books, Inq.)

A. N. Wilson wrote an introduction to the Gospel According to Matthew (ht 3:AM)

Baudelaire & the Beats (several neat YouTube clips of pop depictions of beats)

A biography of Dr. Seuss

Will Self on Bulgakov's White Guard

The English trans. of Michael Maar's book Speak, Nabokov received a couple of good reviews

On the Hungarian lit front, Deborah Eisenberg likes Dezso Kosztolanyi's Skylark

And the Neglected Books site has a piece on Miklos Bánffy's Transylvanian trilogy, about which the Telegraph raved in 2007 (and again in 2010)

Reading Uwe Johnson in NY

Vertigo digs up an early review of Sebald's Emigrants by Gabriel Josipovici
I hope Patrick White wins the 'lost' Man Booker Prize -- it'll serve him right

Denis Donoghue on Yeats, Pound and Eliot

I linked to reviews of these two books in my last load o'links: Germania is reviewed in the WSJ and John Gray reviews World That Never Was

The Economist on Moses Montefiore: "He joined forces with middle-class religious dissenters and evangelicals to help end the slave trade, underwriting along with Rothschild a £15m loan to finance abolition in the West Indies."

Elaine Showalter reviews Hilary Spurling's book on Pearl Buck. Here's Claudia FitzHerbert's review

Someone's started a reading group for At Swim--Two Birds
When I read something by Theodore Dalrymple, I want either to stand up and cheer or to punch my pillow. He's interviewed here

On-line discussion forum for the Chicago Manual of Style. (This marks me as deviant, but I really fell in love with this manual while writing my dissertation.)

China Miéville on J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories

Patti Smith interviewed on KCRW. (ht 3:AM)

Three reviews of a new book on Irving Thalberg, Sr., along with an interview with the author of an older book on him. Thalberg's son, Irving Thalberg, Jr., was a philosophy professor in Chicago

Potpourri

This is not a post about Schopenhauer -- well, it's only a bit about Schopy. I just love the photos of him. He always looks like he's on the verge of hurling a string of obscenities.

I've fixed up some old posts, esp. the ones on Vienna, mainly by replacing or deleting broken links. I've also added these blog scans in the right margin. What a neat tool!

Here are a few interesting web catches of late:

A tribute site for 20th-Century neo-Platonist stalwart, J. N. Findlay;

Marco Roth on (and against) the rise of the neuro-novel;

Pierce & Bekoff on something like morality in beasts;

An interview with Amartya Sen;

A review of a translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's book (I had to copy & paste that name);
Top ten ghostwritten books;

An old Guardian list of best authors (they shouldn't have believed the hype -- or maybe it's we who shouldn't);

A 1917 German propaganda film about a U-boat mission -- they sink ships, always evacuating the crews first, and take five British captains as POW's; shortly after the 30-minute mark: "Filming interrupted by the appearance of an English destroyer";

Wow! Olivia Newton John is Max Born's granddaughter (Born was a Nobel laureate);

Interesting new activity -- reading police blogs, some with disturbing titles, some quite thoughtful and into theory, some about life on the job, some about life on and off the job, some that had to be shut down due to pressure from on high, etc. etc.