More quotations about facts

(Part I from last May)

G. E. Moore (1953): '"Facts" is a very ambiguous word, although it is so constantly used as if it were clear.' (Some Main Problems of Philosophy, p. 306)

Henry Philip Tappan (1844): 'By fact, we mean phenomena, — something which we know by observation merely. Facts are of two kinds: 1. Facts of the Senses, or external observation. 2. Facts of the Consciousness, or internal observation.' (Elements of Logic, p. 427)

William James (1907): 'The facts themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are.' (Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Lecture VI. Pragmatism's Conception of Truth)

W. R. Dennes (1932): 'Facts are events. ... [T]he facts propositions report are qualified and related events which occur and cease but are not true or false.' ('Fact and Interpretation', Studies in the Nature of Facts, vol. 14 of the University of California Publications in Philosophy [Berkeley: University of California Press]: 98)

L. Susan Stebbing (1930): 'A fact is not an event. ... A fact is anything that is the case. ... Facts simply are; they are neither true nor false. Only propositions can be true, or can be false.' (Modern Introduction to Logic, p. 36)

Talcott Parsons (1949): 'A fact is not itself a phenomenon at all, but a proposition about one or more phenomena.' (Structure of Social Action, Part 1, ch. 1, p. 41)

Henry S. Leonard (1957): 'Propositions, or states of affairs, are either true or false. If a proposition is true, it is called a fact. If it is false, it is said not to be a fact. Thus, facts are true propositions.' (Principles of Reasoning: an Introduction to Logic, Methodology, and the Theory of Signs, p. 47)

Bernard Bosanquet (1885):

English custom has always recognized 'fact' as to some extent a middle term between Thing or reality, and the knowledge which is in our heads. Fact is always conceived as relative to knowledge, whereas thing and reality rather imply independence of knowledge. ... [W]e regard fact as belonging, no doubt, to reality, but as existing for us by construction and especially by abstraction, as the embodiment of it in judgments conclusively shows. I have little doubt that most men would unhesitatingly affirm the existence of things apart from percipient intelligence, but if asked the same question about facts they would be puzzled and would probably decide in the negative. Unknown facts, although a simple process of reflection forces the notion of them on the mind, are felt to be a troublesome conception. Thus I think that common-sense recognizes the true nature of that (viz., fact) on which it chiefly relies, far more correctly than we admit if we confuse fact with thing and reality, or on the other hand with the unformed datum of sense. (Knowledge and Reality, pp. 45-6; [Emphasis added])

Sven Edvard Rodhe (1939): 'The view that the truth of a judgment lies in its correspondence with a fact meets with the difficulty that a fact qua such and nothing else cannot be conceived as given otherwise than in judgments. We never attain to more direct contact with facts than in our judgments, and, unless mutually contradictory judgments are accepted as equally true, the correspondence of the judgment with fact can only be interpreted as its agreement with other judgments. The demand for accordance between judgment and fact is a demand for accordance between judgments, since the answer to the demand for fact is no fact but judgments.' ('Correspondence and Coherence', Theoria [Jan., 1939]: 23)

W. V. Quine (1987): 'Or perhaps we settle for a correspondence of whole sentences with facts: a sentence is true if it reports a fact. But here again we have fabricated substance for an empty doctrine. The world is full of things, variously related, but what, in addition to all that, are facts? They are projected from true sentences for the sake of correspondence.' (Quiddities, p. 213)

'Scientism' 12 - James, Dewey & Mueller

Twelfth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, & 14).

William James used 'scientism' in a few letters. The first such letter was addressed to his father's friend James John Garth Wilkinson (a Swedenborgian). James wrote to Wilkinson about the latter's book Greater Origins and Issues of Life and Death. In the letter (dated March 8, 1886), James wrote of his desire

...to protest against the sottish sect of "scientists" so far as it is a sect - which of course it is on an enormous scale.... Science carries its own remedy in its method and will slough off each successive crust of scientism that tries to harden over it, before it has had time to set. (James, letter to James John Garth Wilkinson [March 8, 1886], The Correspondence of William James, v. 6: 1885-1889, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley; [Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004], p. 125)

'Scientism' appears in two letters that James penned in later years, one of which was sent to James Mark Baldwin (in Jan., 1889) (Ibid., p. 477) about Baldwin's critique of James' 'Will to Believe'.

As was noted in an earlier post, James used the even more ungainly word 'scientificism' in his published work. Why didn't he use 'scientism' instead? Perhaps he thought it had associations with more conservative religious authors; or, perhaps, in an effort to play up the supposed folly of scientism, he opted for a more ridiculous, comical phrase.

I said in my 6th post of this series that John Dewey was taken for a paragon of scientism by some of his contemporaries. Further evidence of that tendency may be found in a review from 1949 by Roy Wood Sellars. In the course of discussing some lectures by R. B. Perry, Sellars said:

This is James' meliorism with fideism. God is the mightiest champion of the good. Not so much of this remains in Dewey, with his increased scientism and humanism. (Sellars, 'The Cook Lectures: "Characteristically American": A review of a distinguished philosopher's five discussions of fundamental aspects of American life, as recently presented to University audiencess', The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus [1949]: at 190)

Finally, in 1936, Gustav Emil Mueller (a Swiss-American philosopher) published Philosophy of Our Uncertainties, which included a chapter called 'The Four Fallacies of Scientism'. Mueller there said:

We now proceed to examine the mongrel scientism. Its position may be stated as follows: The universe is an object of scientific knowledge; what remains of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences. This maxim raises a legitimate issue against 'popular' pretensions to solve 'the riddle of the universe' in competition with scientific endeavors, and by wholesale and 'intuitive' methods of their own. We now turn to the criticism of the fallacies implied in it, if it is meant as a metaphysical position and not merely as a regulative, pragmatic maxim. (Mueller, Philosophy of Our Uncertainties [Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936], p. 70)

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.

'Scientism' 6 - a Chicago School? (cold war)

Sixth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I looked in the New York Times archives for that publication's first use of 'scientism'. Excluding an earlier use in connection with Christian Science, the term 'scientism' first appeared in the Times on July 15, 1923, in a story about William Montgomery Brown, an Episcopal Bishop in Arkansas who was later deposed for heresy after he became a Marxist materialist. Here's the cover of one of  Brown's later books:

In 1920, Brown published Communism and Christianism, in which he embraced 'naturalistic scientism in its socialist form' (p. 127). He contrasted scientism, according to which 'only scientifically demonstrated facts count in any argumentation' (p. 91), with 'supernaturalistic traditionalism' (p. 127), which he repudiated.

So, already in 1920 scientism is associated with Marxism (this time by someone who affirms the doctrine).

There's quite a gap between this occurrence of 'scientism' and its next appearances in the Times, which were prompted in the early 1940s by two figures: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Hutchins led the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s as its President and then Chancellor. He's known for having pioneered the 'great books' model of education. In his book Education for Freedom (1943), he warned that 'the cults of skepticism, presentism, scientism and anti-intellectualism will lead us to despair' (p. 38).

In the Nov. 16, 1942 issue of the Times (p. 22), a Times reporter summarized Archbishop Sheen's presentation at St. John's University in a report titled 'Mgr. Sheen Assails Worldly Philosophy'. Sheen is there said to have called for 'stamping out the barbaristic barnacles of misdirected progress, scientism, and relativism.' The Times reporter says that according to Sheen, 'the seed of Japanese aggression was sown in the training given Japanese exchange students by American universities that espouse utilitarian philosophic systems.' Sheen is then quoted as saying, 'Pearl Harbor ... had the effect of killing every pragmatic philosopher in the United States.'

The reference to 'every pragmatic philosopher' is intriguing. John Dewey was charged with scientism by Hutchins and by Hans Morgenthau, who met Hutchins at the University of Chicago. (For more on Morgenthau, see the 2nd post in this series.)

Another opponent of Dewey's, the early Chicago-school economist Frank Knight, preferred a term even uglier than 'scientism'. Here's Knight in a 1933 paper:

On the one hand, as Scylla, is the absurdity of Behaviorism. ... On the other side is the Charybdis of Nihilism, perhaps momentarily the nearer and more threatening of the two reefs. Of course, the two are related; nihilism is a natural correlate of "scientificism." (Frank H. Knight, contribution to 'Six Criticisms of "The Arbitrary as Basis for Rational Morality"', International Journal of Ethics 43 (1933): at 148)

In 1936, Knight again used 'scientificism', this time in a discussion of Dewey's book Liberalism and Social Action, where Knight wrote: 'From the standpoint of human liberty, a rationalistic philosophy will virtually begin where scientificism is bound to end.' (Knight, 'Pragmatism and Social Action', International Journal of Ethics 46 (1936): at 235) Later, in the 1940s, Knight switched to the more popular 'scientism'. He used that word twice in his 1946 paper 'The Sickness of Liberal Society' (Ethics 56 (1946): at 94-95).

[Added (Dec. 24): It turns out that William James used 'scientificism' in at least two of his papers: 'The Dilemma of Determinism' (1884) and 'Reflex Action and Theism' (????), both collected in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).]

So, the popularization of 'scientism' owes partly to three influential authors who overlapped at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. Two of them (Knight and Hutchins) began using the term (or something like it) in their 1930s polemics with John Dewey. The third (Morgenthau) adopted the term later and also applied it to Dewey's views.

Added (Jan. 22): For more about Dewey and James, see post 12.

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. 

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'.
 

Philosophy bits

William James

Gertrude Himmelfarb on William James and the new atheists.

Last spring, I wrote about Colin McGinn's stinging review of Terrence Deacon's book. Now, Deacon has responded with a letter to the NY Review of Books, to which McGinn replies.

Robert Boyers on novels of ideas (with remarks about Turgenev, Philip Roth, Ondaatje, Naipaul, Pamuk, Hitchens, etc.).

Michael P. Lynch gives reasons for reasoning (in a critique of Jonathan Haidt).

Here's a three-part series by Liz Williams on Karl Popper in the Guardian. And here's the site for the Guardian's series 'How to Believe' (with material on Donne, Milton, Aquinas, etc.).

The Guardian's obituary for Ray Billington, a former Methodist preacher and former atheist who was drawn to eastern religions.

The latest mp3 in the University of Chicago's series, Elucidations, has N. Asher talking about the philosophy of language.

'What do animals think?' -- a talk given by Tim Crane at Cambridge University. And here are Kristin Andrews and Robert Lurz on 'Animals and Mindreading'.

An Oxford podcast with Sir Roger Penrose speaking about AI and consciousness.

Here are some podcasts from the Northern Institute of Philosophy, the latest of which is a discussion with Crispin Wright. 

Terry Pinkard's review of Eckart Förster's Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction.

Philosophy links & Beckett's film

Georg Reimers

Here's a podcast in which Robert Zaretsky discusses the friendship and dispute involving Hume and Rousseau.

A review of Ann Thomson's Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment.

Two new entries in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, one on Shaftesbury, one on Goethe 

A review of Janice Carlisle's book about John Stuart Mill's 'character and sense of self.'

Jonathan Rée on William James: 'He favoured philosophy too, but not the dreary timidity encouraged by what he called “the PhD Octopus”, nor the stupefying smugness and philistine cleverness propagated by a posh young Englishman called Bertrand Russell.'

Turning from the history of philosophy to the philosophy of history, my library finally has access to the relatively new Journal of the Philosophy of History, a recent issue of which includes Celina María Bragagnolo's paper, 'Secularization, History, and Political Theology: The Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt Debate'.

Re. the history of the philosophy of history: W. H. Walsh wrote one of the standard introductory books on the philosophy of history. Daniel Little has posted a discussion of it, as well as a second item, situating Walsh in the idealist tradition.

A new, open-access journal on Wittgenstein (ht Language Goes on Holiday), and Oxford University Press has made several journal articles on Wittgenstein publicly available, as has the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

David Auerbach posts some quotations that illustrate how Rudolf Carnap viewed his philosophy in the context of contemporary artistic and political movements.

Here's a short film by Samuel Beckett with the following description: 'A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film ... in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts.'



Paul Boghossian argued against moral relativism in a NY Times piece, in which he objected to a 2001 article by Stanley Fish. Fish replied to Boghossian. Now, Boghossian has posted a masterful reply.

In that debate, Fish said that philosophy doesn't much matter outside the classroom. Bookforum's 'Omnivore' has posted a series of links under the heading 'Does philosophy matter?'

'Does Anything Matter?' by Peter Singer.

Mark Oppenheimer on Charles Taylor on 'how the Western liberal can reconcile a preference for liberal democracy with the illiberalism necessary for cultural preservation or self-preservation, which many accept as understandable goals.'

James Wood discourses on Taylor, Virginia Woolf, The Tree of Life, Max Weber, Philip Kitcher, etc. while reviewing The Joy of Secularism.

A podcast of Alan Saunders' interview with Martha Nussbaum.

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

August religion links

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University has a good collection of articles on the civil rights movement and on King's theological influences (inc. entries on Barth, Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the social gospel movement, a tradition that wielded much influence in my home and native land). King's work is situated in the tradition of African-American preaching in Preaching With Sacred Fire, ed. Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Here's an NPR interview (ht) with Simmons. The interview includes a recording from a sermon by C. L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father).

The influence of this same tradition on President Obama is analyzed by Ronald F. Thiemann, and it's the subject of this CNN piece, which features quotations of Gustav Niebuhr, Richard Crouter (whose new book on Reinhold Niebuhr was just released), and former Senator John Danforth.

Two more reviews of Newman's Unquiet Grave, one by Terry Eagleton and one by Anthony Kenny
Francisco Ayala: 'Evolution can be religion's friend'

Siris has an interesting treatment of James' 'Will to Believe'

Gary Gutting poses challenges to theists and to atheists

Laura Miguélez reviews Stephen Williams' The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity

From Gordon Marino's article on Kierkegaard: 'Philosophers gravitate toward epistemological problems such as what makes a belief true or false. Kierkegaard, however, is unusual in that he fixes his attention firmly on the belief or appropriation side of knowledge: on our personal relationship to ideas.'

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

On-line philosophy works

In my philosophy classes I try to use on-line readings when possible. It saves students some money and it provides one with a searchable text. There are many sites where these philosophical texts can be found, but they vary in quality (esp. when the texts are translated).

I'm listing here some of the sites with classic texts in philosophy that I like to consult. I won't link to Episteme since, though it has been an excellent resource, that site became corrupted and I haven't heard that it has recovered.

A. Early Modern
First, it appears that the more important philosophical texts in the early modern era are the most widely available on-line. Here are some of the relevant sites:

1. This Marxist site has lots of texts by Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Berkeley, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Adam Smith, etc. (They also have works by Heidegger, Carnap, Godel, etc.).

2. This Idaho site has many early modern works, including lots of Locke, Kemp Smith's translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Latta's translation of Leibniz's Monadology, and works by several of the lesser figures of that period. In fact, the list of texts runs into the 1800's (ending with Schelling). Translations tend to be older, but respectable. I noticed, though, that some of the links are broken.

3. Jonathan Bennett's early modern texts are very helpful, especially for students. Bennett has posted several texts on-line "with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought." Works by the six big early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume) are included, as are works by Adam Smith, Richard Price, Newton, Thomas Reid, Hobbes, Malebranche, Anne Conway, Jonathan Edwards, etc. There are even excerpts from Kant's first Critique and a few texts by John Stuart Mill.

4. Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.

5. Finally, here are the complete works of David Hume.

B. Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard & Nietzsche
As mentioned, some of Immanuel Kant's works are available at the above sites. One can also find a recent translation of the Critique of Pure Reason by George Macdonald Ross. Here is the orginal German version, and here's another copy of Kemp Smith's 1929 translation; this last version includes a "PERL driven search engine." Stephen Palmquist has put together a glossary for this work.

For Hegel, here is a recent translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit by Terry Pinkard.

Here are some of Kierkegaard's books and several works by Nietzsche.

Walter Kaufmann's lecture, 'Sartre and the Crisis in Morality'.

C. Analytic Philosophy

Much of Bertrand Russell's work is on-line.

Selections from Dewey, James and several philosopher-psychologists (inc. Wundt & Stumpf)
'Scholarly editions of Wittgenstein's works and Nachlass' from the University of Begen's archives, along with many essays about Wittgenstein. Other 0n-line works by Wittgenstein appear in the right menu of the blog 'Methods of Projection'.

Lots of Wilfrid Sellars' works are available, including Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, among other Sellarsian texts and resources. There's also a pdf of Sellars' Notre Dame lectures (of which there's an incomplete audio recording).

The HIST-Analytic site has many papers and books (or parts of books). Many, but not all, are pdf's. There are several selections from works by Mach, Russell, G. F. Stout, Pritchard, Moore, Broad, C. I. Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel, Ramsey, H. H. Price, Dray, D. C. Williams, Hart, Grice, Rawls, etc. Elsewhere, there's Herbert Spencer's First Principles.

Volumes 1-14 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science are now on-line.

I found the penultimate draft of John Searle's 'Minds, Brains, and Programs'. Many recent on-line papers in the philosophy of mind are linked to at David Chalmers' site.

If I teach formal logic again, I'll consult this Handbook of Modal Logic as well as Ryckman's Logic Works.

D. Ancient & Medieval Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion
I don't teach ancient or medieval philosophy, but here are two good lists of resources (the latter of which includes many links to modern texts on religion as well). Here's a site that has 'Christian classics', including many medieval texts. This Fordham site gathers links to medieval humanities texts.

I'm sure there are lots of other on-line translations of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers' works, but this is a good start. I found only some old translations of Plato (inc. Jowett's translations) via these two sites. And here are some of Jowett's Plato translations for the iphone. I also found W. D. Ross's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. John Holbo has posted his new translation of Plato's Euthyphro, Meno and Book 1 of The Republic.

This site lists more than 200 modern philosophy of religion texts that are on-line (including many books), including some by Tillich and some by William James. Speaking of James, here's his Varieties of Religious Experience. The Mead Project has posted excerpts from some of A. N. Whitehead's books. Whitehead's Religion in the Making is available elsewhere.

Here's a pdf of Ian Ramsey's paper, 'Talking of God: Models, Ancient and Modern'.

At the Alex site you can search by author's name for e-texts in the humanities, including many philosophical works. I'm not sure how widely the searches range -- many of the above sites don't turn up there -- but it does at least locate works that are available on Gutenberg. Also, the University of Adelaide's library has a list of e-texts in the humanities (again with many of the great works in western philosophy) that are accessible via that library and via other sites, too (inc. Gutenberg). Finally, many on-line classic philosophy works can be located at the Online Books Page.