Philosophy links

Kadri Vihvelin and Terrance Tomkow didn't like Dennett's review of Mele's book on freedom: 'It is disgraceful because Dennett is coyly, with nodding winks and cunning smiles, inviting the reader to commit the ad hominem fallacy.'

Jerry Coyne didn't like John Gray's review of Dawkins' autobiography.

Michael Rosen reviews The Impact of Idealism: The legacy of post-Kantian German thought (four volumes).

'"Blind" to the obvious: Wittgenstein and Köhler on the obvious and the hidden' (by Janette Dinishak).

Sarah Bakewell's review of The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science (by Armand Marie Leroi). Also reviewed by Patricia Fara.

Frank Freeman reviews Emily Wilson's The Greatest Empire: a Life of Seneca.

Peter Thonemann reviews books on Thucydides by Neville Morley and Geoffrey Hawthorn. Morley's book is Thucydides and the Idea of History.

From Morley's post on the death of German novelist Siegfried Lenz:

It is the task of the novelist, as it is of the historian, to represent the complexity and ambiguity of life, against the tendency of politicians and businessmen to seek simple answers based on a limited number of suppositions and ends.

Baroness Onora O’Neill's Hansard Lecture: ‘Can Human Rights Be Justified?’

Cass Sunstein reviews Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (by Richard J. Evans).

Russ Roberts interviewed about his book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.

Benjamin Bilski reviews Vincent Azoulay's newly translated Pericles of Athens:

Writing with precision and avoiding clichés and anachronisms, Azoulay carefully balances the credibility of classical sources. He presents a convincing account of the stratēgos in the Athens that emerged from the Persian Wars as a fragile democracy in which Pericles played a central role as the city further democratised its public institutions and increased its power until defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

Martin Woessner reviews two books on philosophy and film.

'Under the tutelage of [Wilhelm] Herrmann, [Karl] Barth was from the beginning suspicious of metaphysics and its impact upon Christian doctrine.'

Richard Waters reviews Walter Isaacson's book The Innovators (on the post-war pioneers who laid the groundwork for Silicon Valley):

Unlike Jobs, who was in equal parts brilliant and obnoxious, those singled out for special mention by Isaacson freely share both ideas and credit for their discoveries. The writer is at pains to stress that innovation often works best when combined with a selfless, highly collaborative approach.

From BBC Radio3, Andrew Hussey on Camus.

Philosophy link-o-rama

Here are the podcasts from an Oxford conference on 'Religious Epistemology, Contextualism, and Pragmatic Encroachment'.

From Philosophy TV, Gregg Caruso and Neil Levy on consciousness and moral responsibility; and Al Mele and Eddy Nahmias on free will and science.

Over the past few months, Siris has developed an epic series of posts on the Platonic corpus (including writings that used to be in that corpus but which are now doubted to have been written by Plato). Here's a list of what had been covered by August 1. Since then, there have been posts on the Symposium and the Republic. Also, there have been four thorough posts on Plato's letters as well as posts on Alcibiades Minor, Clitophon, Hippias Major, Xenophon's Symposium, and Plato's Epigrammata.

At Partially Examined Life, the hosts 'walk a live audience through Plato’s dialogue [Symposium] about love, sex, self-improvement....'. They also have a recent item about 'Maimonindes on God'.

Elisa Freschi has a series of posts about a conference on Buddhist philosophy (inc. one on Buddhism and philosophy of mind).

Cambridge have posted podcasts for several symposia, including the following: Ian Rumfitt and Gary Kemp on truth and meaning, Hallvard Lillehammer and Roger Crisp on moral testimony, Gideon Rosen and Marcia Baron on culpability, duress, and excuses, Amber Carpenter and Stephen Makin on the ethical significance of persistence, and Tamar Szabó Gendler and Jennifer Nagel on self-regulation.

Cambridge have also posted Alan Millar's Inaugural Address and Michael Bratman's Routledge Lecture.

From Elucidations, Jeff Buechner's podcast on Kripke and functionalism.


David Auerbach has a series of posts on Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Barry Stocker has a series of posts in the field of 'philosophy and literature', including several on Vico. See also his posts at NewApps.

At In Our Time (BBC), Melvyn Bragg discusses the philosophy of solitude with Melissa Lane, Simon Blackburn, and John Haldane.

From The Encyclopaedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 'Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Moral Growth'.

From Philosophy Bites, Amia Srinivasan on Nietzschean genealogy and Roger Scruton on the sacred.

Some Roger Scruton quotations.

From the bio of Polish philosopher Henryk Elzenberg (who taught the poet Zbigniew Herbert):

Besides being motivated by his own philosophical inquiries, he took part in classes run by H. Bergson, F. Rauh, E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl and V. Delbos .... Elzenberg spent the years 1913-1917 on intensive studies on the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. ... In the autumn of 1916 ... his work Foundations of Leibniz's Metaphysics was presented .... It was followed by his third book (habilitation) entitled Marcus Aurelius. On History and Psychology of Ethics (1922).

John Gray on Kenan Malik's history of ethics and John Gray on Michael Oakeshott.

Ádám Tamás Tuboly's review of Greg Frost-Arnold’s Carnap, Tarski and Quine at Harvard.

Timothy Yu on 'Wittgenstein, Pedagogy, and Literary Criticism'.

Wittgenstein links from the British Wittgenstein Society.

The IEP entry for Victor Kraft; the SEP entry for Ludwig Fleck; and the University of Iowa's bio for Gustav Bergmann.

Historian George Mosse on Bergmann: 

Gustav Bergmann in philosophy was the most visible refugee on campus, a distinguished logical positivist, yet a difficult person, opionated and combative. ... Hardly any of his colleagues managed to get along with him. We clashed straight away about the Western Civilization course and much else besides. (George L. Mosse, Confronting History: a Memoir, p. 144)

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Summer literary links

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

The newly discovered Kafka texts in Tel Aviv and Zurich: "Among the papers found in the sealed boxes were letters to or from Stefan Zweig."

Robert Leiter reviews Amos Oz's Rhyming Life & Death

Colin Marshall interviews translator Suzanne Jill Levine about Borges

James Meek reviews four books concerning Tolstoy

Levi Stahl reviews Tolstoy's Hadji Murat

Aaron Stuvland reviews Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time

Lesley Chamberlain on Nabokov in Berlin

Staff Pick's at The Millions: Andrey Platonov's Soul

Adam Kirsch on two works by Hans Keilson: Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key

John Crowley looks back at Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game

Peter Swirski: "Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982) is a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in a thermonuclear age. It serves me as a starting point for a fresh look at the fundamental questions surrounding morality and altruism."

Professor Gauri Viswanathan interviews Salman Rushdie about religion and rights

David Burleigh on Meira Chand's A Different Sky

"[Jose] Saramago is known for committing mischief with religious and historical texts"

'The Best Magazine Articles Ever' (from the 1960's until 2010)

"Not all Baron Cohens are public figures"

Artists and writers each select five books for their summer reading list

Gödel, Platonov, Brautigan, Goldstein and more

Kurt Gödel, whom P. D. Smith described as 'an uneasy amalgam of Einstein and Kafka'

Alan Saunders interviews Mark Colyvan on Aussie radio about Gödel. There's also this BBC4 radio interview on Gödel, but I can't get it to play

Can you imagine walking with Gödel and Einstein while they talked about Kant? Ah, but, you see, it is doubtful in our enlightened day that Kant was such a great philosopher after all

Peter Smith's site is the go-to resource for those who want an introduction to Gödel's theorems

Rebecca Goldstein recommends five novels of ideas -- Synchronicity! It so happens that I had just begun reading two of her picks, Herzog and Middlemarch, when I saw this. Herzog is among the many US bestsellers in this impressive database

Here are two reviews of Goldstein's book against God. She also had a book about Gödel, and here she is in dialogue with David Eagleman

And here are two reviews of Jerry Fodor's (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's) book against some elements of evolutionary theory, presaged by Fodor's 2007 article in the LRB. According to the publisher's page, Noam Chomsky likes this book (which isn't to say that he agrees with its arguments). More here

Here's an Antipodean radio interview of Tzvetan Todorov about his defence of the Enlightenment, and here's John Gray dissecting the saccharine distortions in Todorov's book

Was Andrei Platonov Russia's greatest modern prose stylist? His book Soul was among Elif Batuman's four alternative modern Russian classics

Thomas Bernhard's publisher correspondence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Bernhard, Sebald and M. Amis

Last year, I linked to a spate of posts about Richard Brautigan and now there's been another spate, with pieces by Michelle Quinn, Robert Pincus and Billy Colllins

Fearing anarchy, Hobbes embraced tyranny

Fed up with tyranny, 19th-Century anarchists resorted to terrorism. Here are two reviews of Alex Butterworth's new book on them

Andrew Pessin's book, The God Question, looks like a good introductory text

Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity looks good, too

Seamus Heaney interviewed

Travel stories by poets and novelists

Joseph Epstein on Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience (ht Books, Inq.)

Literary translators in Germany face funding cuts

"To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, [John] Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings."

Update (March 15, 2010): WRW on Daniel Medin's TLS review of Robert Walser's The Tanners