Quoting Marie Jahoda

Otto Neurath let me participate in a seminar devoted to the translation of Freud's Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse into positivist language. I need hardly say that the attempt failed. The conclusion I drew from it was that the tasks of social psychology should be tackled empirically, not philosophically. -Marie Jahoda ('The Emergence of Social Psychology in Vienna', British Journal of Social Psychology 22 (1983): 345)

Quoting a Victorian cleric

Children, we all know, are the clearest and most merciless of logicians. The only fault in their reasoning about the conduct of their elders is, that it is too mathematical. They allow nothing for the friction of actual life. They do not understand the difficulty of working abstract principles into conduct. -The Rev. Professor E. Johnson ('On "Bishop Blougram's Apology"', 1882)

Poetic Berkeley, prosaic Hume

Wolfgang Breidert has a paper about some of the many poems that refer to Bishop Berkeley ('Berkeley Poetized' in Reexamining Berkeley's Philosophy, 2007) . Berkeley's referred to in poems by Alexander Pope, C. H. Sisson, Kenneth Rexroth, etc.

There's this bit from one of Lord Byron's poems: 

When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
       And proved it—'twas no matter what he sald:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
       Too subtle for the airiest human head  (from Don Juan, Canto 11)

And Berkeley pops up in two poems by W. B. Yeats: 'The Seven Sages' and 'Blood and the Moon'.

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme  (from 'Blood & the Moon', 1928)

All of these poems are noted by Breidert. 

Breidert doesn't discuss poetic invocations of David Hume, but my own googling has turned up few lyrical mentions of the great skeptic. Poor Hume is 'ungrateful Hume' in a poem about whist (Whist: a poem in twelve cantos by Alexander Thomson, 1791); and, in a poem written upon his demise, Hume is condemned as 'the modern Midas' ('On the Death of David Hume' by William Julius Mickle, 1776) chiefly because he had bad-mouthed Spenser's poetry. Thomas Blacklock sang Hume's praises but that doesn't count -- Blacklock was impoverished and received financial support from Hume.

Granted, Paul Muldoon's Madoc: a Mystery has sections headed 'Berkeley' and 'Hume' (and 'Kant', and 'Frege', and 'Meinong', and 'Husserl', and 'Putnam', etc.etc.), but those headings seem to have little to do with the poetry.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired by Hume but seems not to have let this show in his poetry. Was Hume too toxic even in Shelley's day? If so, couldn't Shelley have fit Hume into a private poem (with an eye to posthumous publication)?

If I'm not mistaken, Berkeley has had more attention from the poets than most other early modern philosophers. Is the attraction due to his philosophical views? If so, one would expect Hume to have featured in more poems owing to the similarity between his and Berkeley's ideas. Or does Berkeley get the poetic limelight because he drew Dr. Johnson's ire?

Update (June 22, 2014): Byron's Don Juan is loaded with philosophers. Locke's referred to in the 15th and the 17th cantos. Other philosophers in the poem are Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Machiavelli, both Bacons (Francis and Roger), and 'Professor Kant'. No Hume, though. I guess in Byron's time, Hume was primarily remembered (if at all) as a historian rather than as a philosopher (even though it was Hume's philosophy that influenced Shelley). 

Here's a nifty site where you can enter searches for "poems about...." For example, poems about Kant, about Hegel, and about Hume. Only 6 of the 10 search results for Hume are about David Hume. Four of the remaining poems are of little interest and two are by George Crabbe. Hume gets no love from the poets. I don't see Thomson's, Mickle's, or Blacklock's lyrics among the search results.

Update (June 23, 2014): John Koethke mentions Hume in a poem called 'The Constant Voice' (2002), which has a line about Hume on sympathy. Koethke's a philosophy professor. (In 'Like Gods' Koethke refers to David Lewis and Frank Jackson. Koethke's 'Book X' is about Plato and quotes a line of J. L. Austin's.)

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)

 

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)

Max Black & George Grant in a 1960 TV show on CBC

What a find -- in CBC's archives for the show Fighting Words! The show's initial run was from 1953 till 1962. It had a 'talking heads' format -- the guests would discuss and debate a series of topics fielded by the host, Nathan Cohen. I've put below a clip from a 1960 episode featuring Cornell University philosopher Max Black, Canadian philosopher George Grant, actress Tony Robins, and newspaper editor Michael Barkway. The show has merits -- I haven't seen video footage of Black and Grant apart from this clip -- but it illustrates a weakness of many intellectual talk shows on TV in that the guests can seldom finish a thought before being cut off. Cohen, Barkway, and Black smoke throughout. The show's focus is on issues in what we would now call 'applied ethics'. The conversation about espionage (in the latter half of the clip) occasions some remarks on the state by Black and Grant. Max Black at 14.19: 'To apply moral terms to a state is to commit a mistake in logic'. Black seems to be denying the possibility of corporate agency.


Other episodes of this show featured Robertson Davies, Brendan Behan, J. B. Priestley, Morley Callaghan, and Norman Mailer.

Max Black completed his graduate work in philosophy under Susan Stebbing's supervision at the University of London. Probably the most well-known person whose graduate work was supervised by Black (at Cornell) is the novelist William H. Gass.

Black's family includes several accomplished academics. His daughter, Naomi Black, was a poli-sci professor at York University in Toronto, where she lived with her husband, S. P. Rosenbaum, a Bloomsbury scholar. One of Max Black's brothers was Sir Misha Black, a professor of industrial design in the UK. This bio of Sir Misha provides more information about Max Black's other two siblings (Sam and Betty).

Links re. female authors, mostly early-mid-20th-Century and mostly British

Jack Paar interviews Mary McCarthy in 1963. How many layers of sexism are in Paar's introduction of McCarthy (at 9.03)?


Kate Hext on the 3-volume The Women Aesthetes: British writers, 1870–1900: 'The Women Aesthetes is based on a fair assertion that the critical excavation of the women Aesthetes may have been vibrant, but it has hitherto been partial.'

Matthew Walther celebrates Elizabeth Taylor (not the movie star), author of Angel, which Hilary Mantel lists as one of her three favourite Virago Modern Classics books (the full list appeared in the Telegraph in 2013). The Telegraph has published Taylor's short story 'The Blush'.

Also in the Telegraph, here's a quotation from Alan Hollinghurst's piece on Penelope Fitzgerald, which will be included in 4th Estate's re-issue of Offshore:

In Offshore (1979) she turned to the years, her lowest and most difficult, living on an old Thames sailing barge on Battersea Reach; later, Human Voices (1980) would draw on her years of employment at the BBC during the war, and At Freddie’s (1982), her most exuberantly comic novel, on her time as a teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. Offshore too is at times very funny, though tonally it is the most mercurial of all her books.

A. N. Wilson's review of Hermione Lee's Fitzgerald biography. Edward Platt on 'brilliant and mysterious' Penelope.

From 1982, Penelope Fitzgerald's review of Virago's edition of Charlotte Mew's poetry and prose.

Sameer Rahim (in the Telegraph) on Muriel Spark's novels and 'rackety life'. The Complete Review has posted a review of Spark's Ballad of Peckham Rye: 'Peculiar stuff, all of it, but with a strange appeal too.'

From Bookforum: 'In The Informed Air (New Directions, 2014), a new collection of Muriel Spark's criticism and occasional prose, Spark joins the chorus with a paean to her own cat, Bluebell.' Here's the paean 'Ailourophilia'.

Maggie Smith in Spark's Prime of Miss Jean Brody:


Elizabeth Wassell reviews the first two volumes of the Edinburgh edition of Katherine Mansfield's collected works.

Michael Schaub on Lorna Gibbs' biography of Rebecca West.

A note on Richard Mabey's biography about Flora Thompson. The bio is called Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey. A longer review, by Rachel Cooke, in the Guardian. Here's a 2008 piece on Thompson that Mabey contributed to the Guardian.

The Telegraph has an excerpt from Rebecca Mead's Road to Middlemarch: 'Eliot was absolutely convinced of her duty to instruct and enlighten. She thought a great deal about the moral effect of her works upon her readers, even if she rarely articulated her intentions in 140 characters or fewer.'

Jessica Ferri on Penelope Mortimer. From 1999, Mortimer's obituary in the Guardian. From 2011, Daphne Merkin analyzes Mortimer's novel The Pumpkin Eater.

Here's a scene from the movie version of Pumpkin Eater (1964), the screenplay for which was written by Harold Pinter, featuring Anne Bancroft and Maggie Smith:


'Leavell notes that in 1932, when Marianne [Moore] was writing her poem “The Jerboa,” she was in such an extreme psychological state that she “began saying ‘cookie dust’ with no explanation.”'

Amanda Craig on Jane Gardam's Stories: 'She is easily the equal of Katharine Mansfield, Alice Munro and Helen Simpson, but strangely obscure in this country, despite winning the Costa/Whitbread prize twice, being short-listed for both the Booker and the Orange and holding the Heywood Hill Prize for a lifetime contribution to the enjoyment of literature.'

Neat song, neat cars:

Some Blunden links

Carcanet has published a volume of poetry by John Greening. Most of the poems are addressed to WWI poets. The volume also includes translations of some German and Austrian poets (e.g., Trakl and Heym). One of Greening's poems is 'To Edmund Blunden (Ypres)', read by Greening on YouTube.

Greening on Blunden:

Here was a war poetry that had never quite left Pound’s ‘dim land of peace’. It was comfortable with syntactical inversion, ‘poetic’ diction, literary allusion. It described nature. Blunden wrote of shepherds as others might mention bus conductors. He assumed readers knew the difference between an ash and an elm, could recognise a coppice, had heard of a hame, a garth.

Another quotation of Greening, this time on Blunden's preferred mode of pastoral being stressed to the breaking point on the western front: 'The period 1914-18 was a stylistic turning point. You see it in the work of someone like Blunden, who wants to be a conventional pastoralist, but whose style is almost torn apart under the pressure of events (his ‘Third Ypres’ for instance).'

Also from Carcanet, Fall in, Ghosts: The War Prose of Edmund Blunden, ed. Robyn Marsack.

From Michael Slater's 1997 review of Overtones of War (ed. Martin Taylor):

A most valuable feature of this edition is Taylor's inclusion of all Blunden's post-publication handwritten annotations to poems, made in 1929 and 1954: against "A.G.A.V." he wrote, "Shot himself in a fit of despair, 1924, after long mental misery ... Vidler had been badly wounded, and could not endure many years after though always full of friendship and humour."

'...but we could do nothing except just stare....'

WWI literary links

Artists Rifles, Salisbury Plain (1914)

Source.

Serpent's Tail has a new edition of Frederic Manning's Her Privates We. Here's Manning's earlier version of that book, The Middle Parts of Fortune.

A few years ago, Serpent's Tail also re-issued Fear by Garbriel Chevallier (trans. Malcolm Imrie). Imrie's award-winning translation of the novel is about to be re-issued by New York Review Books (with the same Introduction by John Berger). Here's Tobias Grey's review in the WSJ.

Jean Echenoz's 1914 is reviewed at Tony's Book World, and at the Mookse, and by Max Byrd at the NY Times, and by Martha Hanna, and by M. A. Orthofer at Complete Review.

Last year, Alma Books published a bio of Flora Sandes, 'the only Western woman to enlist as a soldier in the First World War'.

Also from last year, Lydia Kiesling on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

A TLS survey from last fall of some recent anthologies of WWI poetry.

Here's a good site with brief entries for several English-language WW1 poets, and another good list (from the same site) of WWI works of  fiction, memoir, and drama.

Vayu Naidu summarizes the proceedings of the Royal Society of Literature's program Voices of the Great War. A 90-minute podcast of the program is available. On it you may hear Michael Longley reading from several of the great WWI poets' works.

Derwent May reviews two books, one on Wilfrid Owen and one one Sigfried Sassoon.

The new book on Owen is by Guy Cuthbertson and was also reviewed by Jason Cowley, by Ferdinand Mount, and by none other than Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury.

The one on Sassoon is by Jean Moorcroft Wilson and combines material from her earlier, two-volume Sassoon biography. This shorter version has also been reviewed by Piers Plowright. Wilson was interviewed about Sassoon a few years ago at the BBC.

Here's a substantial article from 1998 (just before vol. 1 of Jean M. Wilson's bio appeared) by Mark Bostridge about Sassoon's post-war travails.

George Simmers on some of the controversy arising from realistic accounts of WWI brutality in Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed. It was controversial, but in 2002 it was re-issued by Annick Press, a publisher of books for children and young adults.

Peregrine Acland's All Else is Folly is now available on-line.

WWI author C. E. Montague

Charles Edward Montague, a Guardian journalist who volunteered to serve in France although he had earlier been opposed to the war.

'Although forty-seven with a wife and seven children, Montague volunteered to join the British Army. Grey since his early twenties, Montague died his hair in an attempt to persuade the army to take him. On 23rd December, 1914, the Royal Fusiliers accepted him and he joined the Sportsman's Battalion.'

He was a 'journalist; author of a number of acclaimed books; 24th Battalion Royal Fusiliers, 1914; full sergeant (grenadier-sergeant), 1915; lieutenant; captain (intelligence); press-officer; after the war one of the authors in the 20's that wrote devastatingly of WWI. Disenchantment was his rather philosophical book about World War I combat.'

Here's a detailed summary and analysis of Disenchantment, according to which, 'The book is ... difficult to read, full of allusions to events, perhaps well-known then but now obscure, packed full also of references to Thucydides, Shakespeare and other allusions of a classic liberal education.'

From Montague's diary (Dec., 1917):

To take part in war cannot, I think, be squared with Christianity. So far the Quakers are right. But I am more sure of my duty of trying to win the war than I am that Christ was right in every part of all that he said, though no one has ever said so much that was right as he did. Therefore I will try, as far as my part goes, to win the war, not pretending meanwhile that I am obeying Christ, and after the war I will try harder than I did before to obey him in all the things in which I am sure he was right. Meanwhile may God give me credit for not seeking to be deceived. (Quoted from the above-linked Spartacus bio.)

Several of Montague's works are available on-line.