EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

In the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt) in The Swerve. The author sees […]

Part of the ‘Little History’ series (http://www.littlehistory.org/) from Yale University Press this book takes on a very big subject: the glorious span of literature from Greek myth to graphic novels, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter. John Sutherland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutherland_(author)) is perfectly suited to the task. He has researched, taught, and written on virtually every area of literature, and his infectious

James Wood’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wood_(critic)) call for a comedic moral seriousness in fiction is handsomely reviewed here http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/may/22/featuresreviews.guardianreview6   The depth and brilliance of Wood’s insights left me amazed, and I hope they will have the same effect on you. The Irresponsible Self  was first published in 2004. 320 pages in Jonathan Cape ISBN 978-0224064507 James Wood

In an age when relativism of judgement is hardly ever questioned it’s a rare experience to go back to a confident assertion that there is such a thing as literary taste, and that this can be cultivated. Arnold Bennett (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett) offers a literary canon here. First published 1909. Does it match your expectations? 94 pages in Create

What happens when we accept that everything we feel, think, and experience stems not from an immaterial soul but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? That is the question at the heart of this 2013 book by Patricia Churchland (http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/index_hires.html), one of the pioneers of neurophilosophy. In a narrative detailing her own personal and

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking,the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life, is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Snell) writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and

A half-century after its translation into English, Erich Auerbach’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Auerbach) Mimesis (originally published 1946) still stands as a monumental achievement in literary criticism. A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. Auerbach’s aim was

This is a fine introduction to the philosophy of a highly influential German thinker from the first part of last century – Max Scheler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Scheler) 205 pages in Bucknell University Press ISBN 978-0838752289 Max Scheler  

The title is a reference to a fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilocus: πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (“the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”). In Erasmus Rotterdamus’s Adagia from 1500, the expression is recorded as Multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. The fable of The Fox and the Cat embodies the same idea.