There was a day and age when rural peasants in England scarcely journeyed outwith the sight of their local parish church spire. Young beauty Tess Durbeyfield’s village is Marlot in Dorset. In order to escape her rural poverty Tess (whom Hardy describes as ‘a pure woman’) follows a clue that the family might be connected to nobility. In […]
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Read More »
This book is a landmark achievement in anthropology and evolutionary biology from the polymath Jared Diamond. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond) It is no less than a wholescale assessment of human existence. How did we evolve to dominate so many other species and what is the long term future for a creature that shares 98% of its genes with chimpanzees?
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond Read More »
This book is a one volume introduction to Western intellectual history. Richard Tarnas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tarnas) takes us on a journey from the Greeks to postmodernism. The contemporary world of postmodern thought, according to Tarnas, is caught “between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational
The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas Read More »
Nausea (La Nausée, 1938) is the diary of one Antoine Roquentin whose systematic introspection leads him into a frame of mind in which he senses himself absolutely free in a meaningless world. He is overcome with a dizzying nausea to understand that with the radical contingency of freedom comes responsibility – a responsibility to invest
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre Read More »
71 year old Coleman Silk, Dean of Athena College in New England, has been driven from his position by mischievous accusations of racism. After the death of his wife he takes up Faunia Farley, an illiterate milkmaid and cleaner at the college, who is half his age and has suffered a terribly battered life. Approaching the
The Human Stain by Philip Roth Read More »
An ocean liner cannot turn round on a sixpence. Neither can human nature spin itself away from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Humans are a bundle of pleistocene instincts dressed by Marks & Spencer with some clever gadgetry to hand. Robert Winston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Winston) expertly dissects the deep human motivations that are really in
Human Instinct by Robert Winston Read More »
The mind-body problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dichotomy) is as old as philosophy itself. Modern science proceeds with the assumption that the category of subject matter under investigation is physical. How can this accommodate consciouness and mental causation, though? These seem not to be reducible. Qualia (the ‘felt experience’ of the conscious mind, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) seem particularly resistent. Jaegwon Kim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim) offers a fresh
Physicalism by Jaegwon Kim Read More »
There is not much of a plot to this novel of 1955. Humbert Humbert, European emigree literature professor, develops an obsession with 12 year old Dolores Haze, the daughter of his landlady. They take a road trip together after landlady Charlotte (and briefly Humbert’s wife) is killed by passing traffic. In gorgeous, lyrical and seductive prose (over which
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Read More »
In this novel of 1935 two children, strangers, wait in a well appointed house in Paris: Leopold for his mother, whom he has never seen, and Henrietta for a train. Upstairs an old woman lies dying and her daughter flutters round her. Little does Henrietta know what fascinations this Fisher house contains. There are secrets that have the potential
The House in Paris Read More »
