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 […]
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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
Touching a Nerve by Patricia Churchland Read More »
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
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Nora Roberts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Roberts) a.k.a. ‘J.D. Robb’ is a prolific writer by any standards. She has over 200 titles to her name(s). It is by the pseudonym that Roberts writes the series of futuristic science fiction police procedurals featuring NYPSD Detective Eve Dallas and her husband Roarke. There’s certainly a lot of death on Robb’s mind – this 2013 outing is
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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
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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
Guardian of Dialogue Read More »
In the 1960s within academic theology a movement emerged called ‘The Death of God’ theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_God_theology). Acknowledging the increasingly secular temper of the age, attempts were made to re-cast religious beliefs and theological notions in terms that could be accepted by secular minded people. The conviction was that religious belief and practice were not worthless
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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.
The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin Read More »
Anthony (‘A. C.’) Grayling gives us a scholarly yet accessible portrait of this most passionate writer who was also a philosopher, painter, critic, and radical political thinker – William Hazlitt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hazlitt). The life of William Hazlitt is set in the context of its disturbed times, showing how his work and life interpret each other. The
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