Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster in Spiked Review. Perhaps it is this yearning for a Catholic Shakespeare that must be given up in order to see Hamlet aright and see ourselves in its light. Perhaps we will have to dispense with the ghost’s prayer for an unadulterated life, for Catholic absolution, for an absolute. Hegel…
H/T to Jesse Norman and Nigel Warburton. Julian Baggini on the meaning of life What’s it all about, Alfie? bertrand russellBURT BACHARACHcilla blackHal DavidJulian BagginiPhilosophyt. s. eliot
THE HARVARD REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY vol.XII no.1 I particularly learned from his criticism of dividing philosophy into what he called ‘isms’ and schools of philosophy. He believed there were many philosophical questions and ways of arguing about them, but that attaching labels like ‘physicalism’ or ‘idealism’ to any particular way of answering philosophical questions was…
Just released: here’s The Guardian and Standpoint reviews, the latter mentioning Oakeshott. A.N. Wilson in The Spectator is far more critical. I have left Michael Oakeshott till last because his relationship with Iris was perhaps the most improbable of them all. A political philosopher of real stature, who had a short affair and a long friendship with…
Born on this day. Bryan MageeexistentialismFriedrich Nietzschej.p. sternPhilosophy
Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity … or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness. A VERY Oakeshottian (and Aristotleian) outlook. H/T to Troy Camplin for this. The reissue, introduced by none…
The in-press intro to the themed issue on philosophical approaches to social neuroscience, freely available here. CognitionCognitive neuroscienceconsciousnessMindreadingMoral psychologyPhil RobbinsPhilosophyPhilosophy of mindsituated cognitionsocial epistemologySocial Neuroscience
Born on this day — check out the obits along with Pears and Murdoch in discussion on the idea of freedom. When his book Ludwig Wittgenstein was published in 1971, Igor Stravinksy wrote to congratulate Pears on the beauty of his writing, which, wrote Bernard Williams, “combines in a very pure form the more conversational…
Susan Haack is one of my absolutely favourite living (and still very active) philosophers. The appellation Passionate Moderate had such deep resonance from the moment I read her eponymously titled book. (This is a great book to read if you are coming to formal philosophy for the first time: Susan writes without ever being “jargony” or condescending…
‘The Clarke Plato’: the oldest manuscript (discounting papyrus fragments) for about half the dialogues of Plato, perhaps once the first volume of a two-volume set. Commissioned by Arethas of Patrae (bishop of Caesarea, 902-c. 939), who paid 21 gold coins for the copying and the parchment, and added scholia in the margin in a tiny…
manwithoutqualities 