Mid-June philosophy & literature links

Wilhelm Dilthey

Mr. Waggish mentions Dilthey in the lead-up to some remarks on a passage by Hans Blumenberg. Telos has issued a call for papers for a special issue on Blumenberg (deadling: June 1, 2011).

Catherine Pepinster reviews John Cornwell's new book on Cardinal Newman, and here's Cornwell interviewed about Newman by Jonathan Derbyshire

Michael Ruse: 'Lament for the Humanities'

'Hegel at Georgetown -- The Master-Slave Dialectic'

A posthumous review by Martin Gardner, and here's an interview with Gardner in 1997

Roger Scruton on 'the conflict between value and price'

A nice intro to Bayes' theorem

Steven Laureys & David Chalmers on 'the hard problem' of consciousness. Here are the mp3's, etc. for Chalmers' John Locke lectures at Oxford (see his site for more).

Cian Dorr defends analytic metaphysics from Ladyman, Ross, et al. (More discussion here.)

'What is a law of nature?' A report on a meeting of philosophers & physicists, inc. Julian Barbour. The talks from this conference are on-line.

The New Statesman finds J. G. Ballard's answers for a mid-90's interview but can't recollect what the questions were

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, has a nice reply to Steven Pinker's NY Times attack

Simon Winchester is preparing a new book on Lewis Carroll

Transaction Publishers has re-issued Stefan Zweig's essays on Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac, and will soon (end of summer?) re-issue his essays on Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche. These two volumes are part of a projected trilogy of Zweig's works entitled 'Master Builders of the Spirit'. They include new introductions by Transaction's senior editor, Laurence Mintz. I can't find any indication of what will be in the third volume.

Zweig's previously unpublished novella, Journey Into the Past, will soon be published by New York Review Books, who will also be issuing the first full English translation of Gregor von Rezzori's The Ermine of Czernopol

An article about German translator, John E. Woods

"Writers have no more moral authority than plumbers or butchers," says Han Magnus Enzensberger.

Another review of Ernst Weiss's Georg Letham

Here's the text of the late Peter Porter's poem 'Wittgenstein's Dream' along with a recording of him reading it

Working towards a PhD online lets you explore more literature and study philosophers.

Stücke

Lotte Lenya

20 of Trakl's poems translated by James Wright & Robert Bly

3 of Walser's stories translated by Damion Searls (ht Wandering with Robert Walser)

Bildung Mendelssohn

Carolyn Kelly's article on Herta Müller

"Ernst Weiss ... was a physician and creative writer [who] found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers .... Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan."

Thomas McGonigle recommends works by Heimito von Doderer (and Peter Handke among others): "He is equal of Robert Musil and has the advantage of having completed his great books."

'The Dark Side of the Enlightenment' -- "Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed [Heinrich von Kleist] as an inspiration. Kafka called him a "blood-brother." But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read." (ht Dave Lull via Books, Inq.)

Mr. Waggish on Musil and Kant

Dan O'Hara interviews the creators of Hochhaus, a radio adaptation of Ballard's High-Rise

Update (Dec. 29): George Steiner on Thomas Bernhard

A logophilist on Herta Müller's The Passport