Final batch of 2015 philosophy links

I begin the new year by trying to finish off the old one with this roster of philosophy links from the final third of 2015. I've done some housekeeping by adding new tags, including one for Jane Austen, about whom Barry Stocker has put up seven posts (see below).

Johannes Zachhuber on the relevance of Max Weber to the study of historical and contemporary religion (inc. a discussion of Peter Ghosh's book Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic': Twin Histories). Duncan Kelly's review of Ghosh's book in the TLS.

Robin Lane Fox's book on Augustine (Augustine: Conversions to Confessions) reviewed in the Financial Times by John Cornwell. Mark Lilla's review of the same book in the NY Times, and Sameer Rahim reviews it for the Telegraph.

Renaissance Mathematicus debunks the notion that Aristotle was a 'killer of science', and on the fruitfully mistaken phlogiston theory.

Joshua P. Hochschild: 'What's Wrong With Ockham? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West'.

Massimo Campanini on 'science and epistemology in medieval Islam'.

Harald Sack on 'Avicenna and the Islamic Golden Age'.

Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri interviewd by Nina zu Fürstenberg on processes of 'economic and social decadence'. 

A reflection on the life of Fatima Mernissi (1940-2015), 'the pride of Islamic feminism'.

Susan Gelman is interviewed about essentialismhttp://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-149-susan-gelman-on-how-essentialism-shapes-our-thinking.html.

Barry Stocker on 'Jane Austen and the Ethical Life', a seven-part series.

Soupy Sales nails it:



Danny Heitman on 'the talented Mr. [Aldous] Huxley'.

From the ManWithoutQualities blog: 'Oakeshott, Ivan Illich, and J. K. Rowling on 'School''.

Daniel A. Kaufman on C. S. Lewis' essay conceived in a toolshed.

Andy Wimbush reviews James Wood's The Nearest Thing to Life.

Ava Kofman on 'Nietzsche the space man'.

John Yargo on 'Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas'.

In the Lancet, 'Voices, Identity, and Meaning-Making' (Angela Woods on the Hearing Voices Movement).

The 'Madness & Literature' Network.

From Philip K. Dick's last interview:

The big turning point came when I was nineteen. ... I looked around at the world. And I said, Causality does not exist. It’s an illusion. And I talked with a guy who was in the philosophy department. I said, 'I suddenly realized it was all an illusion. Because, an effect follows something, B follows A, we think A caused B. But actually it just follows it. It’s a sequence. A sequence like a sequence of integers. They’re not connected.'

Patrick Wilcken reviews Adrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science.

Michael Roth reviews George Makari's Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind.

Nick Hopwood is interviewed about his book Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud.

The THE solicited book recommendations from academics.

Links on Jane Austen's moral philosophy

Thomas Rodham on Austen as a moral philosopher. (Here's Rodham's earlier post on Austen at his blog, Philosopher's Beard.)

Rose Woodhouse responds to Rodham's claim that Austen's insights as a virtue ethicist came 'at the expense of psychological insight'.

Sarah Emsley's book, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, is reviewed by Peter Graham.

Maria Comanescu on 'Aristotelian Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels'.

From Alice MacLachlan's review of E. M. Dadlez' Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume:

Many philosophers, most famously Gilbert Ryle and Alastair MacIntyre, have argued for an Aristotelian reading of Austen: in doing so, they draw on themes of moderation, the importance of habituation, the happiness that comes from practicing virtue with moderate resources, and the role granted to pleasure in the good life. Dadlez grants these Aristotelian elements in Austen, but argues that insofar as they are present in Austen, they are also present in Hume.

From Karen Stohr's 'Practical Wisdom and Moral Imagination in Sense and Sensibility' (pay wall, via Muse): 'I shall use Austen's Sense and Sensibility to examine the skill associated with knowing how to behave rightly in the sense we associate with propriety or decorum. This skill is essential to pleasant social life, and hence, on the Aristotelian view, to human flourishing.' Stohr's paper is in Philosophy and Literature, a search of which turns up several more papers on Austen and philosophy.

Mark Canuel focuses on the character of Fanny in Mansfield Park in 'Jane Austen and the Importance of Being Wrong' (pay wall, via JSTOR).

Philosophy professor Theodore M. Benditt on 'Fanny's Moral Limits'.

Sticking with Mansfield Park, Lorrie Clark follows up Ryle's suggestion (in 'Jane Austen and the Moralists' [pdf]) that Austen's novels take a stance similar to Shaftesbury's moral philosophy: Shaftesbury's Art of "Soliloquy" in Mansfield Park.

In his 'Jane Austen: a Female Aristotelian' (pay wall, via Sage), John Ely says, 'Through her novels, she reforms an Aristotelian ethics. She Christianizes it-again largely following the influence of Shaftesbury.'

On Austen's religious stance, here's a review (to which I liked in an earlier post) of L. M. White's Jane Austen's Anglicanism.

Siris thinks the relevance of Shaftesbury is overestimated.

In his After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre compared Austen with William Cobbett. There's an essay by MacIntyre called 'Jane Austen, William Cobbett, and Jacobin Virtues' in this study guide for Mansfield Park (published by Ignatius Press). I can't identify its provenance.

Sarah Emsley on Mansfield Park.

In 2010, Joyce Kerr Tarpley published (with Catholic University of America Press) Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

Eric Lindstrom in 'Austen and Austin' (pay wall, via T & F): 'Not until [J. L.] Austin's bracingly unconventional lectures were collected as a series of extraordinary books in the mid-twentieth century – a list that also includes his collection Philosophical Papers and the Austen-inspired Sense and Sensibilia – did Jane Austen's novels receive a philosophical counterpart adequate to her works' philosophical energies.'

A new collection on Austen's aesthetics from Rowman & Littlefield:

The essays collected in Jane Austen and the Arts; Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony examine Austen’s understanding of the arts, her aesthetic philosophy, and her role as artist. Together, they explore Austen’s connections with Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Madame de Staël, Joanna Baillie, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, and other writers engaged in debates on the sensuous experience and the intellectual judgment of art.

In 2004, Cambridge University Press published Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment, which is the focus of this brief review.

Anglicans -- mostly literary, some musical

Rowan Williams on 'the point of Narnia', which includes an excerpt from his new book on C. S. Lewis, The Lion's World: a Journey into the Heart of Narnia. Here's an interview with Williams: 'Why Rowan Williams loves C. S. Lewis'.

Peter Hitchens on Lewis.

Steve Donoghue reviews Daniel Swift's Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age.

From John Stubbs' review of John Drury's new biography of George Herbert: 'By then Donne was the dean of St Paul's and was finding new self-definition in a venue that demanded preaching "loose as the wind, as large as store" to fill its vast Gothic chamber. Herbert's path, on the other hand, lay towards minimalism, the quietness of retreat.'

A book by Laura Mooneyham White: Jane Austen's Anglicanism (on Google Books). Reviewed here.

'Is there an Anglican culture? Anthony Trollope and the Barchester novels.'

From a review of Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: a Life: 'The family included Quakers, Ulster Protestants, Wesleyan Methodists, Evangelicals, Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics and one famous Catholic priest, Mgr Ronald Knox. Fond of all (or most) of them, Fitzgerald decided that schisms were pointless and that all religions were really one, but also that faith was essential for life.'

An article on Rose Macaulay: '"Oh dear, if only the Reformation had happened differently": Anglicanism, the Reformation and Dame Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)', by Judith Maltby, appears in The Church and Literature. This volume also includes 'Jesuit Pulp fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civiltà Cattolica' by Oliver Logan.

I haven't yet read Macaulay's Towers of Trebizond but I've found these choice quotations from it online:

Then he stopped laughing, and said in the voice one uses when a friend has been killed by a shark, "You heard about poor Charles?"

I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet.

"Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The camel, a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump) from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe, had been a parting present, its saddle-bags stuffed with low-carat gold and flashy orient gems, from a rich desert tycoon who owned a Levantine hotel near Palmyra… I did not care for the camel, nor the camel for me, but, as I was staying with aunt Dot, I did what she bade me, and dragged the camel by its bridal to the shed which it shared with my little Austin and, till lately, with my aunt’s Morris, but this car had been stolen from her by some Anglican bishop from outside the Athenaeum annexe while she was dining there one evening.

I wonder who else is rambling around Turkey this spring. Seventh-day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, writers, diggers, photographers, spies, us, and now the BBC.

'Between 1991 and 1999 D.M. Greenwood produced a series of 9 ‘Ecclesiastical Whodunnits’ centred on the character of Deaconess Theodora Braithwaite. D.M. Greenwood is in fact Dr Diane M. Greenwood who, after teaching classics, took a position as what she described as a ‘low-level ecclesiastical civil servant’' in the Church of England.

Philip Hensher on the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth: 'She has her revenge: on her 100th birthday, all her books are in print, and every one is loved. We Pymmians toast her, even if we reflect as we raise our glasses, like Dulcie Mainwaring, that “there should have been wine… but she drank orange squash”.'

'Pym’s world is inhabited by an eccentric cast of winsome curates, pompous vicars and canons, enthusiastic students, vague professors, badly dressed clergy wives, aging men who live with their cranky mothers, bored civil servants, crotchety librarians, "splendid spinsters," dotty retirees, professed agnostics, titled nobility, "distressed gentlewomen" and discreet homosexual couples.'

Barbara Pym and the Sermon: 'If the sermons reported in the novels fail to satisfy her most reflective characters, a consideration of Barbara Pym’s own long-standing interest in John Henry Newman may offer insight into the kind of sermon that would have satisfied her and her creations.'

Rev. Richard Coles, formerly of the Communards. 'Former popstar, BBC presenter and parish priest Reverend Richard Coles talks to Caspar Melville about faith, doubt and dachsunds.' 'When he applied to train for the priesthood, the church’s medical officer asked if he had taken non-prescription drugs and, if so, which ones. ‘‘I only knew their street names, and he only knew their pharmacological ones. It was a very, very long phone call.’’'

Common Sense & Uncommon Sensibility

Gilbert Ryle, whose 'ordinary language' philosophy championed common sense (and whose physician brother invented the Ryle Tube). Peter Smith of Logic Matters has posted Ryle's paper on Jane Austen, 'Jane Austen and the Moralists'

Chris Power on Bruno Schulz's short stories, and John Self on Schulz's Street of Crocodiles

Mr. Waggish on Thomas Bernhard's nihilistic ranting evasions 

Philip Lopate on a new collection of Bernhard's addresses, My Prizes: An Accounting: "No one could be less accepting of the human condition, and so [Bernhard] tells the awards audiences that they are in for a future of endless cold, that life is meaningless and that Austrians are apathetic, megalomaniac, monotonous. Strangely, these speeches did not go over well."

E. M. Cioran 'belongs to the tradition of French and especially German aphorists, like Lichtenberg, Novalis, and finally Nietzsche.' According to the linked article (in The Hindu), Cioran regarded Meister Eckhart as the 'profoundest thinker of the Occident.'

Sean Kelly on 'navigating past nihilism'

A new biography of Romain Gary

Charles Taylor on 'The Meaning of Secularism'

From 2005, 'Schiller's relevance for us and for all times'

Literary Links

Ernst Weiss

Podcasts with Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, and many, many more

Eileen Battersby on Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, followed by an interview with Fallada's son
An excerpt from Herta Müller's Everything I Own I Carry With Me

David Auerbach on László Krasznahorkai

Video of Thomas Mann at the beach (wearing a tie)

The Canetti family: "In some Jewish families, the least admirable member may be the one who wins a Nobel Prize."

Stephen Vizinczey on Central European classics

William Gass on Knut Hamsun

Coverage of the latest pieces on Robert Walser

A description of P. D. Smith's Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-view of Science 1780-1955 (on Goethe, Büchner, Stifter, Musil & Brecht)
Christopher Byrd on Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham

Geoffrey O'Brien on Kleist

Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny

Providentia blogs on the Kaspar Hauser story

David Askew on Jonathan Swift
Kevin Hartnett on Haruki Murakami

Colin Marshall on the 'scientifically surreal, eerily erotic novels of Kobo Abe'
Joshua Willey on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence

CIM is collecting the tributes to David Markson

Allan Massie on a new collection of essays about Jane Austen

Jim Thompson -- 'a dime-store Dostoevsky'?