Monday, March 29, 2010

Loads o'links on theology, philosophy & lit

At Bloggingheads, Daniel Schultz and Peter Beinart discuss Reinhold Niebuhr. Elsewhere, Schultz chides David Brooks for misinterpreting Niebuhr (one of President Obama's favourite philosophers). Here's Mike Wallace interviewing Niebuhr in 1958. And here's a discussion of Niebuhr by Gary Dorrien and Kevin Mattson from last November on Minnesota Public Radio

Ernst Cassirer -- Emily Grosholz on his humanism (with a quick survey of the neo-Kantians)

Heidegger makes it into Wired 's science blog

Vivian Gornick reviews Michael Sandel's book on justice, which is also reviewed by Richard Reeves (along with Sen's book on justice). Sen devoted his Demos Annual Lecture to the topic 'Power and Capability'

And here's a justice free-for-all (with Sandel, Walzer, Nussbaum, Pollitt, etc.)

David Harvey's guide to Marx's Capital

Judith Butler interviewed (ht Silliman's Blog)

Alan Saunders interviews Alan Hájek on probability on Aussie radio

On Bernard Baars' 'global workspace' theory of consciousness
A. J. Ayer's doctor has spoken about Ayer's near-death experience
A review of the Archbishop of Canterbury's book on Dostoevsky

Speaking of stimulating Anglicans, John Polkinghorne was interviewed (ht Books, Inq.)

A. N. Wilson wrote an introduction to the Gospel According to Matthew (ht 3:AM)

Baudelaire & the Beats (several neat YouTube clips of pop depictions of beats)

A biography of Dr. Seuss

Will Self on Bulgakov's White Guard

The English trans. of Michael Maar's book Speak, Nabokov received a couple of good reviews

On the Hungarian lit front, Deborah Eisenberg likes Dezso Kosztolanyi's Skylark

And the Neglected Books site has a piece on Miklos Bánffy's Transylvanian trilogy, about which the Telegraph raved in 2007 (and again in 2010)

Reading Uwe Johnson in NY

Vertigo digs up an early review of Sebald's Emigrants by Gabriel Josipovici
I hope Patrick White wins the 'lost' Man Booker Prize -- it'll serve him right

Denis Donoghue on Yeats, Pound and Eliot

I linked to reviews of these two books in my last load o'links: Germania is reviewed in the WSJ and John Gray reviews World That Never Was

The Economist on Moses Montefiore: "He joined forces with middle-class religious dissenters and evangelicals to help end the slave trade, underwriting along with Rothschild a £15m loan to finance abolition in the West Indies."

Elaine Showalter reviews Hilary Spurling's book on Pearl Buck. Here's Claudia FitzHerbert's review

Someone's started a reading group for At Swim--Two Birds
When I read something by Theodore Dalrymple, I want either to stand up and cheer or to punch my pillow. He's interviewed here

On-line discussion forum for the Chicago Manual of Style. (This marks me as deviant, but I really fell in love with this manual while writing my dissertation.)

China Miéville on J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories

Patti Smith interviewed on KCRW. (ht 3:AM)

Three reviews of a new book on Irving Thalberg, Sr., along with an interview with the author of an older book on him. Thalberg's son, Irving Thalberg, Jr., was a philosophy professor in Chicago

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Dodgson's math in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, math lecturer and logician.

Melanie Bayley wrote a couple of articles, one in New Scientist (behind a paywall) and the other in the NY Times, in which she discerns a mathematical satire in Alice. I first heard of her argument in Boing Boing, and it has received coverage elsewhere. Her claims have won agreement in some quarters but not in others (though she offers a rebuttal in the comments). [Correction (May 26, 2010): Peter Cameron, to whose comments the last link of the preceding sentence links, notes that he was not rejecting Dr. Bayley's hypothesis but merely reflecting on it.]

Dodgson wrote some works of popular math (pdf) and developed something called 'Dodgson condensation' (pdf). Robin Wilson's book, Lewis Carroll in Numberland, is a biography that focuses on Dodgson's mathematical efforts. There's also a book by Bernard Patten on the logic in Alice.

Update (March 24, 2010): NPR has coverage of Bayley's thesis. From the comments there I learned that Bayley cites the work of Helena Pycior as having introduced similar interpretive claims in the 1980's.

Update (May 26, 2010): Here's a piece on Dodgson by emeritus Oxford philosopher, J. R. Lucas.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Links on Fodor & evolution

What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, has provoked a lot of bloviating, ad hominem abuse. Probably, the best critical reply is that by Ned Block and Philip Kitcher. Here's an exchange between Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini and Block & Kitcher. There's also this excellent dialogue between Fodor and Elliott Sober. Sober wrote an earlier paper (pdf) about Fodor's views on evolution.

Update (March 22, 2010): Fodor and Sober continue their exchange on Leiter's blog. There's also this note by Terry Tomkow.

Update (March 23, 2010): Here's a new piece by Sober (pdf).

Update (March 24, 2010): Here's Fodor in TPM.

Update (March 28, 2010): Here are three posts by former or current Rutgers students.

Update (May 11, 2010): Here's Richard Lewontin's review in the NY Review of Books.

Update (May 13, 2010): Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarini have a letter in the April 28 issue of the TLS, in which they reply to Samir Okasha's review of their book.

Update (May 24, 2010): Robert Richards' review.

Update (Aug. 3, 2010): John Dupré's review, Peter Godfrey-Smith's review, Fodor & Piattelli-Palmarin's reply to the latter in the LRB letters section

Update (Aug. 11, 2010): Godfrey-Smith's reply in the LRB letters section

Friday, March 12, 2010

Gödel, Platonov, Brautigan, Goldstein and more

Kurt Gödel, whom P. D. Smith described as 'an uneasy amalgam of Einstein and Kafka'

Alan Saunders interviews Mark Colyvan on Aussie radio about Gödel. There's also this BBC4 radio interview on Gödel, but I can't get it to play

Can you imagine walking with Gödel and Einstein while they talked about Kant? Ah, but, you see, it is doubtful in our enlightened day that Kant was such a great philosopher after all

Peter Smith's site is the go-to resource for those who want an introduction to Gödel's theorems

Rebecca Goldstein recommends five novels of ideas -- Synchronicity! It so happens that I had just begun reading two of her picks, Herzog and Middlemarch, when I saw this. Herzog is among the many US bestsellers in this impressive database

Here are two reviews of Goldstein's book against God. She also had a book about Gödel, and here she is in dialogue with David Eagleman

And here are two reviews of Jerry Fodor's (and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's) book against some elements of evolutionary theory, presaged by Fodor's 2007 article in the LRB. According to the publisher's page, Noam Chomsky likes this book (which isn't to say that he agrees with its arguments). More here

Here's an Antipodean radio interview of Tzvetan Todorov about his defence of the Enlightenment, and here's John Gray dissecting the saccharine distortions in Todorov's book

Was Andrei Platonov Russia's greatest modern prose stylist? His book Soul was among Elif Batuman's four alternative modern Russian classics

Thomas Bernhard's publisher correspondence

Stephen Mitchelmore on Bernhard, Sebald and M. Amis

Last year, I linked to a spate of posts about Richard Brautigan and now there's been another spate, with pieces by Michelle Quinn, Robert Pincus and Billy Colllins

Fearing anarchy, Hobbes embraced tyranny

Fed up with tyranny, 19th-Century anarchists resorted to terrorism. Here are two reviews of Alex Butterworth's new book on them

Andrew Pessin's book, The God Question, looks like a good introductory text

Diarmid MacCulloch's History of Christianity looks good, too

Seamus Heaney interviewed

Travel stories by poets and novelists

Joseph Epstein on Svevo's novel Zeno's Conscience (ht Books, Inq.)

Literary translators in Germany face funding cuts

"To illustrate just how big this unresolved debt threat has become, [John] Lanchester (along with others) estimated that the total cost of the financial system bailout in the United States is bigger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase (in 1803, by President Thomas Jefferson), the New Deal (the 1930s), the Marshall Plan (1948-52), the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1961-75), the savings and loan crisis (the 1980s), the invasion of Iraq (2003) and the entire NASA program, including the moon landings."

Update (March 15, 2010): WRW on Daniel Medin's TLS review of Robert Walser's The Tanners

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

The King's College London cuts and related matters

The scandal at King's College London shows creeping managerialism to be now galloping out of control in true juggernaut fashion. One good thing about the controversy is that it has inspired some nice commentary, especially by Anthony Grafton (his article is now on the NYRB blog) and Iain Pears. As noted in a previous post, there's an excellent piece on related concerns by Simon Blackburn. See also Stefan Collini's article in the TLS last year. Finally, here's a blog with additional links to some of the relevant news coverage.

Gerhardie on patriotism

I just found William Gerhardie's posthumous book God's Fifth Column: a Biography of the Age 1890-1940 in a used-book store. I knew that Gerhardie was the author of some obscure but influential novels, but I didn't know that he had written a history book.

On p. 201, while discussing the beginning of WWI, Gerhardie has this to say about patriotism:

"Patriotism is not an evil, provided it is quiet. But a peaceful nostalgia for one's own land is better. It is competitive patriotism which is a bore and a general nuisance, being unblushing self-approbation anonymously multiplied and hurled at the throats of other similarly swollen fools."

This struck a chord with me in view of my own little shire's orgy of patriotic excess ('Own the podium!') during the Winter Olympics.