A Sea of Flowers

signandsight.com has some good writing, a cross-section of writing by European journalists. Not surprisingly, Europeans have a lot to say about the whether the religious and cultural values of Muslim immigrants, including their intolerant approach to other religions, their defensiveness of their religion's approach to symbols and feminism, can be allowed to supersede secular values. Dutch writer Margriet de Moor's essay "Alarm Bells in Muslim Hearts". There is a strong, thoughtful debate under the title of "The Multicultural Issue". There is recent feature called "Blind Exorcism in Poland", which reflects on the work of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the great writer, who made promises to the secret police in order to travel and write, but always managed to tell his stories, subverting the regime in the process.

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Last Sunday, I drove to Ladysmith. I have had a cold, and I didn't have the energy to ride, so I took a short trip up island. On the radio, Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition, with Enright interviewing Richard Dawkins. The interview is accessible as a Real Audio file - it runs to a little over 36 minutes. The interview was mainly devoted to Dawkins's identity as a public atheist and his arguments against religion, presented in The God Delusion. Enright gave Dawkins a chance to cover the main themes of the book, challenging him mildly on a few points. Dawkins lived up to his reputation as an intellectual Rottweiler, not by being rough or forceful, but by his intense focus and tenacity.

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The British publisher Icon Books has a series called Introducing .... The books are heavily illustrated, and tend to present in the style of graphic novels instead of conventional texts. I checked out Introducing Critical Theory, by Stuart Sim, illustrated by Borin Van Loon.

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This story starts with The Dawkins Delusion, a parody, which I found in Edge 202.

Continue reading "Does Dawkins Exist" »

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A check on the new acquisitions shelf at Greater Victoria Public turned up the 2006 revised third edition of the Granta Book of Reportage. Most of the pieces were in the first edition in 1993. Most of them are long, most are immediate and thoughtful and all are well-written. The thinking tends to represent the conventional wisdom of the British Left intelligentia, Germaine Greer's coverage of Women and Power in Cuba being nearly effusive in praising a Marxist, egalitarian social experiment. Some pieces were translated from East European publications. Ryszard Kapusicinski covered the 1969 soccer war between Honduras and El Salvador. Svetlana Alexiyevich's piece "The Boys in Zinc" distills the Russian occupation of Afghanistan into a series of short first person fictional narratives.

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Frans de Waal's popular books The Ape and the Sushi Master, and Our Inner Ape are entertaining, informative and useful. De Waal is leading expert on the behaviour of animals, mainly apes, and particularly chimpanzees and bonobos, as observed in colonies in the Arnhem and San Diego zoos, and in the wild.

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For fans of George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck", a discussion of the work and influence of Edward R. Murrow from the New Yorker: THE MURROW DOCTRINE, Why the life and times of the broadcast pioneer still matter, by Nicholas Lemann.

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Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and it stands as one of the most distinctive works of social criticism and commentary of the last three decades. Lasch used the term narcissism, a psychological term based on a myth, "as a metaphor for the human condition". Analyzing culture through a psychological, diagnostic metaphor is an experimental venture. Many writers fail. The bookstores and libraries are filled with half-baked social theories dressed up in medical jargon. And, of course, narcissism has become one of the catchphrases of popular psychology, with literally hundreds of self-help books mentioning narcissism in some way. Lasch's ideas stand out from a mass of inferior material.

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It was an impulsive purchase, which proved to be worthwhile. I was looking for something else in the Ideas and philosophy section of the Grant Park McNally Robinson store when I noticed Peter Watson's A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind. (ISBN 1-84212-444-7). With end notes and index, 847 pages of small type. It was the Orion Press British paperback edition. The book has also been published in the US as Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century.

Watson is a journalist, and an experienced writer. He seems to have an insatiable curiosity and wide interests. His other published work has tended to relate to the visual arts, but that only covers part of his work. His style is smooth and fluent, only occasionally lapsing into journalistic bombast and cliches.

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An article by Jim Holt in the New Yorker's Critics at Large column called "Say Anything" looks at Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, which I mentioned on February 25, 2005 and Laura Penny's Your Call is Important to Us, which I mentioned on June 14, 2005. It goes into Simon Blackburn's new book Truth: A Guide and a broad discussion of modern theories of truth and meaning. It's readable and useful. (I found this article through Arts & Letters Daily).

Continue reading "Fresher Bullshit" »

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Some of my web feeds are linking to articles about Jean Paul Sartre on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Online Edition of the Independent had one. The Boston Globe had another. Sartre gets a nod from Julian Baggini in the Sunday Herald, promoting David Hume for the BBC poll on the Greatest Philosopher. And Baggini has a Python quote: "David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel". Which may be true, although Hume was pretty boring, for a Scot.

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My review of Edward Craig's Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elleptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and mental needs and powers, living in societies speaking the same languages, living in finite space and time, living within the safety and danger of the natural world, living subject to the actions of other people, and living with the ability to do things that affect other people and the course of events. How do such beings understand themselves and make decisions about what to do?

The word mystery suggests a religious project, but philosophy is aimed at understanding mystery without trusting the stories of priests,prophets and gurus who claim to have had the mystery revealed to them or to have mastered a tradition based on relevation experienced by some individual person or persons in history. Religion rests on trusting stories of revelation and miracles presented by other human beings.

Continue reading "Philosophy or Religion" »

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Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction (ISBN 0-19-285421-6)by Edward Craig, is one of the Oxford University Press's excellent Very Short Introductions.

A few years ago I started to read Simon Blackburn's Think. I was thrown off by a few of the later chapters and never finished it. I have gone back into reading philosophy by way of some of Mortimer Adler's books. Adler likes to go back to Aristotle, and is hard on most of the philosophers since the Enlightenment. For reasons that I don't really understand, I have been finding that religious writing and serious theology, no matter how elegantly written and reasoned, does not carry a coherent vision. I am accepting that I am who I am - a stubborn and skeptical person.

Craig's approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed.

Continue reading "Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction" »

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From the news - a story in the (London) Times online about the BBC poll to find the greatest philosopher of all time. Marx has surged to the top of the list. He was the BBC's Great Thinker of the Millenium in 1999. The old Left has not lost its will to live after all.

The BBC poll site has its explanation for this exercise, and some resources including noted ideas, and expert appraisals. Useful, actually, but not as much fun as the song in Monty Python's Australian Philosophy department sketch. "Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar, he'd drink you under the table, Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am."

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Once again, a note about a philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler. He wrote Six Great Ideas in 1981. He divides the ideas into two groups. Truth, goodness and beauty are ideas we judge by, and liberty, equality and justice are ideas that we act on. His discussion of each idea is broken down into 3 or 4 short chapters. The book is around 250 pages long, divided into 28 short chapters.

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The History Channel in Canada broadcast "The Real Da Vinci Code" as a two hour show last night (March 23/05). Actor, journalist and politician Tony Robinson was the narrator and he brought a comic and sarcastic presence, honed in his appearances as Baldrick in Rowan Atkinson's "Blackadder" shows, to his role as debunker of modern myths.

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Here's another philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler, brief, well-organized and to the point. He wrote "Ten Philosophical Mistakes" in 1985. He was trying to explain why he had identified himself with Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in his autobiography. He identifies some key ideas associated with a series of philosophers, including Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Hume, Kant and criticizes their failings. His own ideas on these points go back in some instances to Aristotle and Aquinas, but in other instances he relies on modern criticism of the thinkers of the Enlightenment and the early modern era.

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In Michael Lynch's book about Truth, which I mentioned back here, he mentions Harry Frankfurt's paper "On Bullshit". It has just been printed as a very short book. The paper was available on line here and elsewhere, but Frankfurt's publisher - the Princeton University Press - has been asserting copyright. [Updated March 16/05; it was availabe when I wrote this post but taken down]. Frankfurt is going to be on The Daily Show. Blog news about that at Crooked Timber.

Continue reading "On Bullshit" »

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I picked out Truth in Religion, The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth by Mortimer J. Adler (see previous post)- as I was browsing at the library. It was a quick and worthwhile piece of reading.

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In the last couple of weeks I have been reading some books by Mortimer J. Adler, a teacher and writer with a broad grasp of the history of philosophy, and an advocate of living the examined life through understanding the "Great Ideas".

Continue reading "Great Ideas" »

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