Books
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Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts
Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The occult in the age of enlightenment (Yale UP 2013). In 1650, scientific thinking could not be separated from fascination for alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, spell casting, and prophecy – for short, “the occult”. By 1815, the separation was pretty definite, even if attempts to confound the two persist to this… Continue reading
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Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters
Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters (Random House, 2013) The overall purpose of the book is to describe the Enlightenment as an intellectual phenomenon, a matter of ideas being thought and books being written, published, and read. There is little attention paid to what we might call the material conditions of history… Continue reading
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Israel, A Revolution of the Mind
Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (Princeton UP, 2010). This book is based on lectures Israel gave at Oxford in 2008 in honor of Isaiah Berlin. The overall aim is to show how modern democracy emerged from the tension between Moderate Enlightenment and Radical Enlightenment. The chief maxim of Radical Enlightenment is “that all… Continue reading
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Review of Phillipson’s Hume
Review of Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Many people know of David Hume the great empiricist, the skeptic of causality, and the architect of a moral system based on natural sentiments. But in his own day, Hume was most famous as an historian and political analyst. This book helps us by… Continue reading
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Nicomachus, Introduction to Arithmetic
Nicomachus’s Introduction to Arithmetic is not merely about numbers. It is a treatise aimed at providing a mathematical metaphysics for all entities of any quantity or size whatsoever. It is said that Plato had a sign above the entryway to his academy: “Let no one enter who is ignorant of mathematics”. Nicomachus (c. 60-120 c.e.)… Continue reading
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Ah, libraries.
“Sit in your local coffee shop and your laptop can tell you a lot, especially if you wield your search terms adeptly. But if you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will still have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stone stairs. There – as in great libraries… Continue reading
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Book review: why the Enlightenment still matters
Book review by Ollie Cussan of Pagden, The Enlightenment and why it still matters, in Prospect: The Enlightenment’s great achievement, Pagden argues, was to repair the bonds of mankind. Its distinctive feature was not that it held history, nature, theology and political authority to the scrutiny of reason, as most of its critics and many… Continue reading
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The world of Anathem
In the beginning, Father Cnoüs had a dream. What it really was is anyone’s guess, but his two daughters interpreted it in different ways. Hylaea believed she saw a world of perfect forms, the intellect’s heaven. Deät believed she saw a world ruled by an imperial deity and his angels – I don’t know whose… Continue reading
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Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle
One of my summer projects has been to read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. It’s a three-volume set which includes eight separate novels he wrote and then combined. I’m a touch intimidated by even trying to summarize, but here goes. The saga ranges over the years 1640-1714 (roughly), following three principal characters: Daniel Waterhouse, a British… Continue reading
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Wolff, The Ideal of the University
“And I for one will break a lance for the theory of the great tradition at least as one element in an undergraduate curriculum. We deal here in matters of intellectual taste, about which there is much disputing, but no deciding. I cannot truthfully claim that men are inevitably spiritually crippled by their unfamiliarity with… Continue reading
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Kitcher’s view on science & the humanities
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the topic – most of it myopic, in my estimation – but Philip Kitcher, in an essay in the New Republic, contributes a perspective that is informed, clear, and judicious. As usual. Excerpt, from the conclusion: We are finite beings, and so our investigations have to… Continue reading
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Hume, the mind, and the world
(Reflections on Peter Kail’s Projection and Realism in Hume’s Philosophy. Oxford, 2007.) The main point of this book is to understand what Hume thinks we “project” upon the world, and what Hume thinks really does exist apart from our perceptions. In the first part, Kail shows that Hume’s account of how we come to believe… Continue reading
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Please join my campaign for illiteracy
Begin today. Find a child in your neighborhood, and unlearn them reading. “[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it; they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember… Continue reading
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On Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition
This is an interesting and insightful book on Nietzsche’s philosophy and on ancient skepticism generally. I really admire Berry’s ability to adopt and clearly express judicious opinions, and her ability to anticipate readers’ questions and objections and she moves through her story. This is the best book on Nietzsche’s philosophy I’ve seen in quite a… Continue reading
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Getting the 4-1-1
I recently read James Gleick’s book Information: a history, a theory, a flood. It’s a fascinating account of our varying relationships to information. For a long time, we were only set on getting as much of it as we could; then a theory of information developed in the 20th century (principally by Claude Shannon); and… Continue reading
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Homer & Langley: recluses and hoarders
I just finished E. L. Doctorow’s novel, Homer & Langley. It’s a retelling of the true story of Homer & Langley Collyer, who, by the time they died in the late 1940s, lived in a place that looked like this: The Collyer brothers were born in the 1880s and lived until 1947 in their parents’… Continue reading
Huenemanniac 