Historical episodes
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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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A.J. Ayer vs. Mike Tyson
from Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers. I have no idea if there is any truth in it. It took place in Manhattan at the party of Fernando Sanchez, a fashionable underwear designer (not many philosophers get invited to underwear designer parties). Ayer was talking to a group of models when a woman 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 