All of philosophy, Whitehead famously quipped, is a footnote to Plato. Not only does Plato’s corpus cover almost everything that we have come to call “philosophy,” but many great (and minor) thinkers have spent careers writing commentary on Socrates’s famous student—footnotes to Plato. Beginning with the Hellenistic schools devoted to Plato and Aristotle, there were the Continue Reading …
Guardian.UK Reviews Bakewell on Montaigne
In this Guardian.UK review of Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer Nicholas Lezard characterizes the disorganized genius of Montaigne: So, just because Montaigne doesn't have a plan, this doesn't mean he can't be ranked with the great philosophers, because what he is doing is trying to teach us how to live, how Continue Reading …
David Brooks Reviews Hubert Dreyfus/Sean Kelley
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, conservative columnist David Brooks discusses the bookAll Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, Read the review. As a review, it's basically just a fancied up version of one of these blog posts (meaning he gets paid a lot of money to write it and so actually puts some energy into it): he sets out a Continue Reading …
WEIRD vs. World ethics
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes an interesting review of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happenby Kwame Anthony Appiah: read the review here. In evaluating our moral intuitions, we often reflect on whether this kind of phenomenology has resonance beyond other Western ("Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD)") points of view. Appiah's book Continue Reading …
Philosophy & Comedy – Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up”
I just finished reading Steve Martin's autobiography Born Standing Up - a comic's life, an honest and direct memoir about his youth and early life experiences which shaped the development of his unique comedic style. The book covers the time from his childhood through to his 30's when he walked away from stage performing to do movies and other media. I am old enough to Continue Reading …