No comments about John Stuart Mill.

3 comments about Isaiah Berlin - Selected Letters 1928-1946.

1. "Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscrete to intimate friends', opines the remarkable Berlin in this collection of his early letters. Isaiah Berlin is one of the most engaging figures of twentieth century letters, and this early first volume stretches from his school years, through to his classic work on Marx, thence the war, and subsequent Cold War. Berlin the witty conversationalist manifests in these epistolations, with their colorful background amidst ominous political events of high drama.



2. Few philosophers in the twentieth century have had more of an impact on their times than Isaiah Berlin. Born in Russia in 1909, he immigrated to Great Britain with his family in 1921, where he went on to a fantastically successful academic career, first at New College, Oxford, then as a fellow of All Souls. His burgeoning career as a young philosopher (during which time he wrote his excellent short biography of Karl Marx) was put on hold by the Second World War. Though initially destined for the Soviet Union, he ended up in the United States, where he wrote weekly surveys of American politics that were unmatched for their insights and still reward reading.
   
   Berlin's insights were not just reserved for his superiors in London, though, as they infused his correspondence with his family and friends. This book, the first of three projected volumes, collects the letters he wrote during these early years, giving us a unique view of the man and his times. The Isaiah Berlin we see in these pages is witty and perceptive, not just about the people he encountered but about himself. His pride in his identity as a Jew is also apparent, and the letters chronicle his interaction with the flourishing Zionist movement of the 1940s as well as his involvement in academics and his work for the British embassy.
   
   Berlin's erudition also is evident in these pages, as is his penchant for name-dropping. Navigating through the people and places he writes about is a monumental task, and one that the editor, Henry Hardy, performs admirably. His footnotes provide an indispensable guide to the letters, vastly increasing the reader's understanding of Berlin's activities and encounters. The result is a work that offers a window into life in interwar Britain, the politics of wartime America, and the life of a great intellectual who lived in the world rather than apart from it.



3. If you are interested in Isaiah Berlin, and in understanding his roots and evolution, this is the book for you. These letters cover the period of 1928-1946, and deal with some very fascinating topics such as Oxford in the 1930's, Berlin's service in Washington and New York during World War II, and a cast of well known British, Continental and American characters. The collection is immeasurably enhanced by yet another superb job of editing by Henry Hardy, including an extended preface, extensive notes and a biographical directory which save the American reader from becoming too lost. But Berlin being Berlin, the letters are sometimes overly long, may deal with mundate topics, can be maddeningly repetitive, or lose one in the intricacies of Oxford and the academic life. Berlin is absolutely unrestrained in his comments, both pro and con, since these were meant to be private letters, and his views of some fellow academics can be devastating. However, he can positively support some individuals, such as H.L.A. Hart whose initial appointment as Fellow and Philosophy Tutor at New College Berlin strongly advocated. The book is dedicated to Hart's wife who provided indispensable assistance to Hardy in putting all this material together. As the letters illustrate, Berlin's prolonged struggle in writing his book on Karl Marx goes a long way toward explaining why his book output was so limited and he preferred to express his thinking in essays. This first volume concludes when Berlin is 37 and has returned to Oxford. By this point in the letters, one begins to have a very solid grasp of Berlin's character, interests, interactions, and ambitions. "Berlin on Berlin" is beyond question the best way to come to know and understand him.

1 comments about The Book of My Life (New York Review Books Classics).

1. Girolamo Cardano's THE BOOK OF MY LIFE is a very typical entry into the lists of the New York Review of Books Classics: fairly obscure except to Renaissance historians, Cardano was an enormously important Italian mathemetician, scientist, and astrologer who also wrote an account of himself, his nature, and his life. Cardano's experiences in 16th-century Italy are extremely complex and colorful, and he recounts not only his problems with his children and his many enemies, but also his birthsign, his experiments, and his encounters with supernatural beings. The book isn't quite as enthralling as you hope it might be, and in the foreword Anthony Grafton comments on the limitations of this translation (which hearkens back to the 1920s)--given this, you wonder why NYRB didn't commission a new and more faithful translation. The book is intriguing enough but doesn't exactly pass the time quite in the enjoyable way the NYRB Classics seem to be intended to do.

3 comments about Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life: 1861-1907 (The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner).

1. Steiner's autobiography is a real classic, telling of his childhood in central Austria, his antics as a schoolboy, and his youth in thriving Vienna. It is an inner narrative about the events and impressions that shaped him, written in the last two years of his life. This Complete Works edition is copiously annotated by Paul Marshall Allen, who explains many references that, while understandable to German speakers in 1925, have since become obscure.



2. As long as this book is, it does get boring at times.
   
   The whole autobiography is described in purely external events, and done in the most detatched and objective way imaginable. That's why I think that it's stale in the beginning and middle sections.
   
   It all starts to get interesting (for me) around 1900 when he gets involved with the Theosophical Society, then the occult action and drama picks up and doesn't let up. And right when you least expect, it abruptly ends, in 1907.
   
   This is very intriguing because you think that he will talk about his spiritual experiences throughout but he doesn't. He just keeps it on the physical all the way, and it's like he does it on purpose. He only rarely mentions anything spiritual, but when he does, he does in an almost "intellectual" way, it's very strange!
   
   I give it 3 stars because as much as I love Steiner, it still is too long of a book and somewhat tiresome. A lot of the what he talks about really doesn't means mean much to me in the long run, Eg: going to this place and hearing about the personality of this guy etc. I don't understand why he includes such random details? (as interesting as some of them are).
   
   I would recommend reading others' reminiscinces and recollections of Steiner rather than his own autobiography.
   
   But it is a necessary read for any Steinerite at least once. His language demands that you take leaps and bounds within your own thinking to meet him on "his" level.



3. If you are wondering how to approach the work of Rudolph Steiner, this autobiography is a great place to start. It gives an excellent presentation of the development of Steiner's ideas, including how he was influenced and who he worked with and why. The extensively researched endnotes lead to an endless array of avenues for further study of people and ideas associated with Steiner. Steiner's methodology for his own studies serves as inspiration for anyone who wants to delve more deeply into his work.

3 comments about Kant's Life and Thought.

1. It has been so long since the original German version of this biography of Kant was written by Ernst Cassirer in 1916 (and first published in 1918, due to "the delay inflicted by the war on the progress of the edition of the complete works," (p. 2) according to the Foreword by Ernst Cassirer dated August 14, 1918) that it might be considered quite proper that the recent biography of Kant by Manfred Kuehn deserves to be much more modern in its point of view. My review of Kuehn's book emphasized how modern Kant ought to be considered for someone who lived in his times. Kuehn also put a major emphasis on Kant's desire for perpetual peace, a topic which might have been considered questionable for anyone writing in German at the time when Cassirer was writing this book for use as a supplement to the study of Kant's complete works.

   I should admit that I have not attempted the study of Kant's work in the manner for which this book is meant to be a guide. I might even be considered too political to be offered a position on such a faculty, so I have no expectation of ever becoming a professional philosopher, and furthermore, I might even be so comical that I would dare to consider Cassirer and Kant as representative of philosophers in the way that Merry and Pippin were typical of hobbits in the movie cycle, "The Lord of the Rings." The set of 4 DVD disks covering the first movie, "The Fellowship of the Ring," allows easy access to specific points in the movie, and scene 44, "The Breaking of the Fellowship," on the second disk, shows the two hobbits (knowing that Frodo Baggins was the only important target) acting as decoys, crying, "Hey! Hey, you! Over here!" Logically, this follows scene 40, "The Fighting Uruk-hai," in which Saruman declares his creation, the Uruk-hai, a perfect creature for war, much as Prussia is described as a highly disciplined place during Kant's life in this book. Philosophically, Kant's writings, which reflect his use of thought processes, can be selected and their relevance to "The whole moral voice of the Enlightenment, as it lived in the purest and greatest spirits," (p. 83) are here demonstrated as logically as Pippin and Merry's exclamations, "It's working!" "I know it's working! Run!" could be considered a histrionic reflection of the admiration for tactics similar to the praise for Kant's philosophy which this book exhibits.

   This book also exhibits an eagerness to bring God into every discussion in a manner which has become much less popular as the experience of the godly has been tied detrimentally to the likes of Osama bin Laden in the last hundred years or so. My interest in the early part of the book was primarily in comparing the competing Cosmologies of that time. Kant's early work, UNIVERSAL NATURAL HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE HEAVENS (March 14, 1755), which was dedicated just three months before Kant became a doctor of philosophy on the strength of his treatise, DE IGNE (ON FIRE), was not well known in his time because "The publisher had gone bankrupt while the work was in press; his entire warehouse was sealed up, and therefore this book never came onto the market." (p. 40). In attempting to think beyond the laws of motion which had been established by Newton for a Kantian cosmogony which Kant derives from such laws, "The planetary world in which the sun, acting with its powerful attraction from the center of all the orbits," (p. 47) is considered the cause of the planetary system, and particularly accounting for "the `unanimity of the direction and positions of the planetary orbits'." (p. 49) Kant also uses this explanation "in order to think of it as in proportion to the power of the Infinite Being, it must have no limits at all." (p. 47). Newton could have come to the same conclusion about the origins of planetary motion "if instead of seeking the physical bases of the system of astronomical phenomena exclusively in its present state he had turned his gaze backwards to the past of the system, if he had pushed forward from the consideration of the systematic state of the universe to its systematic becoming." (p. 49).

   The big jolt in Kant's cosmology was caused by his attempt to comprehend a heavenly system of a different kind, described in Part 3 of the second chapter of this book. "The Critique of Dogmatic Metaphysics: DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER," (pp. 77-92) on Kant becoming "aware of the marvelous tales surrounding the `visionary' Swedenborg, which led him to immerse himself deeper into Swedenborg's work, the ARCANA COELESTIA. We use this account here not to repeat it, but are content to make reference to it. Who will seriously believe that because he had bought the eight quarto volumes of Swedenborg's works, at a considerable outlay of trouble and expense, Kant would have decided to perform a literary analysis on the book?" (p. 79). Kant's book on Swedenborg "appeared anonymously" (p. 78) and he was determined that "I shall never become a fickle or fraudulent person, after having devoted the largest part of my life to studying how to despise those things that tend to corrupt one's honesty." [Kant to Mendelssohn, April 6, 1766] (p. 79). Swedenborg's ARCANA COELESTIA might still be considered a work in which the dreams of a religious writer were collected with more enthusiasm than anyone prior to Freud had shown for understanding his dreams, and Kant's problem stems in large part from Swedenborg's understanding of his dreams being considered an explanation of heavenly forces, or more often, of the conflicts between heavenly and hellish spirits. Cassirer is willing to venture "that the whole idea of the spiritual is due to habit and prejudice, rather than to exact scientific analysis." (p. 81). Lacking such habits, modern people can read this book for a philosophical guide to how Kant's thought went on from that point, or spend their time watching hobbits, with the 4 DVD disks that show how the "Lord of the Rings" movies were made, or make countless other choices. People who believe this book might spend a lot of time studying Kant, as the author certainly did.




2. One of the mysteries of the rise of the modern world is the sudden appearance of the grand phase of German philosophy beginning with the work of Kant, as his thought suddenly flowered late in life with his precipitous Critique of Pure Reason. Like an echo reverberating across the ages, Kant's breakthrough both recovered and surpassed the height to which philosophy had reached in Plato. This thunderclap just at the takeoff of the revolutionary passage to a new era is the prelude to an entire new universe of thinking, and joins the world of science, the Enlightenment, with a world as ancient as the Upanishads and as futuristic as Quantum Mechanics. Cassirer's philosophical biography is one of the clearest and most cogent introductions to the Kant's life and work and is a classic in its own right.



3. Over the past few years, I had increasingly developed an interest in the Kantian system. I had approached several of Kant's most important works in order to gain an understanding of his thought, but I found that I often struggled to make clear sense of many of his ideas. Although I had obtained a basic knowledge of his philosophy and some lasting insights from these works, I found that Kant's method of presentation often presented some difficulties regarding a complete understanding of them.

   Ernst Cassirer's book provides the student of philosophy with an excellent elucidation of Kant's system of critical thought and both the characteristics of this philosopher's personality and the currents of thought that were prevalent during and preceding his lifetime that led him to develop the philosophic views for which he is well-known. Cassirer also amalgamates Kant's theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic aims into a whole system that reflects Kant's fundamental philosophical outlook. A great deal of material containing many subtle and frequently misconceived points is presented in a very clear, though well-detailed, way. Cassirer's discussion of the Critique of Judgment, a book that has long stupified many readers, is especially thought-provoking. The impression one receives of Cassirer's deep admiration is understandable given the astonishing intellectual depth and breadth of Kant's achievements This book is highly recommended for anyone seeking a more profound understanding of Kant's life and works.

5 comments about The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy.

1. I enjoyed reading this from the standpoint of finding out what it might be like to teach and write in the field of philosophy. McGinn was honest about the tedious and rewarding parts of such a career. The author's writing style is clear and unpretentious.



2. I thought the story about how the author became a professional philosopher was fascinating and inspiring. Just about every male from his recent family lineage had become a coal miner. He relates that he grew up in a dreary working class environment in which he showed hardly any promise at all, at least in his early years. What got him started toward a life of the mind was really one teacher, and from that point there was no stopping him. But it wasn't as though everything was carefully laid out for him to follow. Just going to college was a big step, without any family precedent. Then, there were a several remarkable twists of fate that promoted him to positions and places that not long before would have been considered unattainable.
   
   He describes the three main influences of his undergraduate life. Bertrand Russell was a hero and role model of his youth. For a time, Sartre had an influence, especially in regard to a personal need for self-determination and freedom. The other influence was Noam Chomsky, who struck a blow to behaviorism and laid the ground for modern cognitive science. Later in the book, he comes to know a number of well known figures in contemporary philosophy, and the books that he writes grow out of these associations and experiences teaching. I was much less interested in the line of thought concerning language and meaning than in his thoughts about perception, the mind and consciousness. Questions concerning what we can know and not know about reality seem to me to be not merely academic but to be questions that are healthy for anyone to ask.
   
   He makes no bones about the ego-driven aspect of academia. Along the way there were incidences that stick out as sore spots from a bruising here or there. But beyond personality, the author brings a very clear and refreshing view to a profession that looks to many on the outside as a domain in the clouds of jargon and obscure logic.



3. This book is both a memoir and yet another introduction to philosophy. McGinn tries to come at introducing philosophy in a different way: through his autobiography and through the issues that prompted his interests in philosophy, the ideas he found interesting as a young man studying philosophy, and what he has thought about at particular times in his career as an academic.

   The results are rather mixed. You don't get much of substance here, and so you should look somewhere else if you're searching for a serious and comprehensive introduction to philosophy. But this book does cover enough ground to give you a taste of what current academic philosophizing is like. It includes a breezy, straightforward picture of the life of an academic along with brief sketches of lots of interesting philosophical issues. Furthermore, there's not a lot of history covered here; the emphasis is on a few historically important philosophical issues and the more striking arguments and positions that have been defended in contemporary analytic philosophy. So this really gives you an account of what professional life is like for people working in contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the tradition in which McGinn works.

   It appears McGinn intends the reader to come to philosophy in the same way he did. We go from the vague, somewhat confused ideas and concerns that first led McGinn to philosophy to immersion in ideas and concerns of current-day professional philosophers. Now, this emphasis on the intellectual development might seem too limited a perspective from which to introduce a subject. But this isn't such a problem here since specialization isn't as extreme in philosophy as it is in other parts of the academy. Since the division of intellectual labor here isn't as extreme as it is in the sciences, all philosophers tend to know a lot of the same stuff.

   The book is quite interesting at the beginning, and I think the first couple of chapters would be a good introduction to just what philosophical thinking is like. Here there are very few details about McGinn's early life, and he concentrates on only those elements of his autobiography that are relevant to his intellectual development and his eventual interest in philosophical questions. So these chapters are concerned with the kinds of philosophical problems that are likely to be of interest to those without much, or any, background in the subject. Skepticism, free will, the existence of God--these are the sorts of issues that are introduced in this chapter. McGinn doesn't say a great deal about these issues here, though he says enough to reveal how philosophers attempt to answer them and how they criticize or defend the answers given by others.

   The latter chapters come to focus more on the nature of life in academia and the issues that get discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy along with McGinn's own intellectual development as an academic. So we really get two stories here. The first story is the one of McGinn's rise to prominence in academia, and the other is the story of major issues in U.S. and U.K. philosophy from the sixties to the present. And these stories are interconnected since McGinn is a prolific thinker who has published on nearly everything of central importance in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Some of the highlights he mentions are Davidson and Quine on meaning, Wittgenstein and Kripke on rule-following, Kripke and Putnam on reference, David Lewis on possible worlds, Dummett's anti-realism, Nagel's views about the mind and its relation to the body. And whenever McGinn discusses someone's ideas, he attempts to provide a brief portrait of them.

   Whatever one thinks about McGinn's personality--and some aspects of it can be off-putting--his discussions of issues here is pretty even-handed. While he occasionally says unflattering things about other philosophers, but he's more even-handed when it comes to their ideas--even those ideas with which he isn't sympathetic. He doesn't ridicule the ideas of others; nor does he use the book to push his own ideas on the topics he discusses.




4. This is a great book but I felt something cold inside of me while reading it. I don't know if it is cultural (the modern English philosopher's fear of displaying passion) but I had the feeling to talk to a plumber who developed expertise in abstract concepts and their relationships just as if they were small plumbing problems fitting together under a generalized plumbing theory. Perhaps philosophy needs to be treated like that, just like engineering --but not for me. At least I give myself the illusion of doing something more...literary.
   Colin McGINN teaches us that we need nevertheless to master the art of clarity of both thought and exposition. He write with perfect clarity: a clear, unburdened, unaffected, UnFrench UnGerman philosophical prose.
   The book has a presentation of the Kripke idea of naming as necessity of such clarity that I felt actually smart reading it.
   Other than that there is the feeling of drabness in part of the book of the type I got once at a conference in an industrial city West of London.



5. The only thing I learned from this book was how great the author thinks he is.

1 comments about Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine.

1. Kuklick is not pushing the story of a heroic, iconic individual--Fontaine is not cast as a symbol of racial improvement.
   
   Instead he's telling the story of an individual whose career in academia was unlikely, rare for its time, and was, in fact, a mentor to Kuklick at the University of Pennsylvania. Fontaine's scholarly contributions, and his broader importance are both discussed.
   
   Race in higher education is a subject that will not go away any time soon, and this book certainly pushes the discussion forward.

3 comments about Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr.

1. The disappointing thing about this book is the lack of a good narrative. The problem is that there is so little known about Hypatia and her world that not a lot can be said. Try to imagine a colony in Egypt of mostly Greek ethnicity, where pagans and Christians both fought and coexisted and interacted, if not always well, with a Jewish minority. The culture was in decline and the science, such as it was, died with Hypatia. This resembles the contemporary USA more than Egypt or any place in North Africa or the Middle East today. The academic mathematics community has become utterly moribund and it is being followed by theoretical physics (see Lee Smolin's book "The Trouble with Physics"). Who is our version of Hypatia? Perhaps Lynn Margulis, a biologist whe dares to be different.



2. This book is very good. The historical context about Hypatia's time and life is very interesting. Read this book, you'll learn much more about the christian's church in the first times.



3. This is a difficult book to evaluate. Deakin is a mathematician, not a classical historian, and apart from his discussion of Hypatia's place in Alexandrian mathematics, this biography contains little that is not already to be found elsewhere, most notably in Dzielska's study. Deakin does a reasonable job of putting Hypatia in a cultural context, but his understanding of late antiquity is superficial and admittedly garnered largely from encyclopedias. On the other hand, he has closely studied the sources for Hypatia's life (which he includes in an appendix) and the meagre evidence for her influence on philosophy and science. His introduction to astrolabes and conic sections is of some intrinsic interest and helps illuminate the state of knowledge in the fifth century, but since we have not one shred of writing that is inarguably Hypatia's work, the connection is rather tenuous. Nonetheless Deakin's conclusions give a valuable new perspective on this best-known of female Hellenists: one of a teacher with a wide range of interests, if not an original thinker.

No comments about On Karol Wojtyla (Wadsworth Notes).

5 comments about Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

1. This well-researched and detailed portrait of a remarkable and unique relationship between two remarkable and unique people is never less than engaging. It is well worth reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the intellectual climate in France just preceding, during and after WWII, a period that produced an amazing list of artists and philosophers: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lanzmann (all of whom figure in this narrative), the nouvelle vague in cinema, and many more. For that matter, it is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in life, and the details of these lives are intrinsically fascinating (which is not always to say admirable). Rowley had an almost unprecedented access to historical materials, and to many of the people involved, and put together a sensitive and coherent picture of Sartre and Beauvoir from roughly the time they met to their deaths. That she is able to paint such an intimate and compassionate portrait that does not shy away from depicting faults and inconsistencies in their lives and thought is a testament to Rowley's skills as a writer and as a historian.
   
   The major weakness of the book is that her talent with philosophy is not equally on display here. In the course of telling her story, Rowley mentions the philosophical works of Sartre and Beauvoir, but says very little to illuminate the connection between their thinking and their lives. Even where she does discuss such connections, the links are fairly superficial. (Or, the connections are of the sort that can be made at the level of pop psychology between an artist and his or her work.) Existentialism comes across in her book in its fairly popular form: that there is no essence of human being and that we define ourselves through our actions. The connection between Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology gets summarized in the claim that Sartre learned from phenomenology that philosophy could be about everyday life. What she doesn't note is that beyond the fact Sartre learned from phenomenology to focus on everyday life, he also engaged in a systematic effort to redescribe life -- to show that our ordinary ways of conceiving everyday life are deeply flawed. Beauvoir's own significant and original philosophical work (apart from "The Second Sex") is hardly discussed -- her "Ethics of Ambiguity," for example, is never even mentioned. What she doesn't note is that Beauvoir had developed a powerful typology of ways in which one might respond to and realize freedom in one's life, in her "Ethics of Ambiguity" -- and it would be interesting to consider where she must have fit on that continuum. Perhaps most egregiously, she fails to emphasize that for both Sartre and Beauvoir, existentialist freedom is not primarily about the rejection of traditional bonds but about the recognition of the ways in which we bind ourselves to others through our projects and commitments -- so that "authenticity" is not just about being oneself but about the discovery that one cannot avoid belonging to others and to deny one's commitments to others is bad faith. If Sartre painted this inevitibility as a kind of hell in "No Exit," Beauvoir especially in the "Ethics of Ambiguity" depicts an acceptance of the ambiguous commitments that emerge from our being with others as the only genuine freedom and the only possible salvation. (In spite of her desire to depict Beauvoir as independent of Sartre, and her emphasis of Sartre's unwavering respect for her as a thinker, Rowley doesn't really give a sense of the independence of Beauvoir as a thinker -- and what comes across for the most part here is the popular but I think misleading picture of Sartre as the philosopher and Beauvoir as the memoirist who occasionally also applied philosophy to subjects like women and aging.) On this reading, then Sartre and Beauvoir come across primarily as writers whose ideas and commitments evolved over time to become more political, who rejected standard morality including and especially the moral prescriptions that reinforce the family, and who shared a unique form of relationship (that involved fidelity to each other in the sense that they would always tell each other the truth, even where they were willing to lie to others with whom they had secondary relationships). One might have wished for a more detailed account of their thinking if only because such an account would help to pose the question how their life must have been conceived by themselves, in accordance with their own thinking. Otherwise, and in spite of the book's other merits as a piece of history and biography that can complement a study of their work (or of the period), the book ends up reading like a soap opera for intellectuals. While I think this point deserves emphasis I don't want to overemphasize this. One of the merits of Rowley's book is that she takes as her model of biography the autobiographical works of Beauvoir -- and to that extent she does employ a similar approach to reflection on their lives that Beauvoir employs in her published works. I just would have liked to see a bit more reflection in the book about the relation between their lives and their more focused philosophical reflections. First and foremost, Sartre and Beavoir are engaged thinkers and a biography that rarely engages with their deepest thinking except at the superficial level of brief summary, seems to me to be lacking. Having said that, I should reiterate that apart from such misgivings I found the book to be very well written and thoroughly enjoyable and could hardly put it down.



2. This book is a factual chronology of the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, particularly as it relates to their extracurricular sexual relations. It is not an in-depth commentary or analysis on how they influenced each other's thinking and writings. I found this aspect of the book disappointing.
   
   Attention should have been paid to how Sartre's way of life runs counter to his existential philosophy- freedom in action is paramount to JPS's existential man and yet he succumbs to addictions to drugs and alcohol in his mid-to-later life. Why does Beauvoir give Sartre her uncritical approval to his meaningless, manipulative and lecherous courtships? And how does such compliance reflect on her nascent feminism?
   
   I expect biographies of two seminal philosophers to raise such questions and provide some level of explication. Despite these reservations, I recommend this book as it is well-researched and well-written.



3. I felt part of that tangled and emotionally complex world that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte wove around themselves while reading this book. It balanced the passion of their creativity with the very calculating anti-passion of their emotional lives. Never judging, just describing how one phase played into the next and the work that was born out of all that was inspiring enough. All the people who were caught up or made certain to be caught up in those two lives never really made a difference in the final out come. Their work was all that really mattered.



4. 
   De Beauvoir and Sartre, without any doubt, are among the most talented writers of the twentieth century. I have enjoyed de Beauvoir's novels over the years, even when I could never quite get connected with the turgid texts of Sartre; and Sartre could be a perfect idiot on matters political, while de Beauvoir always retained more than her share of good sense. But no matter. Both of these "intellectuals," as they are called in this book, wrote thoughtful books that deeply affected the thinking of the last century.
   
   Now comes a book that conclusively shows one of this duo to have been, well, a sick character. A technical term might be erotomania, the insatiable drive for sexual gratification. Even when Sartre was close to death, blind, incontinent, suffering from dementia, his friends would provide him with young women that he would then proceed to grope. It was the culmination of a lifetime's obsession.
   
   Hazel Rowley, in this scrupulously documented study, has shown us a deeply flawed human being achieve success, despite these considerable odds, at being outstandingly creative.



5. This book vividly sets genuis in a human perspective. It is a sad story. Genine love requires fidelity and the human heart knows this even if philosophical genius doesn't. Certainly worth reading as an insight for any time. Besides, it provides a magnificent and totally unexpected view of Simone's marvelous behind.