2 comments about Isaiah Berlin.

1. For some reason, the other reviews, with one exception, are not reviews of John Gray's, "Isaiah Berlin;" they are instead reviews of a compilation of Berlin's writing, "Four Essays on Liberty." I don't know how this happened, but I will review Gray's book, ISBN 0691026351.
   
   Gray presents a compact (168 pages) intellectual biography of Berlin, an affectionate, fair, yet critical survey of his thought and works. It is an excellent resource, and it provides the reader with the background and context necessary for understanding Berlin's rather voluminous and disparate writings. This is especially valuable, as Berlin was a loquacious and sometimes untidy writer, circling around, over, and back through his ideas in way that some may find confusing more than clarifying. In fact, his key ideas were not that many, and not that difficult to grasp, when set out as carefully as Gray sets them out.
   
   If you want more narrative of Berlin's very interesting life, you should consider Michael Ignatieff's, "Isaiah Berlin: A Life," which is also superbly done. Gray concentrates on Berlin's ideas, summarizing the whole of his life in one paragraph in the Introduction.



2. This book came out in the mid 1990s right when the biggest debates were dealing with cultural diversity and affirmative action. No book not even this one can capture the essence and writings of Berlin's writing that expanded nearly six decades yet it provides a fresh analysis of his ideas to those who aren't familiar with the 'history of ideas' and unleashed in the public debate about what to do about the remnants of liberalism and multiculturalism in this day and age. I recommend buying this highly.

No comments about John Hick: An Autobiography.

2 comments about Ludwig Wittgenstein (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives).

1. 
   When thinking about Wittgenstein, I often recall the comment attributed to Cambridge Philosophy professor C.D. Broad (who did not understand nor like him). `Not offering the chair of philosophy to Wittgenstein would be like not offering the chair of physics to Einstein!" I think of him as the Einstein of intuitive psychology. Though born ten years later, he was likewise hatching ideas about the nature of reality at nearly the same time and in the same part of the world and like Einstein nearly died in WW1. Now suppose Einstein was a suicidal homosexual recluse with a difficult personality who published only one early version of his ideas that were confused and often mistaken, but became world famous; completely changed his ideas but for the next 30 years published nothing more, and knowledge of his new work in mostly garbled form diffused slowly from occasional lectures and students notes; that he died in 1951 leaving behind over 20,000 pages of mostly handwritten scribblings in German, composed of sentences or short paragraphs with, often, no clear relationship to sentences before or after; that these were cut and pasted from other notebooks written years earlier with notes in the margins, underlinings and crossed out words so that many sentences have multiple variants; that his literary executives cut this indigestible mass into pieces, leaving out what they wished and struggling with the monstrous task of capturing the correct meaning of sentences which were conveying utterly novel views of how the universe works and that they then published this material with agonizing slowness (not finished after half a century) with prefaces that contained no real explanation of what it was about; that he became as much notorious as famous due to many statements that all previous physics was a mistake and even nonsense and that virtually nobody understood his work, in spite of hundreds of books and tens of thousands of papers discussing it; that many physicists knew only his early work in which he had made a definitive summation of Newtonian physics stated in such extremely abstract and condensed form that it was impossible to decide what was being said; that he was then virtually forgotten and that most books and articles on the nature of the world and the diverse topics of modern physics had only passing and usually erroneous references to him and that many omitted him entirely; that to this day, half a century after his death, there were only a handful of people who really grasped the monumental consequences of what he had done. This, I claim, is precisely the situation with Wittgenstein.
   
   Over half a century after his death and after decades of relative neglect (considering he is viewed by some as the greatest natural psychologist of all time) Wittgenstein is again attracting considerable attention. Though there are hundreds of books dealing wholely or in large part with him, few have really grasped his remarkable advances in understanding behavior, so this fresh look is most welcome.
   
   Overall, it is first rate with accurate, sensitive and penetrating accounts of his life and thought in roughly chronological order, but, inevitably (ie, like everyone else) it fails, in my view, to place his work in proper context and gets some critical points wrong. It is not made clear that philosophy is armchair psychology and that W was a pioneer in what later became cognitive or evolutionary psychology. One would not surmise from this book that he laid out the foundations of the modern concept of intentionality (roughly, personality or higher order thought) which has been further advanced by many (most noteably in philosophy by John Searle in "The Construction of Social Reality" and "Rationality in Action").
   
   There is no clear explanation of how W defined the class of potential actions, which he called dispositions or inclinations, (now often called propositional attitudes), differentiating them from perceptions, memories and actions and showing how they lack truth value. He notes that W spent much of his time discussing the foundations of mathematics but fails to provide any explanation as to how this relates to his work on language and logic. In fact, as W came to realize, they are all names for groups of functions of our innate psychology with many differences and none are dependent on the others. It is not really made clear that all our behavior depends on the unquestionable axioms of our evolved psychology and thus differs totally from the testable empirical facts which they enable us to discover. It is not explained that W's frequent references to "grammar" and to "language games" refer to our innate psychology. All these failings are the norm in behavioral studies.
   
   Kanterian notes (p41) that in W's first talk on philosophy, given in 1912 at the age of 23, he is reported to have said that philosophy is the totality of all propositions that are taken as unprovable and basic in science. If one understands that "philosophy" is observational psychology, and that "propositions" are sentences which depend for intelligibility (truth) on the innate axioms of our psychology, it appears that W understood the basic problem of philosophy (behavior) and its answer right from the beginning--a feat few have accomplished to this day. He again made this crystal clear in a letter to Russell quoted by Kanterian (p86) in which he stated that the point of TLP :
   
   "is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions -ie. by language-(and which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt) which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy. "
   
   Note also W's identification of thought with language and his rejection of the idea that there is, between language and thought, another entity such as "the language of thought", a point which he discussed directly and indirectly for the next 30 years but which still bedevils behavioral literature nearly a century later--another sad consequence of the oblivion to one of our greatest teachers.
   
   Kanterian describes the famous distinction in W's Tractatus between what can be said and what can only be shown but does not explain that one can understand this in terms of W's later denotation of the difference between our axiomatic innate psychology, which submits to no test (eg, this is my hand, I am reading this page etc), and the factual or empirical applications of this evolved axiomatic system (ie, our intentionality). Perhaps one should not fault Kanterian, since, to my knowledge, nobody else has noticed what I regard as this basic and essential interpretation of W's TLP either--though a few have noticed it in his later work. It is essential to understand this distinction because any description (following W's frequent injunction that we cannot EXPLAIN but only DESCRIBE our psychology) of animal behavior must do so in terms of evolution for the same reasons we must describe the genetics, physiology, anatomy and function of the heart in evolutionary terms. The alternative "blank slate" view that heart functioning is a matter of one's environment is just as preposterous for the brain.
   
   He does a good job (eg, pg 170-171) of describing (as have others, notably Hacker) W's transition from the confusions of TLP to the clarity of his later work, but (again in my view following universal practice) does not really grasp that W's ideas of the "atomic facts" and "crystalline logic" that formed the foundations of his TLP world view evolved into the notions of an innate axiomatic psychology that he explicated for the last 20 years of his life.
   
   He also notes (p80) that by discovering the innateness of "depth grammar" (ie, our inherited psychology that makes language (thought) possible), W anticipated Chomsky and others by decades. I noticed this some 40 years ago but I have never seen anyone else point it out, so it's hats off to Kanterian!
   
   With his penetrating understanding of our psychology, W was also prescient about larger issues such as the desireability of progress.
   
   "It isn't absurd... to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately by known; that there is nothing good or desireable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this in not how things are." ) (Kanterian p114 from W's Culture and Value).
   
   Kanterian quotes, without I think fully understanding its implications (again like everyone else so far as I know), another very fundamental discovery by W--our natural tendency to subsume all uses of a word or sentence under a single meaning rather than recognizing that eg, "space" is a complex family of uses or concepts (language games as W liked to call them) with quite different applications (meanings) in our life (our intentional psychology).
   
   He notes that W described thinking and other dispositions or inclinations (W's terms)-- (ie, judging, feeling, remembering, believing etc)-- as behaviors and not as mental activities but I don't see that he really makes it clear that another pioneering discovery of W's was that dispositions describe public actions and cannot be mental phenomena for the same reason that he so famously rejected the possibility of a private language.
   
   The probable evolutionary explanation for a route to such usage of dispostion words seems to me to be that several hundred thousand years ago (give or take) when we evolved the ability to vocalize events, objects or actions (ie, when an animal as agent was involved), sentences first substituted for them (get spear, hunt deer) and only later became usable in a dispositional or displaced manner (I want you to get the spear, I think we will hunt deer soon). Again, to my knowledge, W was the first to point this out in any detail with such examples as how pain language functions (see p 182).
   
   Kanterian describes (p174) how W (so famously and notoriously ) felt he had put an end to philosophy as it was understood and how most philosophers reject this view (or more commonly simply ignore it if they are aware of it at all), but his comments that this narrows the range of what we can know by abstract thought and that metaphysical questions make no sense, seem to me to completely miss the point. I think W just called our attention to the fact that "knowing" is another set of games or psychological functions which we can only accept as they are. Much (we might say ALL) of W's work can be seen as describing how "knowing" works and his last writings published as "On Certainty" regarded as the crowning achievement of his life (and of 20th century philosophy/psychology). Metaphysical questions have no traction because questioning the axioms of our psychology lacks a use in our life (this is not "really" my hand, maybe 2+2=4 is not "really" true, perhaps you are not reading this page, etc). Abstract thought (games, music, math, literature, science) is limitless but entirely dependent on the axioms.
   
   Kanterian is one of the rare persons who gets it correct (p185) that W rejects a "language of thought" for the same reason he rejects private languages and dispositions such as thinking, believing etc as mental processes(p 180-183); namely that this would make it possible to make systematic mistakes in our "translations" of thoughts to actions (eg, thinking "I want that apple" to saying "I want that apple") which is absurd. A translation could always be wrong and what test could tell us? We lack the criteria for correctness. We would then need some test for showing what we really thought! I might say "I want the apple" or " I don't want the apple" and what connects that to my thought--even for me? The words are my thoughts (approximately) which are descriptions of acts.
   
   Kanterian also mentions that, in spite of the fact that a large percentage of W's writing concerned the philosophy (ie psychology) of mathematics, very little attention is paid to his work by most of those writing on the foundations of math over the last 50 years. Unfortunately he fails to tell us why. One reason is the nearly universal failure to understand what W has done as a result of his originality, style, failure to publish and premature death. Another is that it took so long to properly gather, translate and edit the 20,000 some pages of his nachlass that several generations have grown up without access to the full body of his work. Even to this day some of the German text remains untranslated and one of his most famous and largest works--The Big Typescript--was only translated and published in 2005. In addition, many who were regarded as experts on the subject of math and logic (eg Dummett, Kreisel, Chihara, Godel) totally failed to understand him and much of the writing by others on the foundations of math is not about its psychological foundations at all (of which they are generally oblivious) but about the details of how math is done. The few who have made progress in understanding his mathematical comments have been largely ignored (eg, Gefwert, Shanker) or have published so recently that their work has not had time to diffuse (eg, Rodych, Floyd). Those interested will find further comments and references in my other reviews. I claim that W's work on this is continuous with the rest of his corpus and overall, the most original and stimulating ever done.
   
   He repeatedly and correctly notes (eg, p176) that the core of W's work is the nature of language but (again the universal failing) does not make it clear that language is for humans (as opposed to animals) almost coextensive with thought (public behavior as W insisted) and thus with our evolved psychology. Like most people, philosophers or not, Kanterian has not followed W and taken the final step towards understanding and describing behavior from an evolutionary standpoint, the only viewpoint that makes sense of it, or indeed of anything.



2. Considering there has been two essential biographies written on Wittgenstein, that is Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) by Ray Monk, and Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life, 1889-1921 (1988) by Brian McGuinness, both award winning texts, another biography of the famous philosopher seemed to me to be a redundant exercise. What new information has come to light regarding the great philosopher and what possibly could be added to what has already been expertly covered in the above said texts?
   
   Edward Kanterian has done something essential and quite extraordinary with this new biography, and that is he focuses on Wittgenstein's religious sensibilities, revealing the philosopher's strong convictions to keep his spiritual concerns separate from his philosophy. The author also spotlights Wittgenstein's four love relationships, their intenseness, their joy and the deep suffering the man experienced when they ended, two of which, tragically.
   
   The reader should also consider that Wittgenstein has become an industry for academics and journalists comprising to date over 10,000 secondary sources (including a feature film) on the man's work and his life. Kanterian also examines this phenomenon and proposes possible reasons for this plethora of interpretation and interest for Wittgenstein and his work.
   
   Wittgenstein's first true relationship and closest personal friend in the early years before WW1 was the young David Pinsent. Pinsent was a brilliant undergraduate in mathematics, (and a descendant of the famous 18th century philosopher, David Hume) who assisted Wittgenstein in certain experiments. He was also the philosopher's travel companion: very sensitive and a good listener, tragically the boy died in an aeroplane accident in 1918.
   
   Frances Skinner was more than likely the most important person in Wittgenstein's life. He was a mathematician of great potential, a student at Cambridge to become a Wittgenstein "disciple". Wittgenstein told the boy to drop mathematics' and academic life and work with his hands. He followed this advice against the wishes of his parents and other friends. Unfortunately after some years of working and living together, Wittgenstein required distance from the relationship however received word that his beloved Frances died of poliomyelitis in October 1941. Wittgenstein never truly recovered from this loss.
   
   The third important relationship was with an Austrian high society woman by the name of Marguerite Respinger. There is a diary entry included in this book that really expresses Wittgenstein's feeling for her. Of course they never married but remained good friends.
   
   Ben Richards was the fourth intense relationship and Wittgenstein's last. Richards was a strikingly handsome lad, studying medicine at Cambridge. He is described as kind, sensitive and considerate. Wittgenstein felt a selfless love for Richards and when the boy (40 years Wittgenstein's junior) moved on from the relationship, Wittgenstein's letters and diary entries reveal a man with a broken heart - all very moving.
   
   What these diary entries about his relationships reveal is a man capable of a deep kind of love, a joy and suffering simultaneously felt, as only a deep love can create. What I found extraordinary was that Wittgenstein was so cerebral, a master of logic, an accomplished engineer and architect, however was capable of such intense feeling in his relationships and music. I found Kanterian's book to reveal this aspect of the philosopher more so than the other biographies.
   
   To Kanterian's great credit, his expositions on Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations are more than likely the most clearly explained interpretations I've ever encountered, making these notoriously difficult works, clear and comprehensible - a pure joy to read.
   
   Ludwig Wittgenstein by Edward Kanterian as part of the Critical Lives Series is a notable contribution to the life and works of the famous philosopher and a text useful for someone thinking about embarking on the Wittgenstein Quest.
   
   Highly recommended.

No comments about The Good Life.

No comments about Schopenhauer (Blackwell Great Minds).

4 comments about Paul of Tarsus: A Visionary Life.

1. Edward Stourton's take on Paul is from a somewhat unusual stance. A well-known BBC personality, Mr Stourton is also 'a very publically Roman Catholic Cristian'. It shows. He takes the reader through the places and experiences of this sometimes opaque figure and shows us why Paul matters and why he can be so infuriating at the same time. It seems as if Paul's listeners had the same problem with him! Stourton explains the complexity of the man with charm and clarity. This reader continually found himself smiling, and wishing to reach over and tough Stourton and ask him to tell another interesting anectotes. He most have dozens more!



2. Award-winning UK broadcast journalist Edward Stourton presents Paul of Tarsus: A Visionary Life, a heavily researched, in-depth, yet eminently readable biography of one of Christianity's most influential figures. Following in the footsteps of St. Paul from his murky depiction in the New Testament to a fleshed-out personality, Paul of Tarsus reasoning, theology, and narrative skills into a fascinating and dramatic examination. A thought-provoking experience for lay readers and experienced theologians alike.



3. Suppose you were a journalist and your boss called you in the office and said: "I've been hearing many things about this guy Paul; go find out who he is and write a story about him." This book might well be the result.
   
   The book assumes no previous knowledge by the reader, all Bible references are quoted and annotated. Who was Paul? What did he do? Why did he do it? Where did he go? What did he say? What were his thoughts? Who were his friends? Who were his enemies? What were accomplishments? What were his failures? What was his contribution to history? These are many questions to answer, and just as you would expect in a short book, the answers are not exhaustive.
   
   Paul's main ideas are discussed, foremost, perhaps, that faith lies in one's head and heart, not in the Law (something that was first said in Jeremiah 31:33, "I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts"), and compares it with the Hebrews' continuous application of their Law in the bedrooms, kitchens, pockets. Stourton considers Paul's instructions as ad-hoc rules for life until the second coming, something that was thought to be due soon. He contends that Paul was the first to start the gentiles vs. Jews arguments and that he destroyed the idea of Jewish identity by attacking their Law that made them different. His concept that the Church is the body of Christ affected the entire Christian thinking and theology.
   
   The book is not large enough for the author to cover all of Paul's ideas, but being a journalist he does spend particular attention to scriptural inconsistencies: Paul's vision on the road to Damascus and what exactly it might have been; The differing descriptions of the Jerusalem Council in the Acts and in Paul's letters (he goes along with the letters); The astonishing attack on Paul at the Temple after he and all the money he had brought had been warmly received by James (he thinks it was a setup by his enemies); he examines possible reasons why the Acts stopped short of Paul's death. Although he discusses Paul's writings about homosexuality and his attitude towards women, he ignores most of the detailed, mystical theology: Christ's divinity and pre-existence, his victory against sin and Satan, the believers' becoming one with Christ through the rite of baptism, the resurrection of the dead and the rapture of the living.
   
   All in all this is a very pleasant book to read, especially for those who don't know much about Christianity's beginnings. It would probably make an excellent book selection for discussions during the Lenten season. I would have preferred, however, if the author had given references for the non-Biblical quotes he includes. For instance, he quotes Shelby Spong as saying that Paul was probably gay. But where de he say it? Spong has probably written a dozen books.
   
   (The writer is the author of "Christianity without Fairy Tales: When Science and Religion Merge.)



4. The author writes a brief resume of St. Paul:
   
   Born: AD 5, Tarsus, Asia Minor
   Educated: University of Tarsus and School of Gamaliel, Jerusalem Profession: Tentmaker
   Nationality: Jewish with Roman Citizenship
   Career: Persecutor of Christians
   Vision: Sees Christ arisen, AD 34
   Makes missionary journey to Cyprus and Galatia, AD 45-48
   Meets apostles in Jerusalem, AD 49
   Establishes first Christian Churches in Asia Minor and the Balkans, AD 49-56
   Imprisoned in Rome, AD 59
   Beheaded, late 60's
   Publications: 13 of the 27 books of the New Testament.
   
   Fine, except that every single fact listed here are open to dispute. Mr. Stourton has written not exactly a biography, but an investigation into Paul's life. He reports not only on the facts, and possible alternatives, but also on the impact that Paul had on the writers of the gospels (which came much later than Paul's writings) and on the subsequent effects on Jewish and Islamic thoughts.
   
   Mr. Stourton is an accomplished journalist and he has written this book in a style that makes it almost as impossible to put down as a good mystery. Then again, Paul's life has a lot of mystery.

2 comments about Confucius: A Biography.

1. Clements brings the 2,500 year-old philosopher, teacher, and statesman to life. He also provides maps and timelines to put it into perspective and make visualization easier. It's a short, easy, and enjoyable read spliced with words of wisdom from the Analects. In essence we are all here to do certain jobs and should do them to the best of our abilities and not disrupt the social order. He was very enlightened for his time in that he felt jobs should be obtained by merit and not birth. He came up with the idea of imperial exams to make accession fair. Perhaps it would be expecting too much for a philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago but, his idea of equality and a level playing field didn't extend to women. This is left out of the book. It's a well documented biography and the writing is good.



2. Jonathan Clements once more takes a complex topic - in this case, the life of a monumental individual - and boils it down to a fast paced, lean read.
   
   This biography of one of the world's most well-known and near-deified philosophers of all time is clean, concise - and yet gives more than just facts and dates. It actually feels like you have some insight into the man behind all the profound sayings and ideas which have been attributed to him. Anyone who's interested in more than just the fortune cookie Confucius will find this a fascinating read.
   
   Anyone studiying Asian history or philosophy should be required to read this biography before starting their studies on Confucius. It's clear he was a master of common sense and that's worth reading and learning on any level.

3 comments about Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?.

1. I don't know what's wrong with the next reviewer (I suspect it's Anne Coulter with a fake moustache- Hi Anne!). Yes, Sarte supported some bad people, and some not so worthy causes- but then if we are to judge the Soviets and China for their victims- does that mean turning a blind eye to the countless dead in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, El salvador, Columbia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iran, and God knows how manyother places where regimes were overturned and dictators installed and bombs dropped either with US Aid/money/training or directly by us.

   Choose your evils. Sartre had more gumption than most when it came to calling out his age on its evils. Are we to blame him because, post-WWII he turned away from a non-poitical stance and embraced a left-wing ideology?

   This is a short, consise bio, and I think the best on the market of its kind. If you are looking to round out your perception of this enigmatic thinker- pick up a copy!

   -Ed Niles




2. When you read over a hundred books a year like I do, you sometimes find yourself looking for "bargain" books to save a few bucks, especially if the subject is rather controversial. Who'd have thought you could find yourself feeling that you overpaid for a book that cost $2? This is such a book. Sartre is a phase that most kids go thru, like pimples, before they grow up and understand the world. Yes, we are here a short time and then we die. Get over it.
   For Gerassi, a noted leftist, this book is more of an admission that he, like his friend Sartre, never grew up. While it is hard to read this book and not feel sorry for someone who will die an adolescent, I feel even worse knowing that the kind of nonsense Gerassi expounds about his fellow traveler in this book is probably standard fare dished out to the unsuspecting innocents in his political science classes at CUNY. What can you say about a book which fawns over a person like Sartre, whose entire life consisted of his fawning over mass murderers and criminals of the left? This book is a classic example of leftist snobbery, where Stalin's extermination of millions of Georgians, Ukrainians and others by starvation is ignored and the extermination of millions of Jews by an equally evil totalitarian criminal like Hitler is condemned. Sartre's equal admiration of mass murderers like Mao and Castro is made to look "enlightened" when it is simply outrageous. The only redeeming part of the book is that you can understand Sartre's narcissism and self-loathing to be possibly attributable to his warped childhood and excessive use of drugs and alcohol. I'd be nauseated and depressed too if I were as screwed up as he was.
   What an unfortunate end of being and nothingness for a poor, naked, innocent little tree to give up its life to provide the paper this book was printed on. But maybe it will have a happier end and become a doorstop or some other higher purpose.



3. One of the best sartre bios out there (and the official one). Volume One- It has the dual fortune of being both a quick read and a decent intro to Sartre's life and thought. It also calls him on his *ish*, which is rare for biographers. (Gerassi's parents were Spanish -ok his mom wasn't but married into it- friends of Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, in fact both his mother and father as well as Jean hismelf became the basis for characters in sartre's 'Roads to Freedom' Series of novels).

   While not as massive a compendium as the Annnie Cohen-Solal bio, this has much to reccommend it. In fact, preciseley that it is not the massive compendium reccommends it in my eyes. Who has time for that but the intellectual janitors in their ivory towers? Gerassi knows Sarte's works quite well, but primarily- he knew the man himself and he gives interesting insights into many anecdotes and ideas.

   My feelings towards Sartre tend to be passionately ambivalent. I don't care for his philosophy, which will always be 'cool' to the pseudo-sophisticates who don't even possess a thorough grasp of it... I was enchanted with him in my teens mainly because of his persuasive skill with words (the man was an extraordinary wordsmith), and I will always be deeply enamored of his novels. 'nausea,' alone I feel should secure his place in the history of literature.

   There are tons of works on Sartre purporting to unveil his thought and life. Most of the ones I've read are inadequate- they come off as hack-kneyed and reactionary, and try to compensate for their faults with an over-abundance of fruitless linguistic play that goes nowhere- does nothing, or they take him to task overly for a variety of his personal failings (and there are plenty from which to choose). Few thinkers and biographers attempt to tackle the man as a writer and an activist... Few try to work with Sartre's all-too-human imperfections and put them into context.

   ...And few see any kind of logic in Sarte's later years but Gerassi, because of his close involvement with both Sartre and De Beauvior, is able to show the heart and soul of the man at work, especially in his darker years (involvement with revolutionary Maoists and loss of his sight and mental faculties, most likely due to his extensive use of drugs, ampetamines, alchohol etc in his 30s and 40s)...

   Stil, Sartre is a writeer and thinker worth exploring, and he was one of the more interesting men of his time. If you are at all interested in learning more about this maddening intellectual of the 20th C- this is a fine place to start. Gerassi was chosen by sartre mainly because he was not an acolyte- he had his own opinions and had frequent arguments (some quite vitriolic) with J.P. A couple of which gerassi recounts.

   The book has a lot of meat. Most don't. Let me reiterate that is written cearly and concisely- a quality MUCH LACKING in most books of this kind, and a quality that I value highly, outside of experimental fiction... I have read this a couple times, always enjoy it, find it interesting and illuminating.

   just one man's five cents, as always.

No comments about Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Volume 1, Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880.

No comments about Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975.