No comments about Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left).

No comments about Greek Philosophers (BCP Greek Texts) (BCP Greek Texts) (BCP Greek Texts).

No comments about Kierkegaard Para Principiantes.

2 comments about Divine Madman: The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley.

1. Though Drukpa is a beloved saint of many Himalayans, this is certainly not the first book to read if you're interested in Tibetan Buddhism or culture. In fact, without a grasp of Tantric principles and the way skillful means can be used in a way seen as legitimate by this tradition, many of the events in this book would be received as downright distastful and suspect. I had run across references to him in a number of other works over the years, and am frankly glad I waited until this later point in my understanding of Buddhism before reading this work. Otherwise, I doubt I could have seen through a lot of the cultural chaff, which many would find offensive, to the core insights that the text is trying to promote. Read it sometime, but don't rush to it before you're ready.



2. I read this book via a borrowed first edition, in one mesmerized sitting. 2nd ed. should be same. Now I must own it as soon as re-published! A fabulous story of the Buddhist monk whose left-hand path will scandalize some and delight others. I visited Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan and received the resident head monk's blessing with both the wooden phallus and the ivory one. Kunley created Bhutan's national animal, the Takin, and spread both his generous organ's output and the Dharma over the Himalaya. Worshiped by all women he met, he conquered Bon magicians and otherwise gave Buddhism a full-bodied life. Must reading for all adults. Now, I want to make a film about his life...join me? k4vud@hotmail.com

2 comments about Noam Chomsky (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives).

1. Decent profile of America's chief foreign policy critic, his life and career. It's a slim volume, part of a series called Critical Lives profiling important cultural figures of the past century. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature are the 40 pages on Chomsky the linguist and philosopher. This is the lesser known phase of his intellectual career, but the one that did much to establish his credibility as a policy critic. Author Sperlich strives manfully to give us a taste of Chomsky's contributions to linguistics, but it's pretty heavy weather for the uninitiated. Yet, no profile would be complete without some inclusion.
   
   On the other hand, we get a good idea of Chomsky's formative years and how they bear on his intellectual evolution. It is Chomsky the activist where that evolution largely plays out and it's rather surprising how consistently true to his roots in socialist anachism he has remained over the years. This fidelity also helps explain his distance from the Marxist left and how the anti-imperial undercurrent of his studies has managed over the years to escape the taint of "communist inspired".
   
   Still and all, I wish the text included more on Chomsky's relations with our corporate and media establishment. For although he's well-known among intellectual and activist circles, the broader public (who stands to gain the most) remains largely ignorant of both his name and perspective. Yet daily, the networks parade the same dreary foreign policy spokespeople before the nation, with the same dreary cliches about our role in the world, and the country drifts ever further from the reality. On the other hand, except for Hugo Chavez as his unofficial press agent, the MIT professor never appears as a counterweight. Not that his presence would act as a magic bullet to imperial policies. Rather his absence represents more broadly the deadly absence of any public alternative to present global policy.One positive thing that can be said about this establishment-- they've certainly found more subtle ways of silencing esteemed dissidents than did the old ham-fisted Soviets. I just wish Sperlich had included more of this key aspect in his otherwise informative little account.



2. "High thoughts must have high language." -- Aristophanes
   
   
   Few of us have time to read an entire encyclopedia, and if anyone's life could fill one, it's Chomsky's.
   
   It must have been a huge undertaking to write an introductory book on such a complex figure. Chomsky is primarily a linguist, but it is his controversial philosophical and political views that make him a household name. The trouble is, although so many of us know he is important, few of us know just why. This book comes to the rescue, unveiling the events that made the man whilst delving into his psyche.
   
   To dumb down the subject would hardly be appropriate for anyone interested in Chomsky. Readers will thus be pleased to find the author freely expresses himself in true literati style. The academic rigour provokes much insightful discussion, and yet the subject is kept highly accessibile: there are interesting explanations on linguistics, and we learn about major figures in Chomsky's life, such as Orwell and Russell.
   
   A linear account of his life is followed by a look at his contributions to linguistics and philosophy, and his consequent influence on politics and his relationship with the media -- all in a comprehensive 160 pages

1 comments about Descartes: His Life and Thought.

1. Genevieve Rodis-Lew is Professor Emerita at the Sorbonne and has written a splendid biography on the life and thought of a major and influential 17th Century European philosopher. Ably translated into English by Jane Marie Todd, Descartes is vividly presented in the context of his time. Drawing upon his own correspondence, Rodis-Lewis traces his disillusion with the Jesuit scholastic method and his attraction mathematics and then to metaphysics. Descartes emerges for the modern reader as a complete and complex man, so much more than a mere footnote in the history of science or the evolution of western philosophical traditions.

No comments about Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Weimar and Now : German Cultural Criticism, No 7).

3 comments about His Glassy Essence: An Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce (Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy).

1. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 -1914) was an eccentric American genius and the founder of the philosophy generally known as pragmatism. A difficult, erratic, and sometimes violent man, he was denied in his attempts to secure an academic position and spent the last several years of his life in near isolation at his home, called Arisbe, near Milford, Pennsylvania. Peirce may be America's most significant philosopher. Yet he never produced a book. His reputation, insofar as it is based on his written work, is based on essays he wrote throughout his life and on large manuscripts which his admirers saw through to publication beginning shortly after his death.

   Professor Kenneth Ketner, the author of this "autobiography" of Peirce, is an acknoledged authority on Peirce's life and thought. He calls this book, "His Glassy Essence" an "autobiography" because it is based in large part upon a selection of Peirce's writings and letters arranged to tell the story of his life. As Professor Ketner states, however, the book is also in part fiction. It includes three fictitious characters, the narrator, Ike, a writer of mysteries, his wife Betsey, a nurse, and Roy, a Harvard PhD in philosophy who allegedly knew and studied with Peirce. The story line involves Ike taking an interest in Peirce based upon an old box of Peirce's papers that Betsey has inherited. Roy comes into the story to provide information about Peirce and, not accidentally, some excellent discussions on the nature of philosophy.

   The mechanism creaks at times. The story line is artificial although Roy has many insightful things to say in commenting on Peirce. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction in the account of Peirce because many of his letters and essays seem to be melded together from sources written at different times and places. Ketner's protestations notwithstanding, it is difficult to be convinced of the accuracy of the account presented here as scholarly biography. Finally, this book covers essentially only the first 28 years of Peirce's life (with forwards to his death and to some of his subsequent writings.) There are two promised sequels which are to continue the story through the remainder of Peirce's life.

   For all the difficulties, I came away from this book with a better understanding of Peirce and some inkling of the development of his thought. Peirce's own distinctive ideas beging to be developed only in the last third or so of this book. The earlier sections deal largely with Peirce's years in college when he was deeply under the influence of Kant.

   The book makes a good case that Peirce's work is narrowed unduly when he is viewed simply as one of the first American pragmatists. He was in fact a philosopher in the large manner concerned about science, about logic and categories in an expansive sense of these terms, and about God. He was an empiricist in the broadest sense that William James developed with his term "radical empiricism". I also see strong parallels in the account of Peirce given in this book to Husserl's phenomenology.

   Peirce tought the distinction between knowledge, or the accumulation of facts, and wisdom and meaning which cannot be learned from the books. He developed the philosophy of signs called semiotics and invented a personal and highly idiosyncratic philosophical vocabulary, including terms such as "Cenopythagoreanism" (see page 342) which stretch the casual reader' patience and may stretch the more serious reader's mind.

   This book gives an excellent picture of the philosophic mind, in the person of Charles Peirce, and of the serious and consuming nature of philosophic inquiry. It is not a book to read for a full account either of Peirce's life or his thought. It does capture something of the spirit of the man and the thinker.

   Readers who want a historically based account of Peirce and his times might enjoy "The Metaphysical Club" by Louis Menand. Ketner's book is cited in the references for Menand and it covers much of the same ground, Peirce's life, his relationship to his father, the mathematician Benjamin Peirce, the metaphysical club which met briefly at Harvard in the 1870s, the effect of the Civil War on American pragmatism, and much else. The distinctive value of Ketner's book, I think, is that for all its problems it will allow the reader to see Peirce from the inside out.




2. For me the book, "His Glassy Essence," has been invaluable. Ketner has pulled together information about Peirce's early life that I could not possibly have gotten to on my own. Since I am not attached to any institution, I do not have access to any unpublished documents. I am not sure I would have been able to find the information Ketner has laid out in this book even if I had such access. He has pulled together a great deal of information from diverse sources and put these scattered pieces together in chronological and contextual order.

   This book has been immensely helpful to me for coming to understand the provenance of Peirce's pragmatism. Now, it is obvious to me that there was no abrupt beginning to the development of Peirce's pragmatic theory. Now that I know of his early exposure to qualitative discernment and aesthetics, I can identify these as central to the evolution of his theory of abduction-something I have suspected all along, but had been unable to nail down because of the lack of a chronological and contextual framework for Peirce's early life.

   The author did a fine job of referencing information, providing page by page notes at the end of the book. These references were noted in such a way that they do not interfere with the reading of the text--which unfolds in a story-like way, enabling me to see how Peirce fit within his context. The biographical and temperamental information concerning Peirce's father, for example, fleshed out the cultural and familial milieu in which he was raised-seemingly as a crown prince of the intellectual world for which his father was a sort of king.

   Although there are minor discrepancies (such as a brother who seems to have been left out)and occasional confusions when following the story line, I think that this book is going to be very useful for anyone wanting to know about the early Peirce. I am finding "His Glassy Essence" especially useful as a reference tool. I suspect that other independent researchers, like myself, who are working with Peirce's ideas, but do not have access to unpublished materials by or about him will find this book useful as well.




3. As a Peircean supporter of personal inquiry I can't in good conscience write a traditional "review" like the Kirkus one which dominates this page. I write to encourage everybody to disregard the Kirkus comments and explore His Glassy Essence (and their own, in turn) for themselves.

   Having read the correspondence between Ketner and Percy in Thief of Peirce, I know that Percy commissioned Ketner to write this volume. That said, I believe that Charles S Peirce, Walker Percy, and Kenneth L. Ketner are all speaking to any person whose interests run toward open-minded, evaluative, and exploratory inquiry into Life. What better way to discover your own Way than to see it in the life of another, namely Peirce.

   Personally, I have no doubt in my heart that Percy would be pleased with Ketner's first installment of the life of CS Peirce. But, by all means, don't take anyone's word for it --- be Percy's sovereign wayfarer, pick up a copy of HGE, and discover Peirce's transformative power for you own self!

2 comments about Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (European Perspectives).

1. While there is so much talk about Irigaray's lack of understanding of Neitzsche, it is obvious that previous reviewers have a lack of understanding of Irigaray. Her inquiries are focused around language and how it is used. Her analysis is nothing short of detailed. "Man-hating" it is not, patriarchy-hating it is, what is more this book draws attention to the language that perpetuates patriarchal society and the damage it does to women, but also to men.



2. The first thing that I am likely to notice about a book is whether it has an index. This book has no index. I have the 1991 English translation by Gillian C. Gill of Luce Irigaray's book MARINE LOVER OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE in paperback, and between pages 75 and 119, the only indication at the top of the page to show what this part is about are the words, "Veiled Lips." This is not too surprising for a book that seems to be mainly about the attractions of Nietzsche's ideas because it builds on a section of SPURS / NIETZSCHE'S STYLES by Jacques Derrida called `Veils' in which truth is compared to woman as "Nietzsche revives that barely allegorical figure (of woman) in his own interest. For him, truth is like a woman. It resembles the veiled movement of feminine modesty. Their complicity, the complicity (rather than the unity) between woman, life, seduction, modesty--all the veiled and veiling effects . . ." (SPURS, p. 51).
   
   Fortunately, there is an index in WOMANIZING NIETZSCHE / PHILOSOPHY'S RELATION TO THE FEMININE by Kelly Oliver, and "Veiled Lips" even appears in her index, for a discussion of this book in a chapter on Jacques Derrida (3 The Question of Appropriation). Kelly Oliver suggests, "Irigaray's criticism could be seen as a lesson in psychoanalytic theory." (Womanizing Nietzsche, p. 81). The theory here is not as interesting to me as the possibility of gaining a woman's perspective on a point at which philosophy seems to be close to humor, if modern comedy is recognized in the playful manner in which Derrida explains the great question "Supposing truth to be a woman--what?" found at the opening of Nietzsche's BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. His translation gains clarity by emphasizing a term of contempt: ". . . all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women . . . [and] the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means (ungeschickte und unschickliche Mittel) for winning a wench (Frauenzimmer is a term of contempt: an easy woman)?" (SPURS, p. 55).
   
   Do I need to be forgiven for such a rude interruption? By emphasizing the comic aspects of modern society, I often make myself feel that I am interrupting people who have far more serious concerns. This could be a good time for appreciating the earnest efforts of a woman to meet Nietzsche halfway on ideas which he chose, as Luce Irigaray attempts to do in MARINE LOVER OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. The section `Veiled Lips' opens with a few paragraphs containing words that might be found in joking about which lips are meant: "if not its accessories and its underside. And the opposite remains caught up in the same. . . . With a flip of the coin," (p. 77). She knew what Nietzsche's laughter was: "And you laughed at having been so blindly trusting. And burned as you reclaimed the flames once devoted to their cult." (p. 53). I have not usually been too concerned with the interpretation which might be placed upon Nietzsche by typical modern scholarship, such as it is, but the problem of the education of women looms large in trying to understand what moderns might consider the worst things he wrote.
   
   Nietzsche had excelled in school in studies of the ancient Greeks, and he was made a professor at the age of 24 in 1869 so he could teach Greek ideas to boys in an educational system that was primarily about dead European males. His first book, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, praised the Greeks as surviving from one culture to another:
   
   "And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks, unless one prizes truth above all things and dares acknowledge even this truth: that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and every other culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of inferior quality and not up to the glory of their leaders, who consider it sport to run such a team into an abyss which they themselves clear with the leap of Achilles." (BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, section 15, Kaufmann translation, p. 94).
   
   Taking such a long view of things hardly helps the modern student who is looking for something useful, but this book is not likely to find readers for whom it accomplishes much. Women having equal access to such an education could hardly fail to make their own proclamations about what might be worth knowing, and the chaos of modern society gets boosted for diversity in the process, but my personal theme of praising the hemlock which Athens granted Socrates as a sentence for engaging in philosophy is not too wild to be found in this book, even where it is not stated explicitly. "What are you unable to abandon? What place are you unwilling to leave? What weight always holds you back at the same point? The will to live or to die? . . . Because to receive, without swallowing up what has been given to you . . ." (p. 42).
   
   "Socrates desiring death, and achieving it thanks to a drink given to him by the citizens, signifies his allegiance to the Dionysiac. It is by this means that he will take away its power. . . . the death `for a laugh' of the philosopher whose potion is the logos." (p. 98).
   
   I probably left out the best parts (for everybody but me), but by cherrypicking a few themes and some indication of who might consider this book important, some people might get the idea that guys aren't likely to do great in the humanities anyway, so why try?

No comments about Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712-1754.