1 comments about The Autobiography of Philosophy.

1. Here one walks into profound reveries of unraveled clarity. Davis's book is a powerful, inspired, and enormously thought explication which gives birth to new wisdom honoring the words of Rousseau. Davis knows that the only way to do justice to him is to faithfully and painstakingly follow Rousseau's path. He is the most fortunate of authors to have Michael Davis as his companion. Suffer the first four chapters; what follows, especially in the last two chapters, will justify your effort to understand. Anyone interested in philosophy should read this book.

1 comments about Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography.

1. Karl Popper is yet another exceptional student of the Austrial school that produced a plethora of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and economists at the turn of the century. The only other comparison would be the extraordinary number of scientists from tiny Scotland that almost single-handedly began the Industrial Revolution. Popper and friends were Renaissance men, masterful in numerous subjects, at ease in a laboratory, classroom or lecture hall.

   They were rationalists of a specific kind. Not for them, the ramblings of a street preacher, social "activist" or leader of mass movements. Instead their actions were didactic, in the cause of something greater. Popper served as gadfly, professor, mathematician, scientist, philosopher and could be considered a spokesman for the groups. His life in Europe was remarkable for what was accomplished - oh, to have a such an inquiring, multi-faceted mind!!

   This book is perhaps more approachable that some of his others. The title says it all; it is the story of the evolution of an intellect that seemed to retain its core. He was interested in so many things and so many areas that all his works are to some degrees syntheses of his interests. Whether he is admiring the logic of scientific discovery or the illogic of taxes, he is brillant, informative and endearing. The intellectual battles are here for all to see (and choose sides). He emerges with not only his mind but his soul intact.

1 comments about The Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

1. This book somewhat gives a different view of what Emerson was like away from being the literature giant that he is...if that sounds interesting to you then you should get this book.

1 comments about On Rorty (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

1. The first thing one wants to know when reading this book is who the typesetter and the proofreader were. With at least two egregious typos per page, one gets the impression that one of them must have not been a native English speaker and the other must have doubled as a sportscaster in his freetime.
   
   Once you've gone through this book, pen in hand, adding omitted letters and apostrophes and striking the maddeningly inconsistent double spacing after each period, you'll find a fine example of C-grade scholarship. It's about what you'd expect an above-average undergraduate senior to turn in as his final thesis. It gives an occasionally clear and lucid explanation of Rorty and the context in which he is writing. More often, though, Rumana seems quite simply confused. If Rumana is, in fact, an undergraduate, he can be quite proud of his philosophical ability. As it is, he's probably not, and (...)(at least for me), this book is a scam.

1 comments about Nietzsche's French Legacy.

1. There are some things worth learning in this book. However, the characters reviewed are all postmodernists. Schrift is utterly tolerant of the lunacy most of them write. In fact, Schrift is one of the postmodernizers of Nietzsche. He wants Nietzsche to worship at the feet of Derrida along with himself. Schrift does not review, for example, Alain Finkielkraut, who is more popular in France than any of the PoMo big shots, and who does not share their opinion of Nietzsche. He ignores Julien Benda as well. And he never mentions Clement Rossett -- who had the temerity to point out that the entire movement claims to be Nietzschean, when nothing could be further from the truth. The book is selective, and suspect becasue of that.

No comments about Oscar Wilde: A Biography.

1 comments about Aristotle: Greece 384-322 B.C. (Audio Classics Series).

1. This audiobook provides a good introduction for 2.5 hours of a reader's time. However, with this much time one can only touch Aristotle. Too short. A proper basic introduction would have needed, at bare minimum, three to four times the time of this tape.

4 comments about Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza.

1. Nothing invalidates an historical study more than the imposition of modern values on earlier times. Such an approach misleads the reader and misrepresents the subject. No amount of footnoting and references can redeem a book that applies this century's "political correctness" to attitudes of three hundred years ago. This work is a classic case of the faults of an "a priori" approach to history and philosophy. Gullan-Whur is self-deluded, confused both about Spinoza's life and his thinking, and sadly lacking in historical sense. Gullan-Whur's book makes meagre contribution to the recent studies of Spinoza's life and philosophy.

   The chronological narrative would be a redeeming feature of this book, except that Spinoza's wanderings defy detailed analysis. This isn't Gullan-Whur's fault, but her struggles to locate him physically are on a par with her comprehension of his philosophy. Spinoza, in line with many thinkers of his day, adopted various nom de plumes in his dealings with others. A Jew of Portuguese ancestry living in the Dutch Republic made communication difficult. Gullan-Whur traces his attempts to learn Dutch, Latin, and even a smattering of English. Latin, however, remained the international language. This situation meant that in a given day several languages might be needed according to circumstances. Gullan-Whur blithely ignores this aspect of language and applies one of his various identities according to when and where she's describing his activities. Her variations in Spinoza's names are compounded by her exasperating habit of referring to many of his contemporaries by their given names.

   Within a dozen pages, Gullan-Whur launches into a diatribe on the condition of women in the 17th Century Dutch Republic. A short comment would be understandable, but she returns to this theme throughout the book. At one point she accuses Spinoza of being both "arrogant" and "misogynist". As a final thrust, she entertains the notion that Spinoza's solitary life indicates a propensity to homosexuality. As final point, she abhors his affection for pipe smoking.

   Gullan-Whur's attempt to deal with Spinoza's philosophy is little short of catastrophic. She trolls his writings to substantiate her pre-conceived notions. Using the material like a condiment, she sprinkles quotations from his writings throughout the text. These must be constantly referenced in the Notes to determine the source. The validity of the statements she attributes to him must be assumed. In most cases she imputes the citation to some early period in his life, implying that all his ideas were fixed at an early age. Development of ideas is apparently alien to her. The result is a goulash which the reader must reverse-engineer to derive some logical progression of thought. Given the breadth of Spinoza's ideas, her approach invalidates much of his thinking. This book has no place in early Enlightenment studies. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]




2. Margaret Gullan-Whur's biography of Spinoza does a fairly good job of placing Spinoza's work within a philosophical, social, and historic context. The connections between the works of Hobbes and Descartes and Spinoza show intellectual reaction and continuity. The connections and associations between Spinoza's work and the Dutch Reform Church and the Jewish community in Amsterdamn seem logically constructed and documented. The potential influence of the rise of the de Witt brothers and their assassination also was also thoughtfully developed. I needed this background of Dutch protestantism, the rise of the Dutch republic, and the philosophical forefathers to better place Spinoza's thought. It is interesting that he and Rembrandt were contemporaries and yet there is no evidence that either knew of the works of the other. The final chapters where Gullan-Whur records the commentaries of Goethe, George Elliott, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and David Hume to the work of
   Spinoza further places his work in context from the perspective of later centuries.

   Bertrand Russell's quotation: "The noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural
   consequence he was considered, during his lifetme and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness."

   This observation by Russell is fully illustrated throughout the book as Spinoza struggles to express his philosophy while staying under the 'radar" of the repressive cultural and religious forces of his day.

   A quotation by Hegel: "The allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God." is also fully illustrated by the exploration of Spinoza's philosophy that is integrated into the biography.




3. Margaret Gullan-Whur is a victim of bad timing. A Spinoza scholar, she released her book around the same time as Steven Nadler's excellent biography of Spinoza. Spinoza poses large problems for any biographer, for the vast majority of his life was "lived" in the public sphere. Letters from friends and intimates were destroyed. Whereas Nadler presents a straightforward biography heavy on philosophical analysis, Gullan-Whur, by contrast, attempts a psycho-biography of Spinoza, attempting to fill in the gaps in his life with speculation concerning his philosophical works, particularly the "Ethics." She tries to tie in the philosophical chapters, especially those on sexual desire, with speculation about Spinoza's life.

   At times, when solid facts are there, her speculation is strong . . . but at other times, we are led down the road of fantasy, as in her specualtions on pp. 142-43 of a homosexual relationship between Spinoza and a Dutch student. And having made the speculation, she wonders what we are to think of it before wavering as to its veracity concerning Spinoza, citing a recent Dutch novel about Spinoza being homosexual. How can we be sure when she admits she isn't even sure. Who is the biographer here and who is the reader?

   When dealing in the world of facts, Gullan-Whur is strong, evincing a strong, imaginative writing style. The first two chapters of her book are a joy to read. However, when dealing with the restrictions of biography, she comes off a distant second to Nadler. It would have been far better, given her fluid, imaginative writing style, to have penned a philosophical novel about the life of Spinoza. There she could have speculated to her heart's content.




4. Poor Margaret Gullan-Whur. Clearly, she worked on this biography of Spinoza for some years, even going to the trouble of teaching herself Dutch to research the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher's life. And then, just as it's finally published, Cambridge University Press brings out Stephen Nadler's *Spinoza: A Life*, a book that in its dispassionate tone, its even-handed treatment of potentially scandalous subjects, and in its deep and thoughtful treatment of Spinoza's Jewish milieu, puts *Within Reason* very deeply into the shadows. It's hard to write about a philosopher who died over 300 years ago, and left almost nothing in the way of scandals or love letters. Gullan-Whur compensates by inventing a homoerotic relationship between Spinoza and a Dutch student (along the way showing her complete ignorance of the reams of scholarly work done in recent years on issues of Renaissance sexuality); by teasing out at great length the issues involved in Spinoza's "excommunication" by the Amsterdam synagogue (along the way showing her complete ignorance of Judaism in general--the "oral law" is NOT, repeat NOT, to be confused with the kaballah); and by generally wearing on her sleeve her manifest dislike for Spinoza as a person. The only thing that saves the book is its fairly lively writing, and some vivid pictures of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Otherwise, it's a historical novel. Read Nadler, if you want to know anything about the philosopher Spinoza. If you want to learn about Margaret Gullan-Whur, read this.

No comments about Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Johns Hopkins Jewish Studies).

3 comments about Decadence of the French Nietzsche.

1. For Ned: No matter how excited you seem to be about this "truth for thinking" instead of "thinking for truth", anyone getting behind it is just making a basic mistake, that it is not philosophy. That is what makes me most mad about this book. It makes a big argument but that does not mean it's a philsophical argument. I could deduce the unified field theory and that would, I suppose, be very important but that does NOT mean I've made a contribution to philosophy or done something valuable for philosophers. Therefore if you want to stop people from haranguing you about it, just produce the simple and right response. If someone asserts that the best philosophical truth is just the one that provokes more thought and nothing else, well, that might be, but it's definitely not philosophy. It looks like it is but it's not. I don't know how to make this any clearer. This gets five stars as a book, and perhaps its one of the few reasonably deserving them, but not as a philosophy book. R



2. This book by Brusseau is one of the most refreshing that I've encountered on the topic. He deftly seperates the more perspicacious 'French Nietzscheans' such as Deleuze and Foucault from the somewhat less substantial ones (Barthes, Lyotard).
   A very thought-provocative book (although I'm only a quarter of the way through)



3. Several chapters of this book have been circulating by e-mail for some time now and causing a minor commotion in the UK and Spain, and apparently also in Italy. In the parts I've seen, Brousseau maintains that it doesn't matter whether a particular proposed truth happens to be right or wrong, only whether it sytimulates more thought. As Brousseau puts it, you don't think to reach truth, you have truths to provoke thought. Interjecting a stylistic criticism, his articulation is repeated somewhat too often (in one or another variation, e.g.: The reason we do philosophy is to think, and results only have value insofar as they impel still more thought.). But what Brousseau does quite well is engage his argument as a nifty response to current attacks on Postmodernism (he doesn't dispute them but delineates their consequences for philosophy thereby outlining a sort of "after French Nietzscheansim"). Brousseau does remind us that the notion of philosophy as wanting truth is dated (the profession's rewards are reserved for those whose ideas stimulate the most debate, not those whose ideas are verified). Most notably his proposition that there exists a kind of counter history of philosophy that has valued thought all along is legitimately intriguing. It's further worth noting that Brousseau somewhat dramatically achieves, if that word is permissible here, the end of truth insofar as endeavors to weaken it (Vattimo) or make it more interpretive are replaced by simple disregard for the truth of any truth. While this reader withholds judgment for the moment, it certainly will be interesting to see whether the ideas get the same amount of (perhaps too) devoted attention now that they are no longer quite so subterranean.