I read something very interesting in an interview with Timothy Williamson the other day.

Not long ago I had a revealing discussion with a professor of ancient Greek literature, who was convinced that, by contrast with the tradition of Sartre, Foucault and Derrida, contemporary analytic philosophy had nothing useful to offer the study of poetry ― a common view in departments of literature. He claimed that it could not handle phenomena such as meaning more than one says. I discovered that he didn’t know of the analytic philosopher Paul Grice’s analysis of just such phenomena, which has had a huge impact on linguistics as well as philosophy. The point is that he had never even looked at Grice’s book (

The pope’s a funny guy. The right hand knoweth not what the left hand getteth up to. The right hand has an attention deficit.

During his address in Amman, the pontiff called on Jordan’s Muslims and Christians to work together to improve their society. “Some assert that religion is necessarily a cause of division in our world and so they argue that the lesser attention given to religion in the public sphere the better,” he said…”However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?”

Yes…but…but Herr Rotweiler, sir, have you not noticed … Read the rest

You know how John Stuart Mill had a mental crisis, and became unable to take pleasure in anything. One thing that helped him was reading Wordsworth. Byron was no good to him, Byron was too melancholy himself, but Wordsworth was just the thing – ‘the miscellaneous poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815,’ to be exact.

“In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there … Read the rest

God damn spammers. They keep coming back. I’m having to spend two hours a day cleaning the god damn ads for viagra and xanax and the rest of it out of old comments. Miserable blood-sucking bastards.

[beats head against wall until the blood runs]… Read the rest

I read something interesting in M H Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp this morning.

Ever since Aristotle, it had been common to illuminate the nature of poetry…by opposing it to History…But to Wordsworth, the appropriate business of poetry is ‘to treat of things not as they are…but as they seem to exist to the senses, and to the passions,’ and as worked upon ‘in the spirit of genuine imagination.’ The most characteristic subject matter of poetry no longer consists of actions that never happened, but of things modified by the passions and imagination of the perceiver; and in place of history, the most eligible contrary to poetry, so conceived, is the unemotional and objective description characteristic

Mark Bauerlein had some thoughts on Terry Eagleton almost a decade ago.

[I]t is a mistake to treat social constructionism as preached in the academy as a philosophy. Though the position sounds like an epistemology, filled with glib denials of objectivity, truth, and facts backed up by in-the-know philosophical citations (“As Nietzsche says. . .”), its proponents hold those beliefs most unphilosophically. When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith…Save for a few near-retirement humanists and realist philosopher holdouts, academics

Jerry Coyne, after discussion with other scientists and upon reflection, refused an invitation from the organizers of the World Science Festival to participate on a panel that would discuss the relationship between faith and science. One of the Festival’s sponsors was The Templeton Foundation, ‘whose implicit mission,’ Coyne said, ‘is to reconcile science and religion (and in doing so, I think, blur the boundaries between them).’ The people at the SWF wrote to him and other concerned scientists.

[T]he Festival has programs that not only focus on the content of science traditionally defined, but programs that seek to illuminate how science interfaces with other disciplines and outlooks…For the Festival to have programs exploring the art-science relationship, the government-science relationship, the