David Auerbach
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Posts Tagged "philosophy"
Check out all of the posts tagged with "philosophy".
Gilbert Ryle on Heidegger’s Being and Time
Arch-analytic Gilbert “Category Mistake” Ryle reviewed Heidegger’s Being and Time sympathetically on its publication in 1928. It is a beautifully clear statement of the methodological parting of the ways that was then taking place. The philosophical concerns, ...
Godfrey Harold Hardy: A Mathematician’s Apology
G.H. Hardy is one of the very few mathematicians who’s been immortalized in song, by the Embarrassment no less: Hardy’s little book, A Mathematician’s Apology (that’s apology in the sense of defense, not regret), written in ...
Paul Oskar Kristeller: Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance
This series of lectures, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (1964), contextualizes Renaissance humanism as well as any account I’ve read. For those like me whose philosophical education jumped from Aristotle to Descartes (with very brief stops at ...
Burton Pike on Robert Musil: To Analyze and Order Experience Without Reducing It
Robert Musil is difficult to write about. He outsmarts most of his commentators. Burton Pike’s “Robert Musil: Literature as Experience” is one of the better essays I’ve read on him, trying to link Musil’s hard-to-pin-down ...
Hans Blumenberg on Heidegger’s MacGuffin
Charitable or withering? (See here for supporting evidence.) The secret of the MacGuffin is that revealing its name only further heightens the suspense about its identity in each situation. This in turn challenges the master ...
Benny Shanon: The Antipodes of the Mind
Benny Shanon is an Israeli cognitive psychologist who has taken the psychoactive hallucinogen ayahuasca well over one hundred times. His book The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience is a scholarly attempt ...
Stanley Cavell and Timothy Williamson: Must We Mean What We Say? And How?
This is an extension of earlier thoughts on Wittgenstein, and particularly about how philosophers think of meaning and to what extent culture gets involved in it. I want to contrast Stanley Cavell, for whom culture ...