Studies in a Dying Culture

Written May 14, 2011 at 10:08 pm McGann, Jerome J. Towards a Literature of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Several years ago I collected a number of books by Jerome McGann, beginning with The Romantic Ideology. I put his Towards a Literature of Knowledge on my want list, but my attention turned elsewhere. I finally got hold [...]

Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality Brian O’Connor Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. http://www.scribd.com/doc/87513357/Brian-O-Connor-Adorno-s-Negative-Dialectic-Philosophy-and-the-Possibility-of-Critical-Rationality-The-MIT-Press 1 I did a very quick read of this book, which is a preposterous thing to do considering the difficulty of the subject matter. Furthermore, it is not fully comprehensible without a thorough grounding in Kant, [...]

“The appearance of depth is frequently the product of a complicity with suffering. A monstrous German tradition associates profound thoughts with the theodicy of evil and death. A theological terminus ad quem is tacitly assumed, as if what determined the dignity of an idea were its result, the confirmation of transcendence, or its immersion in [...]

Here is a sampling of hard-copy books I’ve been reading all or parts of since my birthday, more or less in reverse chronological order, but several of these simultaneously. This doesn’t include isolated essays, chapters, or online reading. Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Adventures of Immanence [v. 2]. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [...]

I have not published a reading review since June 2007. Instead of beginning with July, I’ll work my way backward. At the moment there is too much non-book material to document readily, so this is an effort at compiling a list of books I’ve read part or all of since the beginning of March. I [...]

Adorno supplied a sizable quantity of first-class quotable aphorisms. This is one famous one-liner, from Minima Moralia, #122, Monograms: True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. On 17 December 1999 I interpreted this quote as follows: I take Adorno’s statement to mean that writers who formulate great truths or profound models of [...]

Jacques Bouveresse is a French philosopher who is invested in analytical philosophy, with a particular interest in Wittgenstein, and is out of step with the fashionable philosophy issuing from France since the 1960s. A fraction of his work has been translated into English. This article was of particular interest to me: Bouveresse, Jacques; Fournier, Christian [...]

I have long delayed summarizing the books I read in all or part from February through April 2007, partly in hope of writing extensive reviews of some of them. For now, I will just list the books and some other materials, and I can always return and delve into more detail at a future date. [...]