Studies in a Dying Culture

I encountered Aant Elzinga in 1986 at a joint meeting of four scholarly societies concerned with the philosophy, history, and sociology of science and technology. I contacted him many years later and with his permission digitized some of his marvelous essays: The Man of Science in a World of Crisis: A Plea for a Two-Pronged [...]

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 [...]

I’ve just re-read chapter 7 of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which pinpoints his objections to the prevailing Anglo-American philosophy of the day, i.e. the philosophy of language dominant in analytical philosophy, and the treatment of concepts generally in philosophy and the social sciences. He has a particular objection to the empiricist reduction of thought to operationalism [...]

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 [...]

The debate: Bronner, Stephen Eric. "The Great Divide: The Enlightenment and its Critics," New Politics, vol. 5, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 19, Summer 1995, pp. 65-86. Goldner, Loren. "A Reply to Stephen Eric Bronner: Renaissance or Enlightenment," New Politics, vol. 6, no. 1 (new series), whole no. 21, Summer 1996, pp. 137-145. Bronner, [...]

Stephen Eric Bronner is not content to regurgitate the critical theory of its European originators of an earlier era, and he is not averse to criticizing their lapses. None of his books are to be missed, but for critical theory I suggest Of Critical Theory and Theorists above all. In October 2006 I read the [...]