Five-Four Fo Fum
In the TLS for May 4, 2012, along with the free online pieces on Jean Jaurès and today's French left ("What would Jaurès do?"), on Duke Ellington, and on the history of the dust jacket, highlights include reviews of recent books on 1930s Russian culture; the Harlem Renaissance; and Iris Murdoch as philosopher - in whom reviewer Simon Blackburn of Cambridge finds "undeniable brilliance", as editor Peter Stothard notes in his weekly summary, though I recall a quarter-century ago in the same paper Martha Nussbaum raked the novelist in her off-hours guise as Platonist/idealist over the Greek fire rather a bit; Nussbaum has a paper on Murdoch in a collection Blackburn reviews, which also features an unpublished essay on Heidegger by Murdoch, and a memoir, "Iris on Safari" by John Bayley, her husband of 40+ years and one of Britain's leading literary critics in the grand old humanist vein; see also, at YouTube, the interview with Murdoch by Bryan Magee, whose 1978 BBC-TV series on leading philosophers, Men of Ideas, transcripted into paperback, was a landmark of cerebral television of a kind all but unthinkable in the US - rather like Encounter magazine at the newsagents' before it.
Iris Murdoch, Philosopher
ISBN13: 9780199289905ISBN10: 0199289905Hardback, 360 pages
Jan 2012, In Stock
Price:
$65.00 (06)Description
Iris Murdoch was a notable philosopher before she was a notable novelist and her work was brave, brilliant, and independent. She made her name first for her challenges to Gilbert Ryle and behaviourism, and later for her book on Sartre (1953), but she had the greatest impact with her work in moral philosophy--and especially her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970). She turned expectantly from British linguistic philosophy to continental existentialism, but was dissatisfied there too; she devised a philosophy and a style of philosophy that were distinctively her own. Murdoch aimed to draw out the implications, for metaphysics and the conception of the world, of rejecting the standard dichotomy of language into the 'descriptive' and the 'emotive'. She aimed, in Wittgensteinian spirit, to describe the phenomena of moral thinking more accurately than the 'linguistic behaviourists' like R. M. Hare. This 'empiricist' task could be acheived, Murdoch thought, only with help from the idealist tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Bradley. And she combined with this a moral psychology, or theory of motivation, that went back to Plato, but was influenced by Freud and Simone Weil. Murdoch's impact can be seen in the moral philosophy of John McDowell and, in different ways, in Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, as well as in the recent movements under the headings of moral realism, particularism, moral perception, and virtue theory.This volume brings together essays by critics and admirers of Murdoch's work, and includes a longer Introduction on Murdoch's career, reception, and achievement. It also contains a previously unpublished chapter from the book on Heidegger that Murdoch had been working on shortly before her death, and a Memoir by her husband John Bayley. It gives not only an introduction to Murdoch's important philosophical life and work, but also a picture of British philosophy in one of its heydays and at an important moment of transition.
Features
- Leading critics and admirers of Iris Murdoch examine various aspects of her legacy as a philosopher
- Includes a previously unpublished chapter from the book Murdoch had been working on shortly before her death, and a Memoir by her husband John Bayley
- A detailed introduction outlines Murdoch's career, reception, and achievement
Also: the epigenetics "revolution" and whether, in its presumed modifications of evolutionary theory it really is one (the Darwinian faithful are driven round the bend by such claims; Oxford biochemist Jonathan Hodgkin investigates); Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts (whose reviewer, Alexander Marr, an Oxford-and-Sotheby's-trained young art historian with a scientific bent formerly at USC and now at Cambridge, looks himself as though
he might have partied with the Big G like it was 1599; actually, a year before that, as it happens, per his department at Cambridge: "Dr Marr is currently editing Richard Haydocke’s 1598 translation of Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura for the Modern Humanities Research Association’s new Tudor & Stuart Translations series");
Mark Peterson makes an extraordinary claim in this fascinating book focused around the life and thought of Galileo: it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. Galileo’s Muse argues that painters, poets, musicians, and architects brought about a scientific revolution that eluded the philosopher-scientists of the day, steeped as they were in a medieval cosmos and its underlying philosophy.
According to Peterson, the recovery of classical science owes much to the Renaissance artists who first turned to Greek sources for inspiration and instruction. Chapters devoted to their insights into mathematics, ranging from perspective in painting to tuning in music, are interspersed with chapters about Galileo’s own life and work. Himself an artist turned scientist and an avid student of Hellenistic culture, Galileo pulled together the many threads of his artistic and classical education in designing unprecedented experiments to unlock the secrets of nature.
In the last chapter, Peterson draws our attention to the Oratio de Mathematicae laudibus of 1627, delivered by one of Galileo’s students. This document, Peterson argues, was penned in part by Galileo himself, as an expression of his understanding of the universality of mathematics in art and nature. It is “entirely Galilean in so many details that even if it is derivative, it must represent his thought,” Peterson writes. An intellectual adventure, Galileo’s Muse offers surprising ideas that will capture the imagination of anyone—scientist, mathematician, history buff, lover of literature, or artist—who cares about the humanistic roots of modern science.
“Peterson believes there is a fresh and important story to tell about Galileo’s roots in Renaissance humanism. He tells that story well and makes the fascinating argument that Galileo’s interest in applied geometry arose not from the study of orthodox philosophy and mathematics but from his interest in the application of geometry to poetry, painting, music and architecture. He makes this case well.”
—Paul Monk, The Australian
“Peterson advances the hypothesis that it was the interplay of mathematics in the arts, not the philosophically-bent sciences of the day that evolved into our modern sciences.”—Publishers Weekly
“Peterson’s book portrays Galileo in a wonderfully fresh perspective. Over several decades I have steeped myself in Galileo biographies, and it’s really rare to find an account as intriguing as this one.”—Owen Gingerich
“Galileo’s Muse explores a wealth of intriguing connections between the arts and the birth of modern science, presented with thought and verve. Mark Peterson’s excitement shines through on every page.”—Peter Pesic, author of Sky in a Bottle and Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science
“Galileo’s Muse is a brilliant study that lucidly explains the mathematics central to innovations in the Renaissance arts and sciences. Peterson’s expertise as a mathematician and physicist gives this book a level of detail and insight that will offer much to historians of art, science, literature alike.”—Arielle Saiber, Associate Professor of Italian, Bowdoin College
Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture by the University of Texas intellectual historian Richard Pells; 
America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.
Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement—to make the modern world seem more intelligible.
Modernist America brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.
Richard Pells is professor of history emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Austin, TX.
“[T]here is much to enjoy here . . . a rousing jaunt through a period of remarkable upheavals in entertainment and the arts.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Debates over high and low art, and the avant-garde vs. popular culture, rage throughout this absorbing volume.”—Publishers Weekly
"Richard Pells's book leaps, lunges, gallops, and, once in a while, pirouettes its way toward something very close toa unified field theory of twentieth-century American culture."—Gene Seymour, Bookforum
"Pells has written a capacious, original, even compelling book...there is nothing like this in print."—Daniel Horowitz, Smith College
"Richard Pells was one of the first scholars to teach us the importance of looking beyond national boundaries in writing the history of American culture. Now he has valuably extended that lesson in this rich, accessible study of modernism’s transatlantic reach."—Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
"In his cosmopolitan study of American modernism, Richard Pells reveals the open borders for artistic work. With his impressive command of several art forms, high and popular, he illuminates the transnational circuitry of artistic borrowing and innovation."—Thomas Bender, author of New York Intellect
“By showing that American modernism emerged as part of an international artistic movement, Richard Pells provides an important contribution to the growing scholarly literature on the globalization of American culture.”—Elaine Tyler May, author of America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation
“An education in American modernism, this is also well-researched, thought-provoking, and uplifting analytical commentary on its cultural sources and universal influence.”—Carol J. Binkowski, Library Journal, starred review
"Pells's account succeeds. . . in evoking the ongoing exchange between those in Europe who were boldly reinventing classical traditions in art, architecture, and music and those in America who were using the black canvas of the twentieth century to either seek homegrown variations on European genres or invent their own traditions."—Gene Seymour, Bookforum
"Richard Pells's book leaps, lunges, gallops, and, once in a while, pirouettes its way towards something very close to a unified field theory of twentieth-century American culture by charting its intersections, polarities, eccentricities, and, most conspicuously, impact on the world at large."—Gene Seymour, Bookforum
“Pells makes for a fine guide to the 20th century. His book is worth reading for the section on Hemingway alone – and for the blinding insight that the tics and twitches of Travis Bickle and Clyde Barrow and the other crazies of the American new wave owe a lot to Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois.”—Christopher Bray, The Observer
“At times the account is revelatory, as it is poignant: the legions of fans who greeted the dazed band leader Benny Goodman on his arrival in Los Angeles in 1935, where, unbeknown to Goodman, due to the three hour time difference, his moderately successful late night radio slot in New York had become a weekly prime-time smash. The book is full of such gems.”—Nick Liptrot, History Today
and a reissue of the 1968 book In Ethiopia With a Mule by that brave octogenarian Irishwoman and activist, the veteran travel writer Dervla Murphy,*
Editorial Reviews
Review
'One of the supreme virtues of Dervla Murphy as a travel writer is that she is human. She needs her drink; she craves her cigarettes; she is capable of losing her temper; she smuggles things through customs. A more virtuous figure would be far less endearing.' -- Daily Telegraph 'Dervla Murphy must be top of the intrepid class: conventional travel writers seem impossibly pallid by contrast.' -- Financial Times 'An admirable woman ! She has a romantic soul and a keen eye' -- Times Literary Supplement 'Dervla Murphy's credentials are more than a brave heart and strong calf muscles ! the fruit of these mature wanderings for my money puts her among the select travel writers of the last two decades.' -- Observer 'Murphy's observation is acute, her self-effacement is disarming' -- Sunday Times
About the Author
Dervla Murphy is one of the very best loved of travel writers. She was born in County Waterford and since 1964 has been regularly publishing accounts of her journeys - by bicycle or by mule or on foot -- in the remoter areas of four continents. The Times Literary Supplement called her 'an admirable woman -- she has a romantic soul and a keen eye'.
For a moving exchange of letters, 1984, between Lukacs and George Kennan on the tragic dimension of man's cosmic estate, whose style and tenor at times recall Oscar Wilde's "The Critic as Artist",
Wilde (Gilbert, in dialogue with Ernest): But the night wearies, and the light flickers in the lamp ...
Kennan (July 8, 1984, from Norway): However, it is getting late. The sea beyond our windows is being darkened by the first long shadows of the brief Nordic summer night. And the rest of philosophy can wait ...
see here, pp. 94-101.
John Lukacs himself is just out this week in paperback, in a reprint of The Future of History (Yale); if you're ever on Jeopardy!, and the answer, Daily Double or otherwise, in the unsung category of Scholarly Publishing reads "It is the only book listed with Amazon.com to carry generic blurbs from Jacques Barzun, George F. Kennan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Conor Cruise O'Brien, the latter three dead for some years," you now have your winning Trebek-formatted question.
Last year in the THES, Richard J. Evans of Cambridge, a leading historian of WWII Germany, took friendly issue with Lukacs, while another Lukacs title, History and the Human Condition: A Historian's Pursuit of Knowledge, is due October 25 from ISI.
In The Saint, "St. Andrews' Independent Student Newspaper", David Swensen reviews The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, the latest work by George Steiner, another elegiac and cantankerous humanist with whom I have wrestled much these last thirty years, if in and after Steiner's case more in mock Greco-Roman(tic) style than after Jacob with the angel in the case of the Catholic Lukacs:
‘When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer?’ This sentence, written by George Steiner in 1963, is probably the most concise summation of his body of work. No one has been more intensely eloquent about the ancillary function of criticism: ‘The critic lives at second hand. He writes about.’ But this is Steiner’s rhetorical game: lower the expectations of your reader, then instantly awe them by raising the stakes. In other words, tell us that criticism is a sham for secondary minds, then subtly awe us with your extraordinarily first rate mind. My bet is that Steiner has pulled this trick enough to know what we’re thinking: he’s not really writing ‘criticism’ then, is he? Well, no. He’s not.
Steiner’s new book, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan, is described as his ‘magnum opus’ on the dust jack, but since Steiner so brilliantly writes the same book over and over again, this one seems hardly better than any of the others. If anything, its definitive quality is its overwhelming mood of resignation in the face of technology (‘a technophobic consciousness such as mine’) and, though I didn’t think it possible, an even more pervasive note of the elegiac throughout. Steiner’s work has essentially been one long, (more or less) joyous eulogy for the western canon. At times he has proclaimed a unique and fanatical faith in the humanities, but more often he has lamented their current state. One of the last lines of the book refers to “the humanities” in quotes, as that institution which ‘so bleakly failed us in the long night of the twentieth century’. “the humanities”, apparently having forgotten their etymology, can no longer be referred to without quotes. Statements like this, along with the ponderous stylistic gravitas of every sentence Steiner writes, do nothing to illuminate his erudition or brilliance. Instead they tend to encourage the image of Steiner as your peevish luddite Grandfather, cantankerously moaning about the volume of the radio as he tosses another iPad into the River Cam ...
*See also this comic book pick from Dervla Murphy in 2008 in the UK monthly Geographical:
Top 10 writer's reads
... 10. Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry by Santo Cilauro et al (Quadrille, 8.99 [pounds sterling])
Anyone reading this in public risks being certified because of prolonged bouts of uncontrollable laughter
Book Description
The funniest book about travel you will ever read: atravel guide to the fictional European republic Molvania, birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. Australian authors.
Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
The Republic of Molvanîa, known as the birthplace of whooping cough and the Molvanîan Sneezing Hound, has been largely ignored by the backpacking set in its sweep through post-Communist Europe. This may have something to do with the country's miserable landscape, miserable weather, miserable food, and miserable, surly populace; on the other hand, it may have something to do with the fact that Molvanîa doesn't exist. In format and page layout, this inspired send-up of a travel guide looks exactly like the real thing, and it displays an acute feel for all the clichés of the genre, including testimonials that instruct how to have an uncomfortable "authentic" experience, rather than a "bland, westernized" one. The nation's new national anthem is set to the tune of "What a Feeling," from the movie "Flashdance" useful phrases include the Molvanîan for "Please," "Thank you," "May God send you a sturdy donkey," and "What is that smell?"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Molvanîa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Moldova.
Molvanîa (subtitled A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry) is a book parodying travel guidebooks. The guide describes the fictional country Molvanîa, in Eastern Europe, a nation described as "the birthplace of the whooping cough" and "owner of Europe's oldest nuclear reactor". It was created by Australians Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro and Rob Sitch (of The D-Generation and The Panel fame).
History
The book became a surprise success after its initial publication in Australia, sparking a bidding war for the international publication rights. Qantas has even run the half-hour video segment produced in association with the book on its international flights.[citation needed][edit]About Molvanîa
The Republic of Molvanîa is a composite of many stereotypes and clichés about Eastern Europe. The exact location of Molvanîa is never specified. It is said to border Germany, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary and Romania, which in reality is impossible given the presented shape of the country.
The book describes the nation as having been a desolate wasteland for much of its history, torn by civil war and ethnic unrest. Eventually Molvanîa's various warring factions were united as a single kingdom, ruled by a series of cruel despotic kings. In the late 19th century the monarchy was overthrown, but the royal family remained popular in exile. During World War II the country was allied with Nazi Germany, and then afterwards was occupied by the Soviet Union who set up a Communist puppet government. After the fall of European Communism in the 1990s, the country became a dictatorship run by a corrupt government with heavy ties to the Mafia.
Molvanîa is described as a very poor and rural country, heavily polluted and geographically barren. The infrastructure is terrible, with necessities such as electricity, clean water, and indoor plumbing being rare finds, largely due to bureaucratic incompetence. Though the travel guide tries to suggest otherwise, there is little to do in the country, the hotels are tiny, filthy and dilapidated, the ethnic cuisine disgusting, and the "tourist attractions" boring and overpriced.
The Molvanîan people are portrayed as being generally rude, dirty, and at times slightly psychotic, with numerous bizarre and illogical beliefs and traditions. The country's patron saint is Fyodor.
[edit]Language
The fictional Molvanîan language is said to be so complicated that it takes an average of 16 years to learn. Not only is the tone in which one speaks important to the meaning, but also the pitch. It is a gendered language, with different articles being used depending on whether a noun is masculine, feminine, neutral, or a type of cheese. There are language schools for tourists to attend, which are described by the book as a "waste of time."
[edit]Communications
Molvanîa does not have a regulatory authority for wireless communications, therefore the use of any frequency is permitted. At least one maker of Wi-Fi equipment has included Molvanîa as a choice that permits operation over a wider frequency range than is normally possible.[2]
[edit]Criticism
The book was criticized by the United Kingdom's former Minister for Europe Keith Vaz, who accused it of exploiting prejudices about Eastern Europe.
He said the book was a little "cheeky" because "it does reflect some of the prejudices which are taking root [in Europe]. He [Mr Gleisner] does try and show exactly where we are lacking in our knowledge, the sad thing is, some people might actually believe that this country exists."[3]
External links
Sequels
Subsequent travel guide parodies published examine Southeast Asian nation Phaic Tăn (published 2004) and San Sombrèro in Latin America (published in 2006).[edit]See also
[edit]References
- ^ "Laughs in land that dentistry forgot" . Melbourne: The Age. March 6, 2004. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
- ^ "NS2 and Molvania or ComplianceTest" . Ubiquiti Networks Forum. Ubiquiti Networks. July 10, 2009.
- ^ "Molvania spoof mocks travel books" . BBC News. April 2, 2004. Retrieved September 30, 2011.
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