I have to say to begin with that despite initial appearances this is not a grumpy old man piece. At least, it’s not exactly my intention to voice petty gripes just for the sake of voicing them.
I was in the basement of Waterstone’s at the west end of Princes Street. Three young members of staff, one female and two male, were talking loudly. The males were teasing the woman in a deliberately petty, repetitive fashion. I was quite distracted by this incessant stupid chatter, and although I was in a public place and we can’t expect the silence of a library in a high street shop, I was irritated. I think I was justified:
1. Different standards and conventions – loose … read on »
Archive for the ‘books’ category…
An Epic Search For an Epic Search For Truth
Logicomix, An Epic Search For Truth
By Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
I have enjoyed comics since I was a child, when, fascinated and entranced by Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I argued heatedly with my friends, who all preferred Asterix.
I still read Tintin occasionally, and I enjoy more consciously grown-up graphic novels, but I never thought I’d be treated to a comic-book account of Bertrand Russell’s quest to establish the foundations of mathematics. The idea of such a book is incredible, yet here it is, a story told passionately and illustrated beautifully, which does justice to the men and their ideas. And they’re all in here: Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Gödel and Wittgenstein….
Read the rest on my philsophy … read on »
Certainly Not My Kind of Book
Oddly for someone whose political affiliations have always lain in the left tradition, I’m more and more fascinated by, and attracted to, the philosophy of Roger Scruton, who is a conservative. I find his manner of setting forth arguments – both in writing and on television – to be irresistible. It’s somehow both gentle and passionate. But it’s more than that: I really do agree with many of his ideas.
Anyway, I was looking at Mark Dooley’s biography of Scruton on Amazon and noticed this 5-star review:
This certainly is not my kind of book. It is a Christmas present for which I was asked so clearly it IS the kind of book enjoyed by the person who asked for it.
Everyone a Philosopher King
There’s an old adage that wanting to become a politician should disqualify you from becoming one. I just found it in Plato’s Republic, Book 7 520-521. Perhaps that’s where it comes from?
The state whose rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state whose rulers are eager to rule is worst.
For Plato this means that rulers must be philosophers: those who have attained the knowledge of the absolute Good, which resides in the heavenly realm of eternal fixed forms of which the so-called real world that we live in is but a poor reflection. These philosophers, as well as being more just, wise and good than others owing … read on »
Fear and Trembling
It is facile to mock or criticize philosophy for its difficult language, and I like to think I’m not a facile thinker, but I had an “oh sod this” moment while reading Kierkegaard this morning. The obscure, tangled, repetitive and willfully paradoxical language is just tedious – at least, so it strikes me so far. I know a little bit about philosophy: I’ve read some Plato, Hume, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and recently Roger Scruton. So I can be quite confident that my repugnance is not a knee-jerk reaction to difficult arguments. I don’t know, perhaps it just isn’t to my taste. Like Nietzsche, it is rhetorical and poetical rather than clear and elegant. I suppose that you can find truth, … read on »
I Undressed Her by Mistake
Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life reads a lot like today’s popular science books. In particular it reminds me of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, with its conversational style.
Much of the pleasure is the spectacle of all these Viennese doctors revelling in the exciting new theories of psychoanalysis, sharing their little anecdotes. Writing about inadvertent actions and how they can reveal unconscious motives, he quotes another psychologist:
“I entered someone’s home, and gave the lady of the house my right hand. Oddly enough, in the process I untied the bow holding her loose morning dress together. I was not aware of any dishonourable intentions, yet I had performed this unskilful movement with a conjuror’s sleight of hand.”
Chemicals and Complexes
As I wrote in the last post, I’m a tangle of complexes. Why didn’t I know this before? Lately I’ve been examining how my own self-awareness has changed over the years. I suppose you could call this self-awareness-awareness.
For years I would sometimes have bad moods of a particular kind, and during those moods my thoughts would turn to violence. Sometimes while walking in town on my way to or from work I would slip into a self-righteous rage, but lacking a very good reason for it I would fantasize about people offending me more than anyone in fact was doing, and about what I would do to them if this happened (normally involving a beating of some kind, but nothing … read on »
The Black Sheep Blog and More Ted Hughes
I am the black sheep of my flock,
I stand alone at field’s edge.
Out here my waking hours I spend,
Chewing a hole in the hedge.
I am the outcast of this flock.
When you are gathered together,
I spend my days tied up by a rope,
Seeking an end to my tether.
Black sheep, baa baa baa
etc.
I’m reminded of these lines, from Julian Cope’s “Black Sheep Song,” because my blog has been the black sheep of the family around here, sitting around within my site but with a completely different style and lacking a common navigation which might let people know they were actually on the alistairrobinson.co.uk site.
Well now it has returned to the flock: I turned my alistairrobinson.co.uk style into a Wordpress theme, so now … read on »
Russell, Proust and Peake
Reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy I’m struck by his intellectual generosity and fairness. He goes out of his way to extract the best from all kinds of ideas, including those that are easily rejected in the modern era, in the light of science. The book is a classic but it is widely criticized for its treatment of certain philosophers.
[Russell] treats Nietzsche with supreme cruelty as Nietzsche was a thinker that broke from the Enlightenment tradition and refused to play with numbers.
Russell’s bias and his dismissive treatment of philosophers that he does not agree with.
(Reviews at Amazon.com)
On the one hand it is obtuse not to see the (non-causal) connection between Nietzsche and Hitler, and on the other hand it … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson