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Monthly Archives: October 2009
Romanticism
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
Introduction
Method
Critiques
The Moral Law Within
Fanny and Edmund
The Crawfords
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mrs Norris
The Quiet Thing
Enlightenment
Kantian Deontology
King Lear
Romanticism
The Satirical Inheritance
Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
4.3. Romanticism
Miss Austen seems to be saturated with the Platonic idea that the giving and receiving of knowledge, the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment
King Lear
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
Introduction
Method
Critiques
The Moral Law Within
Fanny and Edmund
The Crawfords
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mrs Norris
The Quiet Thing
Enlightenment
Kantian Deontology
King Lear
Romanticism
The Satirical Inheritance
Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
4.2. King Lear
Seneca also wrote nine tragedies on Greek mythological subjects, more designed to be recited or read than [...]
Posted in Mansfield Park Tagged Christianity, Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, King Lear, Mansfield Park, philosophy, rationalism, Romanticism, sentimentalism, Shakespeare Leave a comment
Ritter on Obama
In the earlier article on Afghanistan I quoted Ritter’s ‘fierce’ analysis of the situation facing President Obama. It is also remarkable for a fierce judgement of Obama (quoted below) should he ignore his Vice President and escalate the US commitment by agreeing to McChrytal’s request for 40,000 extra soldiers. Such clarity in ethical matters [...]
Posted in topical Tagged Afghanistan, ethics, Jane Austen, philosophy, rationalism, Scott Ritter, war Leave a comment
Blog News
A New Tag Line
I have cleaned up the tag line of the blog. I am pretty sure that it is an accident that it comes out at exactly the same length as the main title.
Mansfield Park Essay
The Mansfield Park essay is proceeding much more slowly that I anticipated. I am not sure that this is [...]
Posted in commentary Tagged Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, philosophy, sentimentalism 1 Comment
Afghanistan
I have been meaning to write on Afghanistan for a while and today’s column by David Brooks has finally prompted me to write it. Brooks’ argument is simple. All the military experts are sure we can do this, but they are not sure that President Obama has the the resolve to do it.
They do not [...]
Kantian Deontology
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
Introduction
Method
Critiques
The Moral Law Within
Fanny and Edmund
The Crawfords
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mrs Norris
The Quiet Thing
Enlightenment
Kantian Deontology
King Lear
Romanticism
The Satirical Inheritance
Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
4.1. Kantian Deontology
deontology. The ethical theory taking duty as the basis of morality; the view that some acts are [...]
President Blair?
The principles of international community apply also to international security.
We now have a decade of experience since the end of the Cold War. It has certainly been a less easy time than many hoped in the euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our armed forces have been busier than ever – delivering [...]
Posted in topical Tagged ethics, irrationalism, Nuremberg, rationalism, sentimentalism, Tony Blair, war crimes Leave a comment
Twain on Austen
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, but I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader, and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read “Pride and [...]
Posted in topical Tagged Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, literary criticism, Mark Twain, philosophy, rationalism, realism, Romanticism Leave a comment
The Paradox of Choice
Katja notes that Barry Scwartz’s Paradox of Choice is the TED talk (see below) she hears praised most often, in which Schwartz summarizes, with great force and clarity, the argument he advanced in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, and goes on to muse:
Why should we fail to adapt? Even if [...]
Posted in topical Tagged Buddhism, ethics, happiness, materialism, modernity, philosophy, physicalism, poverty, rationalism Leave a comment
Preface to Mansfield Park
This post is the first part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
Introduction
Method
Critiques
The Moral Law Within
Fanny and Edmund
The Crawfords
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mrs Norris
The Quiet Thing
Enlightenment
Kantian Deontology
King Lear
Romanticism
The Satirical Inheritance
Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
Preface
Philosophy is hard. In the Buddhist tradition meditation practitioners are warned that they must engage in study [...]
Posted in Mansfield Park Tagged Buddhism, Christianity, Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, Kant, Mansfield Park, modernity, philosophy, rationalism, religion, Romanticism, sentimentalism Leave a comment
Fiction and Reality
Frank Rich had a great piece on the balloon-boy fiasco in Sunday’s Times.
Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express [...]
Obama and Expectations
I finished the previous post on the rather optimistic thought that Obama’s aspiration to be a president of the United States, to connect with conservatives as well as liberals, is what the times call for. This is worth looking at more closely.
Firstly, there is this from Yglesias on that prize.
But in semi-defense of the Nobel [...]
Posted in topical Tagged ethics, global warming, idealism, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama, philosophy, politics, rationalism, realism, Tibetan autonomy Leave a comment
The Growth Illusion
Although I have gone to some effort to try and get folks to address the wider picture of the Levitt & Dubner attack on efforts to curb carbon emissions, I have only just received the first comment on it or any of the follow-up posts. Thanks to NelC for engaging–it is supposed to be the [...]
A Note to Concerned Bloggers
[I am emailing this around to various bloggers who took part in the recent discussion of the Global Cooling chapter of Superfreakonomics.]
Y’all,
I haven’t had the opportunity to read Superfreakonomics yet, but from what I have seen of it, at least the last 60% of the book is devoted to taking down the notion that we [...]
Posted in correspondence Tagged altruism, Chicago School, climate science, ethics, Freakonomics, global warming Leave a comment
Being Freakonomical with the Heart
[ (i) This is a tribute to, and perhaps fulfilment of, Daniel Davies's post Being Freakonomical With The Truth. (ii) I see that I made a major error in last night's post: Michael Sandel doesn't belong to an academic philosophy department, but is of course in the Harvard Department of Government, with a manifest passion [...]
Posted in topical Tagged altruism, Chicago School, climate science, ethics, Freakonomics, geo-engineering, global warming, Michael Sandel, philosophy Leave a comment
The Age of Cynicism
Madeleine Bunting is in a quiet way one of my favourite journalists writing today. She invariably tackles important questions and I often find myself grappling with them immediately and then reflecting on on months later. Her latest column, Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good, I think will fall comfortably into [...]
Posted in topical Tagged altruism, Aristotle, economics, ethics, markets, Michael Sandel, patience, philosophy, virtues Leave a comment
The Silence of the Lambs
l read with fascinated horror the write-up in TPM of Hannibal Rising, the latest in the Silence of the Lambs/Hanibal Lecter franchise. I am not going to name the author because I can’t emphasise enough that what I am saying is not at all personal but simply reflects in the starkest terms a general contemporary [...]
Posted in topical Tagged compassion, empathy, Enlightenment, ethics, Nietzsche, philosophy, pity, Romanticism, sentimentalism, sympathy 1 Comment
A True-Born Englishman
—
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
Daniel Defoe (1703, h/t Sullivan who has the rest)
Pat Buchanan’s rant on the passing of WASP-supremacy has attracted no soul-searching whatsoever as far as I can tell. As Serwer say, ‘good riddance’, and very well said too, but Robert Farley’s response I thought was [...]
Lost in Zombies and Sea Monsters?
Dazzle camoflage is the only way I can explain my reaction to the Jane-sploitation zombie and sea monster mash-ups, the grotesquery not so much concealing as confusing. The perplexity was only compounded when it became clear that publishers were investing heavily in the genre with supporting short films. Fortunately this was a prelude to enlightenment:
I [...]
Posted in topical Tagged ethics, literary criticism, Pride and Prejudice, rationalism, Romanticism, Sense and Sensibility, sentimentalism Leave a comment
Management Science
Well, I promised myself I’d finish this before the sequel appeared in the shops, and the conclusion has been made, shall we say, somewhat easier by the fact that the burden of my conclusion – that there is something terribly, horribly wrong with the state of modern economics – has become somewhat of an open [...]
Posted in topical Tagged economics, Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, management science, philosophy Leave a comment
Enlightenment
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
Introduction
Method
Critiques
The Moral Law Within
Fanny and Edmund
The Crawfords
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mrs Norris
The Quiet Thing
Enlightenment
Kantian Deontology
King Lear
Romanticism
The Satirical Inheritance
Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
4. Enlightenment
In Sense and Sensibility Austen showed that the Hume’s declaration in the Treatise that ‘reason is, and ought [...]
Posted in Mansfield Park Tagged Christianity, Enlightenment, ethics, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, philosophy, rationalism, Romanticism, sentimentalism Leave a comment
Why I Read Blogs
Further to my previous post, here is a selection of Monday posts from my top five bloggers (this time in reverse alphabetical order).
The Dismal Science and its Discontents
I note that the Freakonomics folks are doubling down, giving Nathan Myhrvold (the controversial advocate of geo-engineering solutions to climate change that they leaned on too heavily in the final chapter of their book) a platform to defend his contributions and De Long lets Nicholas Weaver reply to the technical points of Myhrvold’s post. However, [...]
Posted in commentary Tagged Chicago School, economics, Enlightenment, Freakonomics, philosophy, science Leave a comment
Freakonomics and The Dismal Science
Cute-o-nomics
The maps of real knowledge, designed for real life, showed nothing except things which allegedly could be proved to exist. The first principle of the philosophical mapmakers seemed to be “If in doubt, leave it out,” or put it into a museum. It occurred to me, however, that the question of [...]
Posted in topical Tagged altruism, E F Schumacher, economics, egoism, ethics, Marilynne Robinson, philosophy, psychological egoism 2 Comments
The Satirical Inheritance