Birth: February 20, 1947
So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film)..
Using the Adagietto of Mahler's Fifth is one of the touches of pure genius in Visconti's film (even though Mahlerians complain very loudly that the p….
The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock..
Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of….
There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his wri….
I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way ….
I don't think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore passed on to us by our ancestor….
Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "Ho….
I believe that the arts make indispensable contributions to our understanding..
Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer us perspectives that open u….
I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics..
We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to thin….
I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some o….
I read Aschenbach's constant desire to go beyond the works he has already produced to be the counterpart of Mann's deep wish to surpass his previous ….
I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious..
Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love - and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early readi….
My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundament….
Current education in science treats all students as if they were going to have scientific careers. They are required to solve problems and memorize l….
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives..
It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers..
The theory of evolution explains to us what our ancestry has been. It does not explain away our worth. Why should we be afraid to learn more about wh….