Birth: February 20, 1947
It may be hyperbolic to declare that Shakespeare teaches us more about being human than all the natural scientists combined..
So this is my attempt to give a preliminary - probably far too crude - account of how philosophy by showing can really teach us. The attempts we make….
I don't think readers of Mann have overlooked the fact that he was a great ironist, but they have tended to see the irony in particular parts of the ….
I'm often quite gloomy about the prospects for the human future. But, although I have no competence to intervene directly in a political movement, I ….
So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film)..
Experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn..
Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, the….
The hardest problem of all is to appreciate the facts that the poor nations are - quite reasonably - not going to forgo their development, and that t….
I think the tone of mockery Heller finds is a part of Mann's irony, but only a part - a brilliant further touch consists in juxtaposing perspectives ….
For anyone who conceives literature in terms of plurality of perspectives, Finnegans Wake has to be the apogee. For, as we are told, every word in it….
The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another s….
In elaborating how "philosophy by showing" works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical "showing", I am….
I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have som….
In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard ph….
I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition - rather like the extraordinari….
In the end, we learn about the most basic philosophical questions - like "How to live?" - from a broad mixture of sources, including literature and p….
If the research agenda reflects "market forces", the problems of the poor are likely to be even more neglected than they already are..
Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are inexhaustible. They are celebrations of the ordinary, compelling reactions to philosophical elitism about "the go….
Mann was conscious of adopting different perspectives in different parts of the novella, but my guess is that there are plenty of passages in which t….
The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject..
I'm very concerned about the increasing distortion of research by the intrusion of the market. Universities are beginning to see science as a means o….