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Why Philosophy Needs History

Bernard Williams: On Truth, 17 October 2002

... both to undo the advance and to make sense of their own undertaking. As the historian Richard J. Evans has pointed out, the critic who wrote that ‘historical time is a thing of the past’ needs to consider her position. There are other dimensions in which real history has gone even further beyond the abstract structural necessities of the State of Nature ...

Secret-Keeping

Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Elizabeth Gaskell, 16 August 2007

The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell 
edited by Joanne Shattock et al.
Pickering & Chatto, 4716 pp., £900, May 2006, 9781851967773
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... as a writer of fiction. There is an amusing passage in Ruth when the minister’s sister, Faith Benson, takes pleasure in elaborating on the lie about Ruth’s past. Gaskell makes up for her indulgence here in a brief sequence in which Ruth’s illegitimate child, Leonard, is found taking liberties with the truth; the household goes into serious ...

Horrible Heresies

Jonathan Rée: Spinoza’s Big Idea, 16 March 2017

The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. II 
edited and translated by Edwin Curley.
Princeton, 769 pp., £40.95, June 2016, 978 0 691 16763 3
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... health was beginning to fail – Sophia suspected that he was being poisoned by partisans of ‘faith without reason’ – and he died in 1677, at the age of 44, lucid, calm and apparently content.Within a few months, his friends brought out a five-volume edition of his writings, including the much anticipated Ethica, which quickly became notorious: the ...

Warmer, Warmer

John Lanchester: Global Warming, Global Hot Air, 22 March 2007

The Revenge of Gaia 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 222 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 14 102597 1
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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
IPCC, February 2007Show More
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning 
by George Monbiot.
Allen Lane, 277 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 7139 9923 3
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The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies 
by Richard Heinberg.
Clairview, 320 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 1 905570 00 7
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The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review 
by Nicholas Stern.
Cambridge, 692 pp., £29.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 70080 1
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... culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of SF fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens ...

What’s so good about Reid?

Galen Strawson, 22 February 1990

Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism 
by Norman Daniels.
Stanford, 160 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 8047 1504 1
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Common Sense 
by Lynd Forguson.
Routledge, 193 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 02302 5
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Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ 
by Roger Gallie.
Reidel, 287 pp., £42, July 1989, 0 7923 0390 3
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Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Peter Jones.
John Donald, 230 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 85976 225 4
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Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by M.A. Stewart.
Oxford, 328 pp., £37.50, January 1990, 0 19 824967 5
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Thomas Reid 
by Keith Lehrer.
Routledge, 311 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 415 03886 3
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... early work and then forgot the debt, while transmitting some of his ideas to Wittgenstein. Gareth Evans was a forceful advocate of his views. But today he is known to most analytical philosophers only for one obvious objection to Locke’s theory of personal identity which partly misses the point, and for a theory of memory which is arguably one of the less ...

Jigsaw Mummies

Tom Shippey: Pagan Britain, 6 November 2014

Pagan Britain 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 480 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 300 19771 6
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The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria 
by Max Adams.
Head of Zeus, 450 pp., £25, August 2013, 978 1 78185 418 1
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... Earth Mother or Mother Goddess. Distinguished scholars pioneered the idea, including Sir Arthur Evans, who excavated Knossos, and the Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, who proposed a prehistoric and peaceful woman-centred civilisation in Greece. The discovery of Palaeolithic ‘Venus figurines’, statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to ...

Horrid Mutilation! Read all about it!

Richard Davenport-Hines: Jack the Ripper and the London Press by Perry Curtis, 4 April 2002

Jack the Ripper and the London Press 
by Perry Curtis.
Yale, 354 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 300 08872 8
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... culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey’s The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995). This indicts a ferocious misogynist, Francis Tumblety (c.1833-1903), an American quack who peddled a patent medicine known as the Tumblety Pimple Destroyer. (He was arrested ...

What’s Left?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Russian Revolution, 30 March 2017

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution 
by China Miéville.
Verso, 358 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 78478 280 1
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The Russian Revolution 1905-1921 
by Mark D. Steinberg.
Oxford, 388 pp., £19.99, February 2017, 978 0 19 922762 4
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Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 
by S.A. Smith.
Oxford, 455 pp., £25, January 2017, 978 0 19 873482 6
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The Russian Revolution: A New History 
by Sean McMeekin.
Basic, 496 pp., $30, May 2017, 978 0 465 03990 6
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Historically Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution 
by Tony Brenton.
Profile, 364 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 78125 021 1
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... of the collapse of the old regime and the Bolshevik triumph. This is an old Soviet article of faith, hotly disputed in the past by Western and, particularly, Russian émigré historians, who saw the tsarist regime on a course of modernisation and liberalisation that the First World War interrupted, plunging the country into disarray and making the ...

Take out all the adjectives

Jeremy Harding: The poetry of George Oppen, 6 May 2004

New Collected Poems 
by George Oppen, edited by Michael Davidson.
Carcanet, 433 pp., £14.95, July 2003, 1 85754 631 8
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... first-phase Objectivist and a good raconteur, reran the story for August Kleinzahler and George Evans half a century later: Once the poems were assembled for Poetry, Harriet Monroe sprung a surprise on Zukofsky: she told him the newcomers would have to have a name . . . Zukofsky was caught. He hated classifying people . . . But he was in no position to ...

The Red Card of Chaos

Jeremy Harding, 8 June 1995

... and secondary education. In Basoko, it also provides the only effective health care apart from faith healing and sorcery. The clinic is mostly full of new mothers and tuberculosis cases – TB, sometimes an opportunistic infection riding on HIV, is one of the big illnesses in Zaire, along with malaria, sleeping sickness and viral diarrhoea (‘diarrhées ...

Like a row of books by Faber

Peter Porter, 22 January 1987

Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985 
by Clive James.
Cape, 221 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 224 02422 1
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... Blackmur. Some of the others had our insight, too: Though I suppose I had endurance, toughness, faith, Sensitivity, intelligence and talent. My mind’s not right. With groined, sinning eyeballs I write sonnets until dawn Is published over London like a row of books by Faber – Then shave myself with Uncle’s full-dress sabre. It is an unusual blemish to ...

‘Gwendolen Harleth’

F.R. Leavis, 21 January 1982

... and a confident lack of that ability. And I have further to insist – having described Mary Ann Evans as a savant and remembering that she hobnobbed with the great intellects of the age and was known as the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach – that the creative genius was incomparably more intelligent than the other George Eliot. This is a point that ...

Chelseafication

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, 22 September 2022

Waterloo Sunrise: London from the Sixties to Thatcher 
by John Davis.
Princeton, 588 pp., £30, March, 978 0 691 22052 9
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... Society, argued in 1964 for the listing of the warehouse and offices of the vinegar makers Hill, Evans at 33-35 Eastcheap, in the City of London, which he described as ‘crazy’, one of the ‘follies’ of Victorian Gothic, but well worth saving on that account. In 1964 his plea was rejected, but seven years later the building was listed, and still stands ...

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7
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... of sleep and waking’. Maybe the extreme predations of neoliberalism do call for an extreme faith in nature in this manner, but such prefiguration is not yet a politics. It is also at odds with the Foucauldian assumption, which informs both Techniques of the Observer and Suspensions of Perception, that almost everything is constructed.Over​ the last ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... as they put it, and their belief that their hard-won position as ‘Englishmen of Hebrew faith’ would be threatened by the promotion of a new Jewish nationality. And so Zionists looked for gentile support. When Winston Churchill deserted the Tories for the Liberals in 1904 he was obliged to find another parliamentary seat, in Manchester North ...

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