No comments about Encounters with Kierkegaard.

No comments about Every Person's Guide to Jewish Philosophy and Philosophers.

No comments about Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Volume 1, Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880.

2 comments about Three Critics of the Enlightenment.

1. My review is limited to the study of Johann Georg Hamann in the present volume, and the three star rating applies to it alone. Combining Isaiah Berlin's books on Vico, Hamann and Herder under one cover was a felicitous idea of Berlin's editor and literary executor Henry Hardy. The position which these thinkers share: their anti-Cartesianism, their emphasis on history, tradition, language and mythology may now be seen through the considerably different lenses they employ. I feel compelled, however, to register a caveat. When the present Hamann study appeared in book form in 1993, I expressed my reservations about it in a letter to the "New York Review of Books," to which Berlin replied. I lamented the fact that he had ignored modern Hamann scholarship, and had clung to the interpretation of Hamann as an irrationalist, especially that espoused by Rudolf Unger in his 1911 book,"Hamann und die Aufklaerung,"ignoring modern discussions of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Specialists in the field now consider Unger's interpretation outdated, and see Hamann as a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side.

   The question of Hamann's relation to the Enlightenment turns on the conception of reason. I have maintained that Hamann employed a mode of reason distinct from that of the rationalistic Enlighteners as well as from that of his friendly adversary,Kant. In order to designate that mode, I adopted a term once used by Kant in referring to Hamann's thought,i.e., "intuitive reason," or, in the original German, "anschauende Vernunft." I accepted the term as an apt one for Hamann's mode of thought, however Kant felt about it. Further, I have demonstrated how it can be linguistically distinguished from the traditional logico-mathematical mode of thought in my book "The Quarrel of Reason with Itself"(1988),and elsewhere. It is one which Berlin rightly sees as akin to Dilthey's "verstehen," which Berlin also rejects. He lists a group of philosophers whose conception of reason matches his own: Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Franz von Brentano, William James, Bertrand Russell and the "Vienna Circle." Most of these thinkers are about as far removed from any kind of "verstehen" as possible. Who then, besides Hamann, may be said to have employed what I have called "intuitive reason"? The prime examples are the great epistemological heirs of Hamann: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe belongs here because of his refusal to analyze the "Urphaenomen." Hence, his anti-Newtonian stance. Nietzsche, especially in "Zarathustra," which I have analyzed closely from the standpoint of intuitive reason in "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition"(1985).

   Having stated my reservations concerning Berlin's interpretation of Hamann, I must say, however, that we can be grateful that he has helped mightily to rescue that German philosopher from the obscurity to which he has been unjustly relegated by those who remain under the spell of the strictly rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment. Berlin, in spite of his basic lack of empathy with Hamann, not only recognized his importance, but was always fascinated by him. He was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to "The Hamann News-Letter," which I edited and published in the early 195O's and 196O's. Further, his correspondence with me regarding Hamann over a period of three and a half decades shows an unflagging interest in the man who both attracted and repelled him. In a letter to me of June 25,1972, he wrote: "My passion for Hamann is undiminished." Not too surprisingly, there are certain passages in the present book in which Berlin seems, unwittingly, to move toward a certain degree of empathy,hence to a kind of "verstehen." But such passages are few, and many others are unjustly harsh. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, Berlin's study of Hamann is valuable for introducing the reader, especially the anglophone reader, to the historically important pre-Romantic figure, known as "The Magus of the North," without whom the development of German Romanticism would be unthinkable, and whose insights increasingly bear fruit today, especially in theology and philosophy. As Berlin has said: "Hamann repays study."




2. Following that dictum, I might point out that, especially in two areas of contemporary concern, Hamann's thought is highly relevant: Oswald Bayer has shown in Autoritaet und Kritik (1991) that Hamann's hermeneutics -- antedating by two centuries Derrida's reflections on intertextuality -- provides the basis for a devastating critique of deconstruction by subverting the French thinker's concept of the "center," and demonstrating where the true center ("Mitte") is to be located. Further, there is presently a lively discussion among scholars of Hamann's critique of Kant's famous essay: "What is Enlightenment"? Berlin's present study would have done more justice to Hamann's thought by discussing such developments as these and others, which were available during his lifetime.

5 comments about Descartes's Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe.

1. I'm a Mechanical Engineer with enough Mathematics and Philosophy study in my past to have a basic understanding of Descartes. I went into the book with no knowledge of Aczel, the secret notebook, or of the details of Descartes life. With that said I found the book to be great. I walked away understanding much more of Descartes' life and studies. I feel the secret notebook was addressed fairly well through out hinting that it existed through Descartes' fear of publishing. We know the secret notebook is lost to time and very little of it is known, so I'm not sure that we can expect the detail that some reviewers are demanding. All in all I liked it. Fine, if you are a mathematics or Descartes scholar you will not learn much here. But for 99.9% of the population, you will learn of a great Mathematician and Philosopher. Thanks Aczel.



2. When one reads a book titled "Descartes's Secret Notebook," one expects a few things: a) information about Descartes, b) information about the secret notebook. But Aczel does a slipshod job of presenting both to us.
   
   First, information about Descartes. What biographical information we can find within this book we can find on the internet in greater abundance and depth. I see no reason to buy this book if a) there are many points of inaccuracy with regard to facts in this book, b) what can be found here can already be found on the net.
   
   Second, the secret notebook. We expect to see the links between Rosicrucian teachings and Descartes's notebook, but what we find is the links between Descartes' life and Rosicrucian teachings, and that between Leibniz's beliefs and Descartes' notebook. So Aczel does not offer us what he promises when he claims a connection between the notebook and Rosicrucian teachings.
   
   Besides, why should I buy this book when it is a poor summary of a 1987 article by Pierre Costabel? Aczel should be ashamed.
   
   And if the Wikiproduct report at the bottom of this page is true (and evidence suggests that this is so), then Aczel should be as ashamed of his lack of integrity as he should be at his lack of scholarship.



3. It's no surprise that this book wasn't published by an academic press, because no peer review process could possibly have permitted Aczel so completely to misrepresent the contents of Descartes' `secret notebook.' When he purports to be describing the theorem Descartes discovered, Aczel is actually describing work that was done by Euler more than a century later.
   
   One of the `Featured Reviewers' at this site says Aczel "has a talent for explaining mathematical ideas and formulas that might seem daunting to the lay reader." But how can the `lay reader,' including this reviewer, assess how good well he's explaining the material unless he is already familiar with it? Otherwise, an `expert' like Aczel can fabricate his story, the `lay reader' will never be the wiser.
   
   In about 1750 Euler proved that if you count up the number V of vertices of a convex polyhedron, the number E of edges and the number F of faces, then V - E + F is always equal to 2. This is the theorem Aczel attributes to Descartes in the last 2 chapters of his book, a book which is otherwise just a rehash of old biographies of Descartes.
   
   What Descartes actually proved is this: take the same convex polyhedron, calculate the angle deficiency at each vertex and sum these up - the answer is always 8 right angles (720 degrees). What's an angle deficiency? It's the sum of all the plane angles that meet at a given vertex, subtracted from 360. Let's take the octahedron as an example: at each of its vertices, four equilateral triangles meet. So the angle deficiency is [360 - (60 + 60 + 60 + 60)], which is 120 degrees. Since an octahedron has 6 identical vertices, the sum of the angle deficiencies is 6x120 = 720 degrees, or 8 right angles. The octahedron is only one particular case; this works equally well for any convex solid figure. Try it yourself for a cube, where 8x90 = 720.
   
   Well, these two theorems are certainly very different results, but in the late 1800s, after Descartes notebook was re-discovered, people realized that you could deduce Euler's theorem from Descartes theorem. As a result, in the early 20th century some French chauvinists renamed Euler's formula for Descartes.
   
   There is no evidence that Euler ever saw Descartes notebook, although Aczel fabricates a `fact' to make it seem like he did. There is no evidence that Euler ever visited Hanover.
   
   Now the real facts would make a really good story for a popular math book. A real master of the genre, like William Dunham, Simon Singh or Eli Maor, would explain both Descartes' theorem and Euler's theorem to their audience and then demonstrate the logical equivalence of the two.
   
   Aczel is apparently incapable of doing this, or at least was unwilling to do the real work that it would involve. Instead, he describes Euler's theorem where he claims to be describing Descartes' notebook. Specifically, he claims that Descartes counted the edges of a polyhedron, which he most certainly did not. Euler was the first person ever to consider the edge of a polyhedron as an item of mathematical interest, so that he actually had to coin a Latin word (acies) for it.
   
   As is well documented in other reviews: (1) most of this book is a re-hash of various biographies of Descartes and 90% of it has nothing to do with `secret notebook,' and (2) it is absolutely loaded with factual errors about mathematics and the history of mathematics.
   
   What's much worse is the tiny portion that does cover the notebook itself is an amazingly inaccurate and even dishonest misrepresentation of what Descartes really did. Shame, shame, shame.



4. I've enjoyed several other Aczel works: Fermat's Last Theorem, God's Equation, Mystery of the Aleph, and I struggled mightily to get through this one, but it's just too dull. Blah, blah, blah, then this clown wrote to that one and said meaningless things; blah, blah, blah, these phrases from this ancient manuscript appeared in this person's letters, proving he was influenced by it. Blech.



5. The very fact that the German polymath Leibniz sat down to transcribe pages of a "secret notebook" written by Rene Descartes could send chills up the spine of any fan of these superstars of the Enlightenment, and indeed that is exactly what happened to me. I was so intrigued by the title that I pre-ordered this book and waited for it to arrive in Japan with a kid on Christmas eve kind of feeling. But after I devoured it in one sitting, I found myself wondering how this mishmash of potted biographies and wobbly argumentation (Descartes was in such and such a city at the same time as such and such a reputed Rosicrucian was passing through the same city, therefore Descartes was a Rosicrucian), could add up to a book to be taken seriously. I learned that Descartes might have been poisoned, that he might have fathered a child by a mistress, that maybe he routed a boat-load of pirates all by his Popeye self, which would have made him a considerable scrapper if it were true. Leibniz comes in for an even more nebulous portrait as he glides through the pages, a mere excuse for the plot to ramble on. Finally, at the end of the book we're allowed to look over Leibniz's shoulder as he decrypts and transcribes (in record time!) an equation that would later be rediscovered by Euler, the great mathematician and associate of Gauss, the Beethoven of pure math. Yes, this is remarkable stuff, but it's really not explained in enough depth before Aczel attempts to stretch the significance of Descartes' discovery into a hyper-Einsteinian cosmological intuition of the nature of the dimensional structuring of the universe itself--a truly breathtaking, and--a truly unwarranted--leap. Add to this mix the halting, spavined style that hobbles the narrative and you have what resembles a one trick pony of a book that will leave you hoping for a Native Dancer to canter by some day.

5 comments about The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir.

1. Well, I've read this book in Korean and I'm not deeply read in his theories but as I read this, I couldn't help feeling sorrow. What a peculiar life as a human being , let alone as a philosopher! Whatever they say about the man, to me he seems a vulnerable human being and the victim to a wrong network of human interaction. Think of what this man could have avoided in his life...( Someone might ask "How?" ) Why and how he had to murder his wife will remain a forever mystery. He's dead but I want to pray for him while I'm alive.



2. A review in New Republic by Tony Judt of Althusser's posthumous The Future Lasts Forever implements what might be called the standard reactionary reading of that "curious" autobiographical document. Judt was, at least initially, correct in refusing to read the text as a "Rousseau-like confession", although he claims, and not incidentally, that Althusser would have us read it as such. Curiously enough, however, Althusser cites the exact reason as Judt for encouraging readers to repress the inclination to read the memoir as his Rousseaudian "Confession": he is simply not up to the challenge, at least in the sense that he has no pretensions concerning originality and philosophical profundity. Rather than Rousseau, Althusser sounds more like a victim of a Stalinist inquisition: all he has to do is to confess his guilt, explain in vulgar psychologistic terms his aberrant psychoanalytic constitution. He would have been wise to adopt the Deleuzian stance of, "I have nothing to admit" - who cares if Althusser only studied Vol. 1 of Das Kapital? This would be the effective hystericization of Judt's position in his review. Thus, it is not that he overidentifies with Althusser, takes him too literally, but that he does not identify with him enough - that is, we must take Althusser at his word when he says, "Alas, I am no Rousseau".



3. This contains one of Althusser's late writings on materialism, which might be read profitably alongside "Machiavelli and Us". The train metaphor is especially useful, and Althusser here rejects -- as he did increasingly after 1967 -- any idea of materialism as a philosophy of the primacy of matter over ideas, and grounds it in the thesis of the materiality of ideology, or that "the imaginary exists only in its effects" ... As far as the claims made by Althusser regarding his abilities and knowledge in the text, or his criticisms of his books, these need to be read in light of his quest of self-annihilation, and this genre of autobiography -- and the authority which readers conventionally regard it to have regarding the 'truth' -- provides the best means of achieving that end. Warren Montag's essay on the autobiography, which can be found in Callari, Cullenberg & Biewener (eds), "Marxism in the Postmodern Age" (1992) is essential reading for anyone tempted to take Althusser's confessions at face value.



4. I like Althusser. He was the first to try to fit the esoteric Heidegger, as presented by Jean Hyppolite in Logic and Existence, together with Marx. There had been attempts (by Sartre and Henri Lefebvre) to put the explicit Heidegger together with Marx, but no one was buying it, since the German thinker disavowed humanism. Hence Althusser's rather bizarre (to contemporary eyes at least) claim that you need to READ Marx correctly, that is find all the esoteric truths in Capital, to have a revolution.

   Althusser was a depressive all his life. His illness prevented him from entering into les evenements of 1968, where he might have actually done some good. But he was also a manic. His books have the sort of obsessive compulsive features you only find with people on amphetimines. Those who say that this memoir is just a depressive trying to commit suicide aren't taking Althusser as he was diagnosed. He was also capable of limitless affirmation of life.

   And we find Althusser making some pretty huge affirmations in this book. He liked the USSR in the post-Stalin era. Since the people of Russia are so much worse off under the system that they have now (arguably the world is, both for their infamous Mafia and the lack of a check on US hegemony), this is probably not a bad thing. His argument as to how the people of the USSR really were free in every way except politics is specious (it's sort of like saying the people of the USSR were free in every way except the one that counts), but its very speciousness smacks of a manic affirmation.

   He also says that he never had sex until he was 29. This apparently was because he was disgusted with sex. He says something like "We have bodies! And they have sex organs!" He went on to be quite the ladies man, even conquering women in front of his wife. Which means that he affirmed, like a good Deleuzian, life in all its ugly glory.

   Then there's his last work on Machiavelli. Or is it his last work on himself? Machiavelli formalized the relations between king, nobility and people. Just as Althusser formalized Marx's discussions of class relations and structures in Reading Capital. The fact that he's pulled this off so convincingly in Machiavelli and Us, and the fact that the people who have made a career out of riding on his coattails totally missed it, implies to me that he successfully became-other/imperceptible. In the same way that both Bataille and Sartre missed the point of Genet means that Genet did successfully become-other (as per Derrida's Glas).

   As a last point to consider, for those who see this book as just the sorry chronicle of someone who had better shut up before he gives the entire game away, look at the books he did claim to read. He read all three volumes of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. I know of no one else who can make that claim. I barely made it half way through the Grundrisse before I gave up. Since he's so humble about his actual reading of Capital (didn't get past the first volume and didn't get the theory of fetishism in the first 50 pages), he probably really did read TSV.

   It's true that after this book Althusser was shunned by French intellectuals. It was, as a French student of Badiou wrote, a form of social suicide. BUT that wasn't what Althusser intended to do with this book. Or not only that.

   If you're a Marxist and you liked Althusser, you can always enjoy Etienne Balibar who has at last fitted together the esoteric Heidegger with Marx in his Marxism and Philosophy. That was what dear old crazy Louis was trying to do all along.




5. Althusser became one of the most respected and interesting philosophers of Marxism in France during the 1950's and 60's, which is no small accomplishment considering the fact that practically every intellectual was writing about Marx at the same time. In all honesty, I find his work to be of rather mixed value. I have found his structuralist interpretations of Capital to be extremely insightful, as well as his work on Marx's 'epistemological break,' though his Freudian and Lacanian readings of Marx suffer from the kind of overwrought intellectualizing that was fashionable at the time. However, this memoir is an extraordinary read. We are given painful descriptions of his struggle with bipolar disorder, culminating infamously with the murder of his wife during an hallucinatory episode. Althusser does not apologize for this terrible action, but he does attempt to explain it. He maintains that the killing of his wife was the manifestation of a kind of "suicide via a third party," if you will. For those who worry about the apparent morbidity of this material, the memoir also includes excellent commentary on his political involvements such as his work with the French Communist Party as well as reflections on the May uprising of 68. We are also provided wonderful reflections on private conversations with intellectual giants like Foucault. An excellent read.

No comments about Joannes Baptista van Helmont: Alchemist, Physician and Philosopher.

No comments about Gurdjieff: A Very Great Enigma.

2 comments about Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.

1. This is a very good biography of an overlooked great American thinker. Mr. Brent does a good job of recounting the life of Peirce without getting bogged down in the details of Peirce's philosophy which is well documented in several other books. The book also attempts to analyze Peirce's behavoir and why he failed as an academic, something that desperately needed to be done. As Peirce's reputation inevitatably increases, this biography will become a classic reference to this very interesting American.



2. This book contains a great deal of information on the life of a sadly-neglected philosopher; one of the most brilliant Americans of the 19th century. Dr. Brent has a wonderful, at times even poetic, writing style, and he has "lived" with Peirce so long that he has excellent insight into the man behind the philosophy. Struggling through Peirce in a class? This book may not make his philosophy "easy"--but it will make him more human.

No comments about William James: His Life and Thought.