No comments about Sir Francis Bacon - English Philosopher and Statesman (Biography).

No comments about The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall (Virago Modern Classics).

2 comments about Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings (Swedenborg Studies, No. 13).

1. This work is often described as Kant's most "mysterious". The mystery lies in the fact that here in this treatise the Great Professor of Metaphysics unreservedly admits in the existance of "immaterial natures in the world", i.e. spirits and a spirit world. There is nothing mysterious about this statement, it is just that modern readers refuse to accept it. I've never understood why this should be so hard for some, since Kant's System of critical idealism is perfectly consistent with this view. Kant claimed that we could never know the true nature of the world around us, the true causes of sensations. He always held that there is a real world that we can never accurately know. This real world corresponds with a "spirit world", or if you prefer, a platonic world of Ideals lieing outside of our human perception of time and space. Kant unmistakably states that "We should ... regard the human soul as being conjoined in its present life with two worlds at the same time...." Nothing could be more unambiguous, especially considering his references to the writings of Swedenborg.

   I think that this book has been largely ignored because it is just too divergent from the rational empiracism of the modern scientific mind. The scienitfic materialist conveniently ignores the fundamental questions of material "reality" that Kant couldn't ignore. Furthermore, when the Prussian government banned this work it set into motion the series of events that culminated in the profound physical and spiritual disasters of the 20th cetury- and beyond.
   
   It may yet be proven that the ideas in this forgotten book are far more "real" than the modern materialist concensus of reality....




2. This book is supposed to be the funniest thing that Kant ever wrote, and I really wanted to swim through this book before I tried to figure out what I thought was so funny, but even treading water is a challenge when the current has such a fierce undertow, and the serious "First Part, Which is Dogmatic" demands some consideration, though it ends with the famous prudence which demands "that one make the pattern of one's projects appropriate to one's powers, and if one cannot reasonably attain the great, to restrict oneself to the mediocre." (p. 40). This collection of DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER and other writings from the Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, edited by Gregory R. Johnson, which puts everything that directly related to KANT ON SWEDENBORG into this book, allows a serious consideration of Johnson's view that self-defense was the essence of Kant's approach. Religious controversies had career consequences in those days, and Kant had to show he was laughing "because Swedenborg was a controversial figure. Rumors of interest in Swedenborg would have seriously jeopardized Kant's prospects for academic advancement. This is sufficient motive for him to write a book exculpating himself of the suspicion that he took Swedenborg seriously." (p. xvi). Johnson was writing a doctoral dissertation on Kant the first time he read DREAMS OF A SPIRIT-SEER in 1994, and he cites it in the notes as his COMMENTARY, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2001). The acknowledgments are dated January 2003 (p. xxvi) and I feel lucky that I received this book as soon as I did.

   I have been thinking about this book for a long time before I wrote this review, since this is the work for which Kant wondered if he had gone too far in jest. My first surprise was that Kant himself (like Hegel, he avoids mentioning names) is not entirely clear about whom he meant to be writing until page 49: "I come now to my purpose, namely, to the writings of my hero." He called his preface "A Prospectus That Promises Very Little for the Project" (p. 3) and the final paragraph of his introduction attempted to make his readers share the situation which he found himself in. "Furthermore, a large work was purchased, and, what is worse still, was read, and such effort should not be wasted. From this originated the present treatise, which, as one flatters oneself, should leave the reader in a state of complete satisfaction, in which the principal part will not be understood, the other not believed, and the remainder laughed at." (p. 4). In general, I approve of the steps Kant took to show a more enlightened view than the journals of his day. The major contrast in Johnson's Introduction is with Johann August Ernesti, who denounced Swedenborg in 1760 as a heretic in his "New Theological Library." For attempting to find meanings in the early books of the Bible which were not obvious, Swedenborg was accused of "pervert[ing] the Sacred Scriptures by the pretense of an inner sense, is in the highest degree worthy of punishment." (p. xxiv). When someone in Wurttemberg published a book on Swedenborg, "at Ernesti's urging, the Wurttemberg government declared the book heretical, confiscated all copies, and even ordered private citizens to surrender their copies on pain of arrest." (p. xxv). When a professor of Theology at Tubingen "urged a more open-minded attitude toward Swedenborg[,] Ernesti responded with yet another scathing review, asserting that Clemm's defense of Oetinger and Swedenborg was an offense that would have been worthy of the death penalty in earlier times." (p. xxv). Kant shows how modern people could be much more philosophical about these things, and though those people are all dead, there is a nice justice in the number of people who are still reading Kant and Swedenborg, even if they hardly know anyone else who does.

   The prime point in the Introduction by Johnson resides deep in personal philosophy, that professional philosophers might understand as, "that Kant's mature critical philosophy is best seen as a synthesis of Rousseauian and Swedenborgian elements (the influence of Leibniz and Hume being primarily upon Kant's elaboration of difficult technical questions once his basic vision was already in place). . . . although Kant's vision of the cosmos is more Swedenborgian than Rousseauian, it is Rousseau who provides the essentially pragmatic arguments that allow Kant to embrace the content of Swedenborg's visions but discard his enthusiasm." (p. xx).

   The notes are helpful. Only a translator is likely to notice, "Here Kant embraces the idea of general as opposed to particular providence." (p. 161, n. 26). This is what makes Kant a philosopher, "the notion that God governs the universe by framing general laws. Particular providence is the notion that he governs the universe on a case-by-case basis." Swedenborg is so religious that he argues "general providence is meaningless without particular providence." There is more on this in Johnson's (as yet, unpublished) COMMENTARY. Kant [Part I, Second Chapter, Paragraph 3] was talking about connections in the immaterial world, the former connections, before getting trapped where "nothing hinders even the immaterial beings that affect one another through the mediation of matter from also standing in a special and constant association and as immaterial beings always exercising reciprocal influences on one another, so that their relationship mediated by matter is only contingent and rests upon particular divine provision, whereas the former is natural and indissoluble." (p. 16)

   I would like to check another translation to see if this is even close to what anyone else would think. In 1992, David Walford and Ralf Meerbote had their translation published in Kant, THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1755-1770. "Walford's translation is highly accurate and very readable. Indeed, it would be hard to justify a new translation of DREAMS at all were the Walford translation available in an inexpensive paperback edition." (p. xxiii). It soon might be, if that is what you would rather have.

1 comments about Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Political Traditions in Foreign Policy Series).

1. To read Hans Morgenthau is to meet his sharp and fearless mind seeking `to speak truth to power'. During most of his carrier, his main public cause was to call forth responsibility from North-American policy-makers. His days were the days in which mankind finally found itself face to face with the prospect of the end; here was the setting of a unique era, superior in danger and complexity to all other previous ones; and Morgenthau was one of the few-too-few authors who could see its political problems.
   
   At the end of his life, he wrote the following words: "While I may be best known for my contributions to foreign policy and more particularly to American foreign policy, it is a paradox that my major intellectual interest from the very outset of my academic career has not been foreign policy or even politics in general but philosophy. After WWII, I made a conscious choice in concentrating my efforts on foreign policy because I realized that the existence of the United States and even of mankind depended on a sound foreign policy. What good was it to speculate on philosophic topics if in a couple of years or decades the world would be reduced to a radioactive rubble? So ever since, for more than twenty years, I have been caught in this self-imposed public service which by no means coincides with my real intellectual interests".
   
   Morgenthau died in 1980, shortly before the Cold War itself was over. His political thought will outlast not only the competition of superpowers, but also what was then taken as states and nations; as well as Aristotle survived the disappearance of the Greek polis and Machiavelli, the unification of Italy. These are political thinkers who make it through the surface of their objects and share a glimpse of the very essence of politics. In so doing, they expose truths about the human condition which remain, among the problems of the day, recognizable to eyes which may be very distant.
   
   Of course, almost every man is a son of his era and expresses reality in terms hopefully understandable by his contemporaries. Thus, to point out the rediscovery of those recognizably human and tragically recurrent facts among one's present configurations is a most fortunate task in a biographical work. This is why Morgenthau's Intellectual Biography, written by Swiss professor Christoph Frei, is a special work for those who wish to understand the process of putting together the pieces of his line of reasoning which, in the early 1930's, started being dubbed 'political realism', but only effectively reached public in the late 1940's.
   
   Before the Biography, those who went through Morgenthau's work in English had never had a contact with his early papers, which contain all the seeds of his later intellectual developments. Dr. Frei was the first to study these papers, along with other never seen documents, diaries and letters. Having conducted a trilingual research in English, German and French, he provides us with a reconstruction of the first decades of Morgenthau's life, points out to the first time when theory-relevant thoughts were put to paper and presents a lively account of the difficult context in which these thoughts began to flourish.
   
   The book has two parts. The first part deals with Morgenthau's life story, his studies in different cities in Germany, his acquaintance and perceptions of its several ongoing schools of social sciences, and the beginning of his professional career. As the specter of totalitarianism approached the old continent with its somber colors, we watch his difficulties first in Europe as a Jew, as he tried to emigrate to America, and later on in America as a German and a Jew, struggling first for survival and next to retake his intellectual projects. This first part leads up to the success he achieved with the publication of Politics Among Nations in 1948 and deals, in smaller detail, with the second half of his life as a successful political scientist, trying to contribute to the North-American experience during the Cold War.
   
   As the second part of the book unfolds, we go back to the early decades of the twentieth century and embark in a philosophical trip side by side with a young man's experience of disillusionment: his meditation of civilized life in a time of decay. Here we see the formation of Morgenthau's Weltanschauung and approach the central core of his view of man and society. Frei lets him speak out some of his frankest thoughts about the limits of science, the political sphere, the place and implications of power among human beings. Frei also strikes us with the clever insight of turning Immanuel Kant's four philosophical questions: "What is man?; What am I allowed to know? What should I expect?; and What should I do??" into the skeleton of his investigation. At its end, the book concludes that Morgenthau's realism is in fact a sober type of idealism; as it puts, "transcendent idealism".
   
   The two greatest contributions of this biography are the following: firstly, it unveils Morgenthau's central formative reference in a surprising and unprecedented way: the chapter about his existential dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche is, without a doubt, the most fascinating of all. Secondly, it swims against the epistemological and quantitative tides of contemporary political science so as to concentrate its work in Morgenthau's philosophical side - which is, when all is said and done, what truly matters for those who are attempting to think politics with their own heads.

2 comments about Critical Lives: Mother Teresa.

1. I'd hoped to find a balanced, no-nonsense look at the life of Mother Theresa, but this wasn't it. After some 200 pages, my attempts to shake off growing annoyance at the author's cynicism and derision faltered. While I was open to the possibility that Mother Theresa might have had the same human frailties that we all share, I was disappointed that the author couldn't just accept that and move on. Instead, he seems to revel in gleefully attributing the most profane and egotistical motives to the reverend Mother's actions and words, but only rarely supplies any evidence to support his speculations. It seems at times that he is truly perplexed at the subject's motives, and thus failing to understand them, he merely constructs what he thinks should have been the rational approach. In the end, I don't really care what Paul Williams thinks of Mother Theresa...I want to know objective facts. I'll be more than happy to come to my own conclusions.



2. The only book that presents the true story of Mother Teresa.
   It is shocking and provocative.

No comments about On Jung (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

1 comments about Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment.

1. David Wootton's book, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment, barely does justice to the great man and intellectual known as Paolo Sarpi. Throughout the book, Wootton contradicts his primary argument (that Sarpi is an athiest or a Gnostic) and doesn't use solid arguments to back his claim. His argument is based his view of Sarpi's arguments in his Pensiero filosofico. This being said, the book does include some good information on Sarpi and his arguments. I used the book as a source for a twenty-page research paper on Sarpi and his role during the Papal Interdict of 1606 and I found it useful for this paper. Overall, though containing some good information, the book was rather disappointing. Wootton's lack of evidence for his argument and his blatant contradiction of this argument later in the book outweigh any good information the book contains.
   (Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, I was skeptical about Wootton's argument upon first hearing it, since every other source I had read seemed to prove otherwise. No other source that I used backed Wootton's argument.)

No comments about On Shantaraksita (Wadsworth Notes).

2 comments about Portraits of American Continental Philosophers (Studies in Continental Thought).

1. Whatever the virtues of the American Continental Philosophy scene, the lords of SPEP and Perugia have also earned a deserved reputation for cliquishness and frequent self-promotion. When I first saw the announcement of this book, I was worried that it would provide just one more shameless platform for the canonization of second-rate thinkers. But in fact, the book left me with quite a positive impression.

   Each of the 22 professors featured in the book is allotted 4-6 pages to tell us what they stand for as philosophers. Given this sort of brevity, none of those in the book can hide who they really are; their merits and vices come through in strikingly compact form.

   Bernd Magnus uses his pages to present a Holcaust memoir that is among the most moving I have ever read. John Caputo gives an autobiographical account of his early religious interests that manages to be surprisingly modest. Thomas Flynn makes an equally modest statement about the past and future of Continental philosophy in the United States. Alphonso Lingis gets down to business in typical fashion, refusing to drop any names or preen any feathers in the mirror, giving us a genuinely philosophical argument in his ever-brilliant prose. There are other good chapters as well; these were my favorites.

   Other chapters leave a mixed impression on the reader. Robert Bernasconi explains his recent interests with clarity and apparent sincerity, yet he is tellingly defensive concerning his limited publication record. Patrick Heelan meditates interestingly on the relation between science and philosophy, but his tone borders on abrasive in his attitude toward those philosophers who lack training in the hard sciences.

   Ironically, the worst chapters are written largely by those who are currently the most fashionable and politically powerful of Continental thinkers. Charles Scott's section is a vague muddle of which little can be remembered 20 minutes after completing it. The essay by John Sallis is pointlessly entitled by means of an ancient alphabet (note: if the pre-Socratics were alive in America today, they would write in English and would regard Sallis' essay as sheer pedantry), and the content of his essay is correspondingly pretentious. David Krell reaches new depths of embarrassing literary behavior, while Hugh Silverman insults the reader's patience with an endless prose version of his curriculum vitae.

   American Continental philosophy has had a troubling tendency to rest on whatever laurels it may have had rather than pushing forward into fresh domains of philosophical thought. By allowing us to take stock of what has and has not been accomplished by the SPEP/Perugia movement, Watson's book is a surprisingly potent contribution to its possible top-to-bottom rennovation.




2. "Portraits" does a nice job, but there are a few people mentioned that were left out, and others that should have been excluded. Krell and Caputo's essays are worth buying it alone, but they left out some pretty important people like Hubert Dreyfus, Hans Sluga, and Edward Zalta. Anyway, I liked the book and it shows that the American or "anglo-continental" scene is getting pretty big nowadays among the past 10 year generation of grad students. Sometimes a little arrogant, but I guess that's ok since their foes (the analytics) have that, and worse problems such as being obsessed with paradoxes, puzzles, and liberal philosophy.

No comments about The Philosophical i: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy.