No comments about Descartes and the Last Scholastics.

No comments about Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg Part One.

No comments about Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg Volume Two Part One.

No comments about Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg Volume Two, Part Two.

1 comments about On Rorty (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

1. The first thing one wants to know when reading this book is who the typesetter and the proofreader were. With at least two egregious typos per page, one gets the impression that one of them must have not been a native English speaker and the other must have doubled as a sportscaster in his freetime.
   
   Once you've gone through this book, pen in hand, adding omitted letters and apostrophes and striking the maddeningly inconsistent double spacing after each period, you'll find a fine example of C-grade scholarship. It's about what you'd expect an above-average undergraduate senior to turn in as his final thesis. It gives an occasionally clear and lucid explanation of Rorty and the context in which he is writing. More often, though, Rumana seems quite simply confused. If Rumana is, in fact, an undergraduate, he can be quite proud of his philosophical ability. As it is, he's probably not, and (...)(at least for me), this book is a scam.

No comments about Nietzsche As Postmodernist, Essays Pro and Contra (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy).

3 comments about Decadence of the French Nietzsche.

1. Several chapters of this book have been circulating by e-mail for some time now and causing a minor commotion in the UK and Spain, and apparently also in Italy. In the parts I've seen, Brousseau maintains that it doesn't matter whether a particular proposed truth happens to be right or wrong, only whether it sytimulates more thought. As Brousseau puts it, you don't think to reach truth, you have truths to provoke thought. Interjecting a stylistic criticism, his articulation is repeated somewhat too often (in one or another variation, e.g.: The reason we do philosophy is to think, and results only have value insofar as they impel still more thought.). But what Brousseau does quite well is engage his argument as a nifty response to current attacks on Postmodernism (he doesn't dispute them but delineates their consequences for philosophy thereby outlining a sort of "after French Nietzscheansim"). Brousseau does remind us that the notion of philosophy as wanting truth is dated (the profession's rewards are reserved for those whose ideas stimulate the most debate, not those whose ideas are verified). Most notably his proposition that there exists a kind of counter history of philosophy that has valued thought all along is legitimately intriguing. It's further worth noting that Brousseau somewhat dramatically achieves, if that word is permissible here, the end of truth insofar as endeavors to weaken it (Vattimo) or make it more interpretive are replaced by simple disregard for the truth of any truth. While this reader withholds judgment for the moment, it certainly will be interesting to see whether the ideas get the same amount of (perhaps too) devoted attention now that they are no longer quite so subterranean.



2. This book by Brusseau is one of the most refreshing that I've encountered on the topic. He deftly seperates the more perspicacious 'French Nietzscheans' such as Deleuze and Foucault from the somewhat less substantial ones (Barthes, Lyotard).
   A very thought-provocative book (although I'm only a quarter of the way through)



3. For Ned: No matter how excited you seem to be about this "truth for thinking" instead of "thinking for truth", anyone getting behind it is just making a basic mistake, that it is not philosophy. That is what makes me most mad about this book. It makes a big argument but that does not mean it's a philsophical argument. I could deduce the unified field theory and that would, I suppose, be very important but that does NOT mean I've made a contribution to philosophy or done something valuable for philosophers. Therefore if you want to stop people from haranguing you about it, just produce the simple and right response. If someone asserts that the best philosophical truth is just the one that provokes more thought and nothing else, well, that might be, but it's definitely not philosophy. It looks like it is but it's not. I don't know how to make this any clearer. This gets five stars as a book, and perhaps its one of the few reasonably deserving them, but not as a philosophy book. R

No comments about Blaise Pascal - French Mathematician and Religious Philosopher (Biography).

No comments about Duns Scotus and Medieval Christianity (World of Philosophy).

No comments about McDowell and His Critics (Philosophers and their Critics).