fieldus

From The New York Times:
Jonathan Lear, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who is teaching a course with Mr. Coetzee this semester, said: “One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort [...]

Discussion with Philip Zimbardo, researcher who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in The Believer. Touches on punishment and responsibility:
PZ: It’s really very complicated, it’s really a central issue that has to be dealt with more. And I think philosophers have to deal more—it’s really a philosophical and legal issue. In the extreme case, it really [...]

Found this from GK Chesterton after searching for essays on Great Expectations (of which, more to follow).

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses,
by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of [...]

He [Buddy McGirt] got it that the 28-year-old Paulie was smarting from his lopsided loss to the Hitman, and was searching for reasons why. So, when he didn’t get a face to face chat, or even a phone call from Paulie, informing him that he’d be working with another trainer, Buddy McGirt wasn’t all that [...]

Zbigniew Herbert
Spinoza’s Bed
IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with [...]

from

Excellent interview with Robinson in The Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?
ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in [...]

philosophy, video, magee, dreyfuss, heidegger

Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists - we’re all the same - Telegraph
His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.
Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered [...]

High spirits | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Outside its quotation marks, Baudelaire’s argument is nowadays almost impossible to make publicly. But before the statisticians and their nannies eclipse all possibility of praising drunkenness - beyond the prim encomiums to the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine - it is worth pausing to [...]