When Wittgenstein said “the world is the totality of facts” he obviously hadn’t anticipated the “fictional turn”: the world is now the totality of feelings, fears, wishes, prejudices, allegations, insinuations, ideologies, inventions. I liked Bill Clinton’s simple contrast in his speech of last night: there is the “real Hillary” and there is the “made up […]
I’ve written about a hundred book reviews in my life (I haven’t counted exactly) beginning when I was 22. I believe the book review is a valuable form and not easy to do well. I would encourage everyone to do them and take them seriously. It’s important in a book review to convey accurately and […]
McKenzie Revisited I happened upon Kerry McKenzie’s review of my book Basic Structures of Reality recently and was struck anew by her final paragraph: “For me, then, the one pertinent question this work raises is why all of this went unrecognized [the badness of the book]: this book, after all, […]
What a great Wimbledon this year! I was glad to see Raonic in the final against Murray–with no Federer or Djokovic in sight (great champions and excellent guys, but enough already!). Andy really hit his form and showed that his best tennis is at least as good as anyone else’s best tennis. On a more […]
Listening to The Jam. A-bomb in Wardour Street (“Rape and murder throughout the land, and they tell you that you’re still a free man. If this is freedom I don’t understand, coz it seems like madness to me”). Nothing seems to improve. Evil is everywhere. Cure: the extinction of the human species. But the tennis […]
I know my readers like cat stories, so I have a good one for you. Nearly a year ago I found a kitten in my garden, howling. I adopted him and called him Blackie, on account of his being jet black all over. He is a nice friendly non-violent cat. One of my other cats, […]
A lot has been said on this subject and no doubt it is a complete disaster in every way. To me one of the worst aspects of it will be the festering resentment created: within England, within Britain, and within Europe. There will be dislike and suspicion everywhere; ill feeling, anger, contempt. Even if it […]
Readers may be interested to learn that I have signed a contract with MIT Press to publish a collection of my recently written papers, numbering 50 odd (the remaining 60 or so papers may be published in a later volume). The papers are on a great many subjects but they all aim to provoke–hence the […]
I’ve been reading Hume’s Enquiry and am struck by how much I didn’t understand it before–and how little it is still understood. Several commentators have noted that Hume does not deny the existence of necessary connection, merely noting that our only knowledge of causation arises from experience of constant conjunction; but it is striking how much […]
I was reading an interesting article in the travel section of the NY Times yesterday about Nabokov’s journeys with his wife Vera across some of the more desolate parts of America, which form the basis for the extended sequence in “Lolita” in which Humbert and Lo desolately crisscross the desolate country. It occurred to me […]