Category: dewey decimal project

I’m not a strong believer in the absolute value of capitalism. It is a good generator of wealth, but that assumes that wealth is an end worth pursuing for its own sake. It also has the problem of not necessarily distributing the generated wealth in a fair or equitable way. In this book, Sandel offers […]

When I used to teach math, students fell into two categories when it came to logic. There were those who got it almost immediately and those who seemed to struggle with some of the ways in which logic seemed, well, illogical. For example, given the statements If today is Tuesday, Dawn is in trouble. and […]

I first encountered Lacan in the context of literary theory. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Lacan was of interest to literary theorists as he had a great deal to say about the linguistic and psychological nature of utterances, signifier, signified and the communication of ideas. And yet, his ability to communicate his ideas seems […]

I had a doctor’s appointment while I was reading this and my doctor asked me what the lost causes were that were being defended. I had to admit I didn’t know. Having finished the book, I have a somewhat better sense of what Žižek means with his title. The lost causes he refers to are […]

The first three decades of philosophy are each two or three shelves. Then we get to the 130s, the paranormal. This is extends across three bookcases. Clearly a very different set of priorities among the book-borrowing public here. As a child, I loved this section of the library and I devoured books on ESP and […]

I’ve found myself skeptical of the whole field of evolutionary psychology. There might someday be a scientific basis for evolutionary psychology, but right now it has all the scientific sophistication of mythology and, from a structural standpoint, that is precisely what it is, an attempt to formulate a narrative to support an existing reality.  Given […]

I had high hopes for this book. The premise is a good one: applying the ideas of metamathematics to philosophy and religion in a hopes of providing a new framework for considering these ideas. Sarah Voss’s project is, in effect, one of attempting to conceive a new metaphysics on a mathematical basis. Unfortunately, it seems […]

I took a single philosophy course over the entirety of my education: It was a basic 101 class and the only reading that I recall were The Republic by Plato and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. The latter has left a nagging hole in my conception of the universe that continues to linger. I was […]

This seems like it should be a fascinating area to write about: From the fabricated Shakespeare documents that took in Charles and Mary Lamb in the 19th century to James Frey’s “memoir” in the twenty-first century, there’s a lot to write about. As it turns out, though, most of the stories aren’t that interesting. JT […]