The legal historian David Daube wrote over one hundred monographs during his productive life. Forms of Roman Law and The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism remain notable ever-present reading companions, now joined by The Exodus pattern, their equal both in terms of scholarship and insight. An online bibliography is found here. Read his obituaries at [...]
Mcsweeney’s, my favourite third-favourite website, is part of a project which launched The Future Dictionary of America. Entries include this gem of a piece: “colin-powow: a discussion in which subordinates express well-considered opinions that are ultimately dismissed by superiors” The collaborative effort also includes a companion CD of unreleased tracks, “The future soundtrack of America“.
G.R. Evans’s textbook-like excursion forms a notable footnote to the tradition of formidables shaped by Kuttner, Maitland, Berman, Kantorowicz et al.
Fritz Ringer’s intellectual biography of our greatest social theorist complements, rather than supplants, Marianne Weber’s biography.
Blessed are the Russians, for they know what they write. A long over-due re-reading of Anna Karenina. Also on the list: The sacred & the profane is a book by Romania’s foremost export and intellectual capital earner. Mircea Eliade’s little book is a suitable appetizer to his Myth of the Eternal Return.
David Wood, Chair of Warwick’s philosophy department in the early 90s, is one of the few within academia to have entered, engaged and extended Heidegger without the trappings of Being’s self-revelation; his Thinking after Heidegger is no disappointment. He once wrote (in The Deconstruction of Time, I think?) that philosophers will eventually write about time. [...]
The trouble with each “new” year is the enforced starting over. Twelve months into its maturation, and just as a certain fondness forms out of familiarity (but just before familiarity breeds contempt), the “reset” button is pressed. Therein lies the crux: objective time is demarcated rationally while subjective time – the time of Augustine – [...]
Days from from Christmas and the time for judgement draws near: what do these people, friends and relations, deserve? Under these conditions, how can it be anything but a less than joyous event? As for you sad souls who would imagine a religious dimension to this, recall Schelling’s phrasing: God becomes Man not to complete [...]
The weekend was made whole by Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced “paul-ah-nik”), the finest of the new breed of anti-nihilist authorships. If Lullaby is an allegory of the modern novel’s (im)potency, then what of Diary? The official website at the well-concealed ChuckPalahniuk.com is crass and one-dimensional, precisely everything the writer is not. Sample instead (in the spirit [...]
Machiavelli has always been a thorn in the side of “political philosophy”; convinced that I am his scion. Facile liberal-moralist anti-readings keep me entertained, much like sociologists who fail to grasp Weber’s nihilism; undecided on the academic merit of these Straussians infiltrating Machiavelli scholarship. I ventured and chanced upon Straussians.net, a site that not only [...]
