A lively, well-researched intellectual history.
Parsing the language of philosophy.
In his debut book, Krishnan, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, brings wry wit and adroit observations to his investigation of the rise of analytic, or linguistic, philosophy at his alma mater. A department staffed by idealists, realists, and one pragmatist—F.C.S. Schiller—was shaken up by influences from near (Cambridge) and far (Vienna), and questions of meaning and language rose to new importance. “The special business of philosophy,” Krishnan writes, “was to scrape away at sentences until the content of the thoughts underlying them was revealed, their form unobstructed by the distorting structures of language and idiom.” Analytic philosophy, its adherents believed, would foster “particular virtues” that Oxfordians held dear: humility, self-awareness, collegiality, restraint, elegance, concision, and directness. Krishnan chronicles the transformation, and the energetic debates it inspired, by focusing on salient figures, beginning with the “pipe-chewing, no nonsense” Gilbert Ryle, who, while at Oxford, became acquainted with G.E. Moore and Wittgenstein at Cambridge and discovered Husserl and Heidegger. His classmate A.J. Ayer, “whose greatest non-philosophical interest was women,” also studied in Vienna, where he encountered the American logician Willard Van Orman Quine and philosopher Ernest Nagel. Émigrés such as Isaiah Berlin, Ernst Cassirer, and Theodor Adorno brought ideas from Europe directly to Oxford. By the late 1930s, there were women involved, as well: Mary Scrutton, on scholarship; the fiery Elizabeth Anscombe, who pressed her colleagues to consider ethical consequences of their positions; the quietly sensible Philippa Foot; and the defiantly bohemian Iris Murdoch, who introduced British readers to Sartre. Beginning in the late 1950s, the likes of social critic Herbert Marcuse and New Left Review editor Perry Anderson critiqued the Oxfordians for being insular. Nevertheless, for four decades, they had carried out a formidable task: “to explain what we mean by what we ordinarily say.”
A lively, well-researched intellectual history.Pub Date: July 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780525510604
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.
Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.
Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.
An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781668057858
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Element
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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