A thoughtful consideration of torrid intellectual disputes.
A philosophical analysis examines the nature of belief and the sources of contentious disagreement.
Everyone seems to agree that contemporary society is plagued by a hostile divisiveness, political and cultural. Debut author Palmer argues that these intellectual cleavages are the result of deep misunderstandings about what it means to believe. Rather than private mental events, the author interprets belief largely from the perspective of public action, prioritizing behavior over purely intellectual commitment. In addition, he understands belief as a complex skein of motivating purposes—one believes something not only as an assertion of fact, but also as a display of solidarity or loyalty, as a means of psychological reassurance, or as a way to make sense of a morally ambiguous world. Highly intelligent people can become powerfully committed to positions that are both unclear and inadequately supported by evidence because in some sense that outlook is useful, performing a practical function that transcends the mere description of the world. Palmer expertly surveys the historical development of belief, furnishing a philosophical tour that pays close attention to religion. The author’s anatomy of religious commitment is one of the highlights of his impressively nuanced analysis—while in some sense, theological statements are so unempirical they seem meaningless, he contends such metaphysical leaps are a natural response to the human experience of the ineffable, and the longing for transcendence. Palmer also ably describes the neuroscience that undergirds belief formation, and the backdrop of humans’ evolutionary maturation. The author’s prose is surprisingly accessible given the abstractions he aims to clarify, and he navigates turbid academic waters with informality and light-handed grace. In addition, there isn’t a whiff of partisan ax-grinding to be found—this is an epistemological examination of intellectual conflict, not an expression of political loyalty. But while Palmer’s ultimate defense of tolerance as a virtue is rigorous, some of the solutions he offers seem incongruously simplistic. For example, can “alternate visual cues” like badges or uniforms distract people from more divisive ones like race? The author’s argument simply doesn’t make such a peculiar suggestion even intriguing, let alone plausible.
A thoughtful consideration of torrid intellectual disputes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-692-15155-6
Page Count: 189
Publisher: Consilience Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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