Category: English reviews

John Armstrong, “In Search of Civilisation: Remaking a Tarnished Idea”. London: Penguin, 2009 John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account…

Harry Redner, “Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures” (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007) “Good taste,” said Lichtenberg, “is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason.” Replace “good taste” with the slightly more unwieldy “sense of aesthetic value” and you have…

Tom Frame, “Darwin in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia”. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009 ‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism,…

Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion” (London: Bantam Books, 2006) My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact. – Darwin It is not the victory of science that distinguishes us, but the victory of scientific method over science. – Nietzsche What may human apprehension…

“Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free”, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008 We live in an age not given to deep or extended reflection. The phenomenon of lifestyle philosophy is part of a sporadic and slightly tortured effort by philosophers to make themselves relevant to such an age. For better or worse, philosophy stopped being…