:: Media Times Review Blog ::

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Telegraph Calcutta

In his foreword to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein famously said: “This book is written to the glory of God, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood.” Wittgenstein hesitated, not because of any philosophical commitment to the claim that the most important things were unsayable, or because an admission of this kind would expose him to embarrassment in a secular world. It was because amongst secular and religious people alike, it had become very difficult to imagine living a life that was devoid of what he thought was at the base of a properly religious attitude: a life free of vanity, and a life not judged by any instrumental purpose. Any profession of religion could itself be judged as an act of vanity, or in the service of some other value: to shore up one’s own authority, to stake a claim to truth, or to ground some other expectation. Why was it that Wittgenstein thought that the religious sensibility was the most difficult to possess? So much so that he declares: “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”

Peter Abramov, WPR

Bulgaria has a new government. The former communists (BSP), the party of former Bulgarian king Simeon Saxe – Coburg – Gotta (National Movement Simeon II or “NDSV”), and the party of Turkish minority (Movement for Rights and Freedoms or “DPS”), have entered in coalition after two months political conflicts around distribution of ministry seats in the future administration.

Patricia S. Churchland, American Scientist

The Ethical Brain. Michael S. Gazzaniga. xx + 201 pp. Dana Press, 2005.

Envision this scene: Socrates sits in prison, calmly awaiting execution, passing the time in philosophical discussions with students and friends, taking the occasion to inquire into the fundamentals of ethics: Where do moral laws come from? What is the root of moral motivation? What is the relation between power and morality? What is good? What is just?

Ronald Bailey, Reason

Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is neither “superb” (The New Statesman), “incisive” (The Washington Post), “magisterial” (BusinessWeek), nor “insightful and very important” (Boston Herald). It is, instead, a telling example of how a smart man can be terribly misled by a fixation on one big idea. In this case, Diamond, a biologist, is trying to apply biology’s master narrative to human societies.

By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography
By Joakim Garff, Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton University Press.

Reviewed by Gregory R. Beabout, First Things

When Søren Kierkegaard lay dying in Copenhagen 150 years ago, it would have been hard to predict the influence his work would later have. European Christendom already appeared to be in terminal decay, and Kierkegaard’s main purpose as a writer was to awaken his readers and to convince them of the necessity, and difficulty, of radical Christian discipleship. At his death he had good reasons to doubt whether his work would have much effect on future readers.

Gordon Kane, Scientific American

Most people think they know what mass is, but they understand only part of the story. For instance, an elephant is clearly bulkier and weighs more than an ant. Even in the absence of gravity, the elephant would have greater mass–it would be harder to push and set in motion. Obviously the elephant is more massive because it is made of many more atoms than the ant is, but what determines the masses of the individual atoms? What about the elementary particles that make up the atoms–what determines their masses? Indeed, why do they even have mass?

Thomas Jones , London Review of Books

Where is the internet? At the most metaphorical level, which is also the way that most of us think about it most of the time, it exists in a parallel universe called cyberspace. We peer into this other realm through our browser windows, and can take short cuts through it to places in our world that are remote in space and time. You could, for example, rewatch the fall of 17 wickets on the first day of the first Ashes test. Or you could take a look at the traffic on Fifth Avenue, or the shipping in Portsmouth Harbour. Or you could stay in cyberspace, assume a secret identity, and chat to someone else similarly disguised. Or you could play backgammon with them. Or you could download and play a game that you couldn’t play in real life (or IRL, as they say in the chatrooms), such as the elegant and fiendish Blackshift (www.foon.co.uk/blackshift). Or you could – virtually speaking – sit in a quiet corner by yourself and read the newspaper. The possibilities are endless.

Hugh Barnes , Telegraph

The history of Russia is full of unanswered questions, but for almost two and a half centuries one of its most interesting questions was never even asked. How did a black African slave called Abram Gannibal come to change the face of Russian politics and literature? Tsarist and Soviet historians alike were reluctant to investigate the mystery. No doubt they feared the interloper’s achievements might overshadow national heroes. Only with the discovery of new evidence in the past decade can the riddle now be solved.

by Carl Henrik Fredriksson, Eurozine – the netmagazine

Cultural journals come closer to the ideal of a European public space than any other media: they provide a forum where political, philosophical and aesthetic ideas can be discussed and exchanged. However, these journals reach only so far. Carl Henrik Fredriksson, Eurozine’s editor in chief, calls upon the established national newspapers to promote a true European public space. What that requires more than anything is a dash of openness and the willingness to define their journalistic responsibilities in the light of new social conditions.