Sunday, May 04, 2014

Notable Links

* David Sedley defends Epicurean hedonism. I think the actual weakness of the essay isn't on the ethics side but on Epicurean epistemology, which, it seems to me, it slides over a little too easily. But on the ethics side it was a pretty good summary.

* A good book review of C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces:



I've had several people every day landing on my Till We Have Faces post since February; I'm not sure why that is. Looking around, this is possibly one of the reasons, but I don't know, and it probably wouldn't be the exhaustive reason, anyway.

* James Chastek's notes on evil are worth reading.

* The Politics of Nostalgia at "Sancrucensis"

* Matt Flanagan discusses a recent argument by Scott Bawulski on hell.

* Zachary Braiterman discusses Shmuel Feiner's biography of Moses Mendelssohn at "jewish philosophy place".

* The publication history of Mansfield Park gets an overview at "Jane Austen in Vermont". I'm somewhat struck by the subtitles for the French translations of MP and SS. SS's subtitle is Les Deux Manières d’Aimer, which is a succinct summary of one way to read the book: two ways of loving. MP's, though, is Les Trois Cousines, which stops me short, because there are a lot more than three cousins in the book. Edmund and Fanny obviously have to be two of them. I suppose Maria Bertram is the third cousin -- Tom Bertram, Julia Bertram, and Susan Price are certainly less significant to the major plot -- but I would never have picked up Mansfield Park and, when asked to summarize it, replied, "Ah, yes, it's a story about three cousins."