Summary 24 Oct 2010 | 12:35 am

Coogan's Bluff 17 Nov 2009 | 04:06 am

Joshua Prager has written a sublime, prosaic book about the "shot heard round the world": Bobby Thomson's home run to win the National League pennant on the final playoff pitch of 1951. It has been co...

The Sole Text of Rational Psychology 10 Nov 2009 | 12:41 am

Two passages to begin with. First, from Martin Amis, The Information: "What did they say? Did anyone say anything?" Yes. The man said, "I'm a child." "The man said you're a child?" And Richard went...

Philosophical Experiments 3 Nov 2009 | 07:18 am

[Warning to the reader: the remarks that follow cite no-one and do not attempt to engage with details; but they are in part a response to the first two essays in this book.] What is called "experimen...

The Sense of an Ending 27 Oct 2009 | 12:03 am

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. So begins John Berryman's Dream Song 14. His instruction was ignored by Bernard Williams in "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immorality....

The Rest is Silence 20 Oct 2009 | 05:24 am

Hilarious, inscrutable, disturbing, Melville's Bartleby both tempts and rebuffs interpretation. The basic facts are two: that we do not and cannot know what troubles Bartleby or why he ceases copying;...

A Critique of Rawls 2 Apr 2008 | 11:05 am

John Rawls (1921-2002) is to be revered primarily for two doctrines: his conception of justice as fairness, and the proposition that baseball is the best of all games. There is no longer an opening da...

Unwritten Books 11 Mar 2008 | 02:24 am

My greatest intellectual fear – one that afflicts me whenever I finish writing something – is that I will have no more ideas, that I will realize that I have nothing to say. It could be worse, of cour...

The Ant and the Grasshopper 18 Jan 2008 | 07:23 am

[The setting is heaven, with the old foes reunited at last.] GRASSHOPPER: I didn't expect to see you here! ANT: Believe me, I'm equally shocked! – Glad, too, since I recently read a book about you t...

Not Pure Drivel 18 Dec 2007 | 04:52 am

Some years ago, I wrote a post about philosophical humour. It ended up dwelling on philosophers. But there are also comedians who do philosophy. Woody Allen is one of them, though he doesn't suit my ...