The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Philip Augar and Keely Winstone [2022]: Agent Twister: The True Story Behind the Scandal that Gripped the Nation. Simon and Schuster.
- Anthony Kenny [1997]: A Life in Oxford. John Murray. This is a very interesting account by a philosopher about his life in Oxford, where he spent most of his career. The narrative is interesting, although often poorly written or edited. For example, Kenny he talks about and names people without telling us who they are, as in paragraph three of Chapter 11, where he mentions someone called Zdena. From later references, this is most likely Zdena Tomin, but Kenny fails to tell us that. He also occasionally misconstrues tense. When text concerning events at a specific period of time (eg, in November 1979, on pages 131-132), is immediately followed (on page 132) by, “In December of 1980, I had paid my first visit to Norway since Arthur Prior’s death . . .), the author has forgotten where he left the reader. The word “had” may be appropriate for the time when the text was written, but is not appropriate for an action in December 1980 when the reader is at November 1979. Perhaps a deleted paragraph once stood between these two pieces of text. For a philosopher who believes (erroneously) that all human thinking is through and by language to mis-understand tense in his native language must be quite embarrassing.
- Anthony Kenny [2018]: Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher’s Diary. SPCK Publishing.
- Ryan Dohoney [2022]: Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde. Bloomsbury Academic. The single most important insight of 20th Century Mathematics arose from Felix Klein’s Erlangen Programme of 1872, that a mathematical object could be understood by studying the transformations of or operations on that object that leave it unchanged. Category theory is the formalization of this insight. A similar notion has occurred in recent years in biography: one can study the life of a person by looking at their interactions with their friends and associates. Dohoney has done this for Morton Feldman.