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Copied from a book by David Foster Wallace

[Thomas Aquinas’] teachings constitute a complete system, which is why, as ‘Thomism’, they provide the Roman Catholic Church with its philosophy, whose official status was further confirmed by Pope Pius X in Doctoris Angelici (June 1914): ‘The capital theses in the philosophy of St Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based; if such principles are once removed or in any way impaired, it must necessarily follow that students of the sacred sciences will ultimately fail to perceive so much as the meaning of the words in which the dogmas of divine revelation are proposed by the magistracy of the Church.’ This places Thomistic philosophy and theology above all debate, which – at least in the case of philosophy – is precisely contrary to what philosophy should be. ...

Re John Updike’s Toward the End of Time Maybe the one thing that the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps clarify what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid: he can quote Pascal and Kierkegaard on angst, discourse on the death of Schubert, distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. And Toward the End of Time’s author, so far as I can figure out, believes it too. Updike makes it plain that he views the narrator’s final impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole. ...

These following pages seem to be missing from all 30th anniversary edition of Tigana. I have two copies of the book and both have the same missing pages. Since I had to go through the effort to source the missing text for myself, I thought I might as well put it up online. Hopefully it helps someone Page 190 If she was to travel north into Corte soon, and clearly marked by now as being from Certando, she needed to have been associated with The Queen, but not so very prominently. Prominent people had questions asked about them, that much she knew. So she feigned an attack of country girl anxiety the night Arduini made his offer. She broke two glasses and dropped a platter. Then she spilled Senzian green wine on the Governor himself. Tearfully she went to Arduini and begged for more time to grow sure of herself. He agreed. It helped that he was in love with her by then. He invited her, gracefully, to become his mistress. In this, too, she demurred, pleading the inevitable tension that such a liaison would elicit within the staff, badly damaging The Queen. It was the right argument; his establishment was Arduini’s true mistress. In fact, Dianora had resolved to let no man touch her now. She was in Ygrathen territory and she had a purpose. The rules had changed. She had tentatively decided to leave in the fall, north towards Corte. She had been weighing possibilities and excuses for doing so when events had overtaken her so spectacularly. Slowly circling the Audience Chamber, Dianora paused to greet Doarde’s wife whom she liked. The poet seized the opportunity to present his daughter. The girl blushed, but dipped her head, hands pressed together, in a creditable manner. Dianora smiled at her and moved on. A steward caught up to her, bearing khav in a black chalice set with red gemstones. A gift, years ago, from Brandin. It was her trademark on occasions such as this: she never drank anything stronger than khav at public receptions. With a guilty glance towards the doorway where she knew Scelto would be stationed against the wall, she took a grateful sip of the hot drink. Praise the Triad and the growers of Tregea, it was dark and rich and very strong. “My dear lady Dianora, you are looking more magnificent than ever.” She turned, smoothly suppressing an expression of distaste. ...

It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and – at the risk of wildly oversimplifying – its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA. The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ’things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be. The things that we describe so carefully are called phenomena — the second element in the definition. The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. As an example, take a cup of coffee. […] What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it— that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and per-fumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced. If I treated all these as purely ‘subjective’ elements to be stripped away in order to be ‘objective’ about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my cup of coffee as a phenomenon— that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee-drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemis-try is hearsay. It may all be interesting hearsay, but it’s irrelevant to a phenomenologist. Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now This ‘set-ting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoche— a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenomenological ‘reduction’ instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee `really’ is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour— the phenomenon. The result is a great liberation. Phenomenology frees me to talk about my experienced coffee as a serious topic of investigation. It likewise frees me to talk about many areas that come into their own only when discussed phenomenologically. ...

Some books about existentialism never try to answer this question, as it is hard to define. The key thinkers disagreed so much that, whatever you say, you are bound to misrepresent or exclude someone. Moreover, it is unclear who was an existentialist and who was not. Sartre and Beauvoir were among the very few to accept the label, and even they were reluctant at first. Others refused it, often rightly. Some of the main thinkers in this book were phenomenologists but not existentialists at all (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), or existentialists but not phenomenologists (Kierkegaard); some were neither (Camus), and some used to be one or both but then changed their minds (Levinas). ...