Books

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....

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....

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....

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’....

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)....