Author: D. A. Hosek
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149.97 ZIZ In Defense of Lost Causes
I had a doctor’s appointment while I was reading this and my doctor asked me what the lost causes were that were being defended. I had to admit I didn’t know. Having finished the book, I have a somewhat better sense of what Žižek means with his title. The lost causes he refers to are…
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133.1 SEL Your Neighborhood Gives Me the Creeps
The first three decades of philosophy are each two or three shelves. Then we get to the 130s, the paranormal. This is extends across three bookcases. Clearly a very different set of priorities among the book-borrowing public here. As a child, I loved this section of the library and I devoured books on ESP and…
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121.6 WOL Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
I’ve found myself skeptical of the whole field of evolutionary psychology. There might someday be a scientific basis for evolutionary psychology, but right now it has all the scientific sophistication of mythology and, from a structural standpoint, that is precisely what it is, an attempt to formulate a narrative to support an existing reality. Given…
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110 VOS What Number is God?
I had high hopes for this book. The premise is a good one: applying the ideas of metamathematics to philosophy and religion in a hopes of providing a new framework for considering these ideas. Sarah Voss’s project is, in effect, one of attempting to conceive a new metaphysics on a mathematical basis. Unfortunately, it seems…
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100 PHI Socrates Café
I took a single philosophy course over the entirety of my education: It was a basic 101 class and the only reading that I recall were The Republic by Plato and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes. The latter has left a nagging hole in my conception of the universe that continues to linger. I was…
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Beautiful sentences
Jack glanced up at her blandly, not quite smiling, touching his fingertips together as if there were no such thing in the world as a hint. Marilynne Robinson, Home.
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Beautiful sentences
I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
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Beautiful sentences
When the pie was done and the roast was in the oven and the biscuits were made and set aside and the old man had nodded off in the warmth of the kitchen, Jack went upstairs and Glory sat down to read for a while. Marilynne Robinson, Home.
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098.3 KAT Literary Hoaxes: An Eye Opening History of Famous Frauds
This seems like it should be a fascinating area to write about: From the fabricated Shakespeare documents that took in Charles and Mary Lamb in the 19th century to James Frey’s “memoir” in the twenty-first century, there’s a lot to write about. As it turns out, though, most of the stories aren’t that interesting. JT…