RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewMarsh knows how to set a scene, how to create suspense and how to surprise the reader ... For the most part, Marsh does not pretend to answer metaphysical questions about the mind, or even assume that they can be answered by the likes of us ... Marsh is often funny, sometimes at his own expense ... There’s no false comfort here. Instead, there’s prose that breaks in gentle waves, its undercurrents deep, the surface of an ocean vast enough to put our lives in moral perspective. The narrative takes detours through DIY and dollhouses, hospital décor and Himalayan hikes. Marsh is seated, storytelling, and he is in no hurry.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff
MixedBoston ReviewWhat do we gain from access to Wittgenstein’s private remarks? We learn that he struggled to get on with his fellow soldiers. We learn how often he masturbated and that he visited the baths in Kraków when he was stationed in an artillery workshop there ... But you may wonder if that’s enough. If there’s something deep to be gained from Wittgenstein’s private notebooks, it has to do with the entanglement of philosophy in the problems of life. This was a constant for Wittgenstein ... The question raised by the publication of the private notebooks is whether knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life sheds light on his philosophy. The answer is that it does ... Wittgenstein’s philosophy is not about being lonely, but one can see disquiet about loneliness sublimated in his work ... Thanks to Perloff, we can now relate the public notes to Wittgenstein’s private remarks. The interest is not merely voyeuristic: it is emotional and intellectual. As the notes progress, Perloff sees a growing correspondence between public and private ... These passages are riveting. But they bring frustrations, too. Perloff does not reproduce enough of the public notes—the ones that Anscombe published—and crucial context is lacking ... Perloff gives us little sense of what was happening to Wittgenstein’s work on the Eastern Front. Some of the most moving passages of the public notebooks involve not pure mysticism, but the interleaving of technical insights with existential ones.
David J Chalmers
MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)[Chalmers] writes with plausible fluency, drawing the reader effortlessly with him ... in the end, Chalmers doesn’t take it seriously enough. His mode is playful. And while that suits the question of how we know what’s real, it strikes a dissonant ethical note. Outside of ethics, Chalmers is a joy: an exuberant guide through challenging terrain, quick with anecdotes and arguments, wit and wild ideas ... Throughout Reality+, Chalmers treats our virtual future as a given fact, not a human choice. Having argued that sims have rights, he notes that simulations built for recreation or research appear to treat pure sims as tools to be exploited, not as ends in themselves. They’re akin to studies of unknowing human subjects. This seems morally problematic, but Chalmers predicts, without affect, that it will happen anyway.
Terry Eagleton
MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIf there is nothing wrong with explaining jokes, something very different is afoot when the theorist of humor bursts upon the scene and ventures to explain the essence of the funny. It’s a bemusing bid, an almost comical collision of metaphysics and mirth. Eagleton doesn’t quite avoid its pitfalls, but he does a lot besides. His book is about the semiotics of laughter and the history of humor, not just what it means to be funny. He is rambling and inconclusive, but he is always entertaining ... It’s frustrating to be met with such balanced judgment: one looks to Eagleton for provocation and polemic. He is famous for his takedowns of postmodernism, on one front, and the \'new atheists,\' on the other. This book is more good-humored, and so it is more difficult to find the crux. What is most intriguing in Humour, I think, is not the setup or the punch line, the beginning or the end, but the tentative theory of humor in the middle; and even there, what is most intriguing is what kind of theory it is meant to be.
