Philosophy

One of the more robust responses to what has come to be called the New Atheism has been that of the influential literary critic Terry Eagleton. He weighed into the argument early with an aggressive and widely cited critique of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) in the London Review of Books, in which he charged Dawkins with theological ignorance. He extended his argument in a series of lectures, published as Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God debate (2009), which condemned the atheist movement for its allegiance to an outdated form of nineteenth-century positivism and for its optimistic belief in the virtues of progressive liberal humanism. His latest book, On Evil, is a kind of supplement to the debate, in which he attempts to drive home what he considers the naïveté of such a view.

One of the most productive and interesting areas of research in applied philosophy is concerned with moral issues around warfare. Although there had been important contributions previously, Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (1977) was immensely influential in philosophy and well beyond its confines, reinstating ‘just war’ thinking as a mainstream intellectual position. It became, for instance, a standard text in Western military academies.

John Armstrong hails from Scotland and is currently philosopher in residence at the Melbourne Business School. He is well known for several popular but elegant works on, broadly speaking, aesthetic matters: among them, Conditions of Love (2002), The Secret Power of Beauty (2004) and Love, Life, Goethe (2006). His recent book is more ambitious than its predecessors, but remains essentially in their fold.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and taste is subjective, why is there often overwhelming agreement that a particular thing is beautiful? Are tastes shaped by brain structure, unconscious psychic drives, society or culture? For almost half a century, the idea of innate, universal and cross-cultural aesthetics has been hotly contested in art theory and cultural studies. Now Denis Dutton argues that our aesthetic responses are instinctual. He has timed his book well. Freud has fallen from favour, post-modernism is generally despised and Darwin studies are on the rise.

The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.

Jeremy Mynott begins his capacious and disarming new book with a dedication to his wife, the author Dianne Speakman. ‘In all our twenty-five or so years together,’ he writes, ‘I have never yet succeeded in persuading her to take the slightest interest in birds. This is my best and last shot.’ Any ornithophile knows this feeling: the regret that his sense of wonderment remains for the most part private, something that others regard as slightly weird or ridiculous.

Terry Eagleton has been widely hailed as Britain’s most important contemporary literary critic. He is surely that, and a great deal more besides.

Marxist maverick, cultural theorist, budding novelist and playwright, he was for many years the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Having traded Oxford for the University of Manchester in the early 2000s, Eagleton has roamed the globe over recent years, speaking on such lofty topics as postmodernism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and it’s early in the morning, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond ... If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy ... What should you do?

‘Let’s get this death thing straight’, declares Julian Barnes in his recently published memoir-cum-meditation Nothing to Be Frightened Of. He sets out to confront mortality, the titular ‘nothing’, but manages only to peer at it through parted fingers. He takes short peeks, which calls to mind the title of his death-haunted novel Staring at the Sun (1986).