3:AM Magazine

By the time photography got into its stride it was accepted pretty much as a documentary index of reality. This was why it became very popular in spirit circles because it proved that spirits existed. Well now of course we know so much more about this very peculiar state of being which has been called ‘image flesh’ – a term of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that I like very much. It’s an expression I like because it implies flesh that is not flesh. He applied it to other forms of iconography, which are also image flesh. They might be more material than a photograph – a sculpture, a painting – but they share the relationship to the mind’s eye that photography does.

Richard Marshall talks Catholicism, zombies and Beckton Alps with Marina Warner.

I am an anti-metaphysician, that is, I think that metaphysical debate requires therapeutic treatment. It’s not quite that, as you put it yourself, Wittgenstein holds that things like selves are just reifications of language; I’d be happier to say that one should talk of persons rather than selves, as these seem to be third- as much as first-personal entities. (Actually I wouldn’t be as hostile to metaphysics as Wittgenstein was; it’s interesting that he wrote little about space and time, where metaphysics seems inevitable.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Andy Hamilton.

This is tough knotted, hard-hearted artifice. Its audacious operation is a newly articulated subordination of erotic laceration. Here ecstatic torments are managed as metrosexual assimilation and sublimation. The novel is a jigsaw that requires a reader to wonder whether multiplication of perspectives fragments and dismantles or accumulates and deepens. The surface narrative is smooth and quick, hardly stirring the air. That’s not where the intensity lies. The wild apollonian tautness is in the architecture, is caught in the style and the structure which butchers the joints of the book’s universe. The surface remains perfectly self-controlled and attentive, a state of pale distraction that Benjamin defined as perfected modernism.

Richard Marshall reviews Toby Litt’s Life-Like.

The full philosophical sense of kairos is found in Christianity which understands an event in the world (the birth, death and resurrection of Jeusus of Nazareth) as a transformative moment. Heidegger in his account of originary and derivative time, in particular in the way in which he understands the moment of vision (Augenblick) in this context, draws implicitly on this distinction of chronos and kairos and in so doing brings together St. Paul, Augustine Luther and Kierkegaard, on the one hand, and Aristotle and Kant on the other.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Felix Ó Murchadha.

When a Descartes or a Leibniz did philosophy, they didn’t limit themselves to what modern philosophers thought about, issues in epistemology or metaphysics or ethics or politics. The entire world—including what we think of as the scientific world—was part of their domain. Unlike modern philosophers, they didn’t have to take what experts in the sciences give them and work within its parameters: they could and did dabble in all branches of systematic knowledge. This is an important difference from philosophers today.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Daniel Garber.

The fundamental idea is that vagueness consists in a word’s possession of multiple equally permissible or competent ways of being applied, for example multiple equally permissible stopping places in a sorites series. I take the multiple competent ways of using a vague term to reflect multiple ranges of application in its semantics.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Diana Raffman.

There’s the ‘law of large numbers’: in a population of 250 million, a ‘million to one chance’ happens 250 times; with the huge range of well-studied pure mathematical structures, it’s not surprising that some of them find application. As I listened to Diaconis’s lecture, I realized that each one of the errors that lead us so naturally to think there’s a coincidence demanding explanation (e.g., this person must be reading my mind!), could also lead us to think that the applicability of mathematics is an amazing coincidence.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Penelope Maddy.

Even the concept of equality may be regarded as less clear-cut if one really presses the question of why we should regard all human beings as essentially equal in a moral sense. Kantians might respond by saying that all human beings are equal in virtue of their rational nature, for example. Yet this invites the question as to why we should accord rationality itself such an absolute value. I am therefore sympathetic to the worry that the German Idealist agenda ultimately rests on quasi-theological assumptions.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews David James.

These are the only serious questions for readers and writers now. Winters’ sense of yearning running through all his essays here is an immense inquietude. He’s nailed the portable solitude of reading, its source in the noise of the universe’s silence.

Richard Marshall reviews David Winters‘ Infinite Fictions.

There are TV sets in every room and the grim politics of this techno-human relationship is quickly established. Greif makes clear that Yoyodyne aerospace and Republicanism grow up side by side. What Pynchon starts to articulate is a creepy, X-Filey sense that technology is draining us away.

Richard Marshall reviews Mark Greif‘s The Age of the Crisis of Man.