Five items of interest today — the first, third, and fourth items are via Bookforum.com:

• Julian Baggini reports on Jonathan Israel’s attempts to get analytic philosophy to reconsider an historical and contextual approach to philosophy.
• Simon Critchley writes about happiness.
• Nathan Schneider looks at how scientists and theologians are coming together on questions about the multiverse problem.
• Along a similar vein, in terms of theoretical physics, Paul Steinhardt and Peter Galison discuss philosophy, physics, and truth.
• Microsoft is rebranding its search engine to “Bing,” and restructuring how its searches are performed.  If I’m reading this story correctly, the new Bing engine is the next attempt to topple Google’s dominance in the search engine market.

Next week’s post will be on Wednesday, since I will be out for commencement exercises next Thursday and Friday.  See you then!

I was browsing through Bookforum.com yesterday, and found an interesting link, listing “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Time.”

Enjoy!

*From The Steve Miller Band song, “Fly Like an Eagle“

Here are the September reviews from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Are any of these items which we should add to the Robbins collection?

Aesthetics

• Kendall L. Walton, Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts, Reviewed by Scott Walden, Nassau Community College
• David Davies, Aesthetics and Literature, Reviewed by Eileen John, University of Warwick

Epistemology

• Jens Harbecke, Mental Causation: Investigating the Mind’s Powers in a Natural World, Reviewed by David Robb, Davidson College

History of Philosophy

• Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume, Reviewed by Richard N. Manning, University of South Florida
• Delbert Reed. The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege, Reviewed by Jeremy Heis, University of California, Irvine
• François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Reviewed by Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University

Individual Philosophers

• Richard Creath, Michael Friedman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, Reviewed by Gregory Lavers, Concordia University, Montreal
• Novalis, David Wood (ed., tr.), Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, Reviewed by Jane Kneller, Colorado State University
• Emmanuel Bermon, La Signification et l’enseignement: Texte latin, traduction française et commentaire du De Magistro de saint Augustin, Reviewed by Roland J. Teske, S.J., Marquette University
• Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, Reviewed by Eugene Garver, Saint John’s University
• Oskari Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy, Reviewed by Marie McGinn, University of York
• Dorothea Olkowski, Gail Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reviewed by Gayle Salamon, Princeton University

Metaphysics

• Fred Wilson, Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism, Reviewed by Wade Robison, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Reviewed by Peter B. M. Vranas, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moral & Political Philosophy

• John Kleinig, Ethics and Criminal Justice: An Introduction, Reviewed by Douglas Husak, Rutgers University
• Claudia Card, Armen T. Marsoobian (eds.), Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair, Reviewed by John K. Roth, Claremont McKenna College
• Tobias Hoffmann (ed.), Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present, Reviewed by Byron Williston, Wilfrid Laurier University
• Jean Hampton, The Intrinsic Worth of Persons: Contractarianism in Moral and Political Philosophy, Reviewed by Matt Matravers, University of York
• A. W. Price, Contextuality in Practical Reason, Reviewed by Tim Henning, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Philosophy of Mathematics

• Michael Roubach, Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Reviewed by Stephan Käufer, Franklin & Marshall College

Philosophy of Physics

• Robert DiSalle, Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein, Reviewed by Carl Hoefer, ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

After all the recent fuss about the Large Hadron Collider in recent weeks, this video may amuse and enlighten you as to what exactly is going to happen there –

I offer it to pique the curiosity of those with an interest in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science.

For an interesting look at the Large Hadron Collider from the perspective of political philosophy, you may want to check out out Martin O’Neill’s piece in The New Statesman, “Politics of Proton Smashing.”

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this review, which comes from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.