Michael Bench-Capon Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Michael Bench-Capon

Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens makes Hard Times

Out of stock

Michael Bench-Capon

@KnitIndustrie @scmbradley @lastpositivist Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once

Michael Bench-Capon

Quite surprised that the only one of the 48 books in the 20 books in your 20s picture that I've read is Thinking Fast And Slow; I've kind of soured on the genre now but back in the day I used to read books by people like Tim Harford and Steven Pinker all the time

Michael Bench-Capon

@hermeneuticist Bernard Williams has an example (in his part of Utilitarianism: For and Against iirc) about someone called George becoming a chemical weapons maker because if they don't then someone else will and probably more efficiently

Michael Bench-Capon

@cj_sheu @AgnesCallard @HistPhilosophy And apparently Walter Kaufmann took it upon himself to produce another translation Martin Buber's I And Thou even though he didn't think the book was very good

Michael Bench-Capon

I read ch5 of Pasnau's Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 yesterday and it was interesting but at the end he did a bit (not this👇 bit, a different bit) where he said that philosophy might have died with scholasticism and been replaced by science if Descartes hadn't kept doing it https://t.co/yzr0dE40Jj

Michael Bench-Capon

Hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens makes Hard Times

Michael Bench-Capon

So I read The Art Of War and there's all this this "know your enemy" blah blah and you might be wondering "how?", and the answer turns out to be spies. Lots and and lots of spies. So are all these MBA types who say they like Sun Tzu actually just really into industrial espionage

Michael Bench-Capon

So apparently in the 3rd century people used to try to make out like Plato and Aristotle were basically in agreement, and in the 19th century Edward Caird did the same kind of thing with Kant and Hegel, so who could we be doing that with now? Carnap and Quine, obv, but who else

Michael Bench-Capon

So according to this British idealism book I'm reading the preface of Dewey's Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics "expresses its great indebtedness to [Edward] Caird, [FH] Bradley, and [TH] Green", so all you Deweyans out there are probably a bunch of idealists really