Two years may not be enough to forge an annual tradition, but tradition is a good excuse for self-indulgence: in this case, a look back at my public writing in 2023.
In January, I wrote about the terminal diagnosis of the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh, whose book And Finally is an amateur philosopher’s reckoning with mortality: “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.”
In April, I took issue with Nihilistic Times, by the political theorist Wendy Brown, for its superficial treatment of ethical relativism:
Typography will not substitute for theory. And it’s a fallacy to think that disavowing “Truth,” whatever it is, “abets the pathos of distance Weber seeks in responsible action.” One can be committed to a scheme of absolute values, an ethics of inflexible conviction, without regarding it as True—or maintain that Truth demands responsibility, proportion, and restraint.
In May, I wrote in defence of academic philosophy, against Philip Kitcher: his critique is out of touch with the sociology of the field, which has become more outward-looking and more diverse in the last forty years. Its problems have more to do with institutional pressures facing higher education than narrowness or undue technicality.
In June, I published my first review in The Atlantic, and the most enjoyable thing I wrote this year, about Diogenes, Plato, and the road less travelled: “Philosophy Could Have Been a Lot More Fun.”
A month later, I reviewed Sarah Bakewell on the history of humanism in the TLS, followed by another piece, in September, on Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, “a potboiling escapade with a density of incident apt for a Hollywood thriller and a gently postmodern adventure in the philosophy of language.”
In October, Life is Hard came out in paperback—I’m especially fond of the new UK cover—and I wrote about Tom Nagel’s career in moral philosophy for the LA Review of Books. I was glad of the chance to celebrate his difficult, brilliant monograph, The Possibility of Altruism, which “purports to demonstrate, on logical grounds, that each of us should care about everyone else’s life as much as we care about our own.”
I won’t try to summarize his complex argument, which is half metaphysics, half machinery derived from Gottlob Frege, the German logician who has been called “the father of analytic philosophy.” Even the book’s admirers would concede that its reasoning slips in and out of focus, as if you’ve dreamed a flawless proof of Kant’s categorical imperative but upon waking can’t recall the steps.
In November, I wrote about Robert Sapolsky’s Determined, a book about free will and determinism, written by a neuroscientist, that spends about a page on the philosophy of free will. I try to fill some of the gaps; for a more polemical take, see John Martin Fischer.
Finally, other people wrote things, too, some of which I loved, including Kate Briggs on translation and Laura Beatty’s Looking for Theophrastus.
More to come in January. Meanwhile, Happy New year!
Really enjoying these.