Human Sciences

Blog post from the philosophy/religion librarian at Princeton.

Creationists come to college

I found this review of a new biography on Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller) very interesting. Perhaps the book is also interesting.

"Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished." [I had this feeling after reading The Fountainhead in my early twenties.....of course I was wrong.....]

"The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect." [Thought in roarkian terms for a month or so after reading the book.....]

"But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration...Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre." [Not really, capitalists probably have more than one value to which they are dedicated...this is sort of a cartoon stereotyping of capitalists....]

"At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”)." [Yes, I read the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead and she explained just this in her preface, something I found absurd after reading the book. Nietzsche, or at least a vulgar Nietzsche, are all over the pages of this book.....]

Philosophy Subject Guides
Philosophy  // Aesthetics // Philosophy of Science // Early Modern Philosophy // Eastern Religions & Philosophy

Very nice semester-long series of lectures on Ancient Greek History by Donald Kagan (books) at Yale. He's a good speaker and gives an interesting overview of Greece from the Bronze Age down through the rise of Macedon. Some of you may know Kagan as a frequent writer and commentator of contemporary military/geopolitical affairs (articles). This makes listening even more interesting because one is always wondering how his views of the present are influencing his interpretation of the past as well as the opposite. He's very interested in warfare and political relations and this comes through in his lectures. He frequently makes analogies to the first and second world wars but tends to shy away from the more urgent Middle East analogies. At one point though, he does get a bit mixed up and refers to the US attack on Afghanistan and Persia, catches himself and then explains he was thinking about the Greeks. Hmmm....Persia, Iran, Greeks, Americans....

Intro to Ancient Greek History (need iTunes to load)

Take a look at the screencast below to view the new Films on Demand interface. Films on Demand provides streaming access to over 5000 educational and documentary films. Watch them from your computer, on or off campus.

Watch this screencast to get a sense of the relationship between Periodicals Index Online--Periodicals Archive Online--and British Periodicals Online.

Some interesting podcasts from the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at iTunes U. I'm working my way through the lectures, which are at an introductory graduate level. Lecturer goes over philosophy, religion, and history.

Here's some quick, useful biographies of Indian philosophers.

Here are some books by Temple's own authority on Indian philosophy, Jitendranath Mohanty.

This looks interesting: Spiritual Machines, part of a series of blog posts on Immanent Frame on Rethinking Secularism.

A new reference book has been added to Oxford Reference Online, called A Dictionary of Creation Myths, a good source for comparative religion and mythology.

I've been told by a reliable source that this is a very nice online bibliography by Barend te Haar at the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands:

Bibliography of Chinese History and Culture.

Another recently released philosophy reference work from CREDO Reference:

Political Philosophy A-Z. 

Here are some of the other ones you'll find in CREDO:

• Biographical Dictionary of 20th Century Philosophersrout
• Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
• The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
• Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
• Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy
• Dictionary of Existentialism
• Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers
• A Dictionary of Philosophy, Macmillan
• Dictionary of World Philosophy
• The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy
• Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy
• Encyclopedia of Empiricism
• Encyclopedia of Ethics
• Encyclopedia of Postmodernism
• Political Philosophy A-Z

Naming infinity : a true story of religious mysticism and mathematical creativity, by Loren R. Graham

This book deals with the connection between a bunch of heretical Russian Orthodox monks engaged "Name Worshipping", a type of mysticism found in many different religious traditions, and a group of Russian mathematicians studying infinity and, indeed, infinities of infinity.

Here's the Harvard University Press web page for the book, including a link to the author interview, which is especially interesting.

Also see Names and Naming (Encyclopedia of Religion) for more information surrounding this topic.

Religion //African Religions // Christianity // Eastern Religions & Philosophy // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Theories of Religion

The Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association, and the Association of College and Research Libraries have prepared The Google Books Settlement: Who Is Filing And What Are They Saying? (PDF) to summarize in a few pages of charts some key information about the hundreds of filings that have been submitted to the federal district court presiding over the Google Books litigation. There have been over 400 filings by class-members and amici, and the charts are meant to give the reader a general idea of who these filers are and what they are saying about the Settlement. In response to the filings, especially in reaction to the brief filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on September 18, 2009, there is a chance the proposed agreement will change substantially. The parties are now in renegotiation of the Settlement terms.

I've been listening to an interesting series of lectures by Patrick Hart, an expert on Alpine archaeology who is trying to trace the route that Hannibal took through the Alps to invade Rome. His lectures are very detailed, bringing historical (mainly through the work of Polybius), scientific (mainly geological), and archaeological (terrain, geography, numismatics) evidence to bear on a question that has fascinated adventurers, emperors (Napoleon), scholars, and armchair Walter Mittys for over a few thousand years.

I especially enjoyed his first lecture, which covers the Phoenician heritage of Carthage with a special focus on the god Baal (associated with lightning) and its relation to later Greek and Roman gods (Zeus and Jupiter). Pretty interesting stuff. Also, his description of the strategic position of Spain and its mineral wealth (silver, lead, copper) in the geopolitical struggle between Rome and Carthage is fascinating. One thing I never thought about was the degree to which silver mining was part of the Spanish experience thousands of years before they started exploiting the silver, gold, and human beings of the Americas.

Hart is now being sponsored by National Geographic to find the route that Hannibal took through the Alps. What he most hopes to find is: 1) a stash of Punic coins; 2) human or elephant bones (also tusks); or 3) charcoal from the huge encampments of Hannibal's 20,000+ army.

Hannibal (Stanford Continuing Studies Program, need iTunes to open)

How did Hannibal cross the Alps? (single lecture Hart gave at Stanford on his conjectures of Hannibal's route)

Saw this and thought I should share it any of you at TU are aspiring librarians. It's a wild ride.

This looks interesting. It's from Annenberg Media's Learner.org. Check it out.

American Passages: A Literary Survey
"16-part American literature course. The video programs, print guides, and Web site place literary movements and authors within the context of history and culture. The course takes an expanded view of American literary movements, bringing in a diversity of voices and tracing the continuity among them. The materials, which are coordinated with the Norton Anthology of American Literature, can be used as the basis of a one or two-semester college-level course or for teacher professional development."

To see some great images, sound clips, and texts, do an Archives Search.

Interesting discussion on the Radio 4, BBC program Thinking Allowed. Tariq Ali discusses and contextualizes the epic Don Quixote within a christianizing Spain which persecuted Jews and Muslims. He says that Cervantes scholars now generally believe that Cervantes was a converso. Also discussion of other stuff on cultural hybridity. I need to learn more about this.....

Cultural hybridity: is globalisation making the world homogenous?

You can also pick up this program on iTunes.

Duke University has put a collection of historic TV ads on iTunes U called AdViews (need iTunes to open link). Check them out. They're quite entertaining.

Here's more information from the Duke University Office of Communications.

WorldCat is a huge union catalog that contains records to books, films, journals, and other items from libraries, museums, and research institutes in North American and around the world. If you really want to broaden your search to items outside Temple, it's a great place to look.

Once you find books, it's easy to place Interlibrary Loan requests through WorldCat. It's a free service. When the book arrives, the library will notify you by email. Take a look at the screencast below to see how it's done.

Based on his book Why Beauty is Truth: A Short History of Symmetry, mathematician and science writer Ian Stewart provides a seven-part audio tour of symmetry, moving from the Babylonians to the Greeks, Arabs, Renaissance Italians, Revolutionary French, and nineteenth and twentieth century mathematicians and physicists.

All you need to know to understand this is a little algrebra, until, well, you get to relativity and quantum physics. I always get a little lost in there. Would that it were. But Stewart does a great job of making it as clear as possible.

1. Introducing Symmetry
2. Babylonian and Greek mathematics and the role of Omar Khayyam
3. Competitive mathematics in Renaissance Italy
4. Évariste Galois - the failed revolutionary
5. Physicists start to notice and Einstein changes everything
6. Symmetry and Quantum Mechanics
7. Symmetry, string theory and an equation for everything (plus - could we be living in an asymmetrical universe?)

Here's the Web Site. Also available on iTunes.

More Books by Ian Stewart