Posts From Author: philosophy
Writers and Storytelling: Roger Rosenblatt
Roger Rosenblatt is the author of five New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and three New York Times bestsellers. He has written seven off-Broadway plays and his essays for Time and the PBS Newshour have won two George Polk Awards, the Peabody, and the Emmy, among others. In 2015, he won the Kenyon Review Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. He held the Briggs-Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing at Harvard. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at SUNY Stony Brook/Southampton. His new book is Cold Moon: On Life, Love, and Responsibility. He will be joining Lilliam Rivera, Helen Macdonald, and Melissa Faliveno on October 20 to tell stories tied to the theme “Nerves of Steel.” Register here for the show! What are you reading right now for solace or escape? Myself, a new book I’m writing; and I can’t escape. If you could live inside a fictional world, which one would you choose? America; It must be fiction. Are there any quotes you use to inspire you now or anytime? “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” — Philo
Read MorePlato at the Googleplex: Review
Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Knopf Doubleday / Vintage, 2014; 480pp “Just accept the one preposterous premise that Plato could turn up in twenty-first-century America, an author on a book tour, and everything else, I hope, makes sense.” That’s the preposterous but brilliant premise of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein‘s latest book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, a witty and stimulating tour of Ancient Greece interspersed with “out of time” Platonic dialogues with a right-wing talk-show host, an agony aunt, the 92nd Street Y, and staff at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Remember that bit in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure when Socrates, Beethoven, Joan of Arc et al go wild in a shopping mall? It’s sort of like that, only with a much more rigorous approach to textuality. It’s also a fierce defence of the practice of philosophy today, at a time when many scientists and other “philosophy-jeerers” would have you believe that philosophy is just a stop-gap, a method of generating questions that will later be answered by science, and has no inherent value in itself. Goldstein intersperses these witty imaginings with historical context for the thinking that her Plato puts […]
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