Charles Foster

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Kieran Setiya |Nikhil Krishnan |Charles Foster |Noga Arikha

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love. Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance.

Jan 8, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Charles Foster |Noga Arikha |Robert Adès |Simone Gubler

Why are we good? Why are we bad? What do those questions mean? Do they mean anything at all? Even if meaningless, these questions matter. They deserve a big book with a broad reach, written by an adroit, confident author, happy in many disciplines. They have it in The Invention of Good and Evil, a brilliant, acute, infuriating, uneven survey of the last five million years of history, courtesy of the German philosopher Hanno Sauer, sparklingly translated by Jo Heinrich.   Sauer’s structure is neat.

Dec 18, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Simone Gubler |Charles Foster |Noga Arikha |Robert Adès

The initial work to categorize all of the dogs that live among us was suffused with the spirit of the Scientific Revolution. John Caius, a Cambridge physician, published one of the first attempts at canine taxonomy in 1570. There are five classes of dog, he tells us. He groups them not primarily in terms of physical characteristics, but rather by the useful stations that they hold in human lives.

Dec 4, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Costica Bradatan |Charles Foster |Noga Arikha |Robert Adès

In The Faith of the Faithless (2012), Simon Critchley observed that “those who cannot believe still require religious truth and a framework of ritual in which they can believe”. Indeed, one of the broader points he made in that book was that philosophers, even if personally faithless – or, rather, because faithless – have much to gain, philosophically, from engaging in matters of faith. Philosophy should always maintain a respectful dialogue with religion rather than ignore or despise it.

Oct 16, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Charles Foster

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