Richard Whatmore

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Madoc Cairns |Suki Finn |Richard Whatmore |Jonathan Egid

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a creature of contradictions. For Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon and the array of poets studied in Cynthia R. Wallace’s The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil, Weil’s contraries analogize our own. Reading Weil, we meet someone caught within our conflicts and limitations; and someone who, somehow, transcends them.

Nov 13, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Suki Finn |Madoc Cairns |Richard Whatmore |Jonathan Egid

Despite its title, Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like A Woman is very much not a how-to guide. Instead it is a combination of memoir, philosophical exegesis and the biographies of several philosophers, structured somewhat chronologically around the author’s changing relationship with philosophy itself. As for gendered thought, Penaluna provides a few hints at what “thinking like a woman” might entail. On page 120 we read: “the epistemic state of many a thinking woman is one of self-doubt”.

Nov 6, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Richard Whatmore

An detail of an engraving from ýlýments de la philosophie de Newton by Voltaire, 1738

Sep 10, 2024 | lawliberty.org | Richard Whatmore |Graham McAleer |Steven Hayward |Richard Samuelson

David Hume is famous for his seminal contributions to philosophy and economics during the Enlightenment. He may also have been the principal diagnostician of his time. This at least is Richard Whatmore’s contention in The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. He argues that Hume’s early optimism about the Enlightenment, followed by a growing pessimism, was emblematic of the age. Whatmore grants that there was a plurality of enlightenments.

Mar 1, 2024 | literaryreview.co.uk | Richard Whatmore

We think of the Enlightenment as a movement dedicated to the clearing away of prejudice, superstition and all the delusions that obstruct the rule of reason and the achievement of happiness. The great enlighteners – Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Bentham – in the usual presentation were reflective and principled men and women, a ‘party of hope’ sufficiently sceptical to endure disappointments on their way to an ultimate triumph.