The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll
Unexpected Essays on Philosophy, Art, Life, and Death
Scharfstein begins with essays on the nature of philosophy itself, moving from an autobiographical account of the trials of being a comparativist to philosophy’s function in the outside world to the fear of death in Kant and Hume. From there he explores an impressive array of art: from China and Japan to India and the West; from an essay on sadistic and masochistic body art to one on the epistemology of the deaf and the blind. He then returns to philosophy, writing on Machiavelli and political ruthlessness, then on the ineffable, and closes with a review of Walter Kaufmann’s multivolume look at the essence of humanity, Discovering the Mind. Altogether, these essays are a testament to adventurous thought, the kind that leaps to the furthest reaches of the possible.
Introduction • You, Me, Kant, and Carroll
1 • The Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll
2 • A Comparatist’s Risks and Rewards
3 • A Handful of Rules against Philosophical Self-Isolation
4 • What Death Makes of Philosophy
5 • Keeping the World Together
6 • The Common Universe of Aesthetics
7 • Are the Deaf and Blind Epistemologically Isolated?
8 • Pain, Cruelty, and Pathology in Art
9 • On the Transparency and Opacity of Philosophers
10 • The Three Philosophical Traditions
11 • Does Philosophy Progress?
12 • Nonutopian Observations on Machiavellism
13 • On the Nature and Limits of Ineffability
• Ineffabilities Are the Demons and Angels of Incompleteness and Incompletability
• What Can and Cannot Words Express?
14 • The Bird with Bread in Its Beak
15 • You, Me, and Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind