Saturday, February 16, 2013

Notable Links

* "biblioklept" has a post on Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. I've always liked Flann O'Brien much more than James Joyce, with whom he is often compared (he's less pretentious and pompous, for one thing); his The Third Policeman was one of my favorite books in college ("biblioklept" had a post on that one a year ago).

If you want a very brief taste of what he's like, try his short-short story, An Insoluble Question, or read this very short passage from The Third Policeman.

* Sean D. Collins discusses instrumental causality

* Agatha Christie's brush with MI5, when she was investigated because they were worried she was leaking secret information.

* Alberto Vanzo notes the problem with glossing the empiricist/rationalist position in terms of innate ideas.

* Charts on Thomas Aquinas's account of the structure of the Pauline Corpus. I talked about Aquinas's view on this a long time ago.

* "Geographic Travels" looks at the 'non-European Popes', i.e., those who came from places we don't normally think of as Europe -- mostly the Levant and North Africa.

* A new SEP article on Adam Smith's Moral and Political Philosophy

* Pope Benedict XVI discusses Vatican II:

I would now like to add yet a third point: there was the Council of the Fathers - the true Council - but there was also the Council of the media. It was almost a Council in and of itself, and the world perceived the Council through them, through the media. So the immediately efficiently Council that got thorough to the people, was that of the media, not that of the Fathers....So while the whole council - as I said - moved within the faith, as fides quaerens intellectum, the Council of journalists did not, naturally, take place within the world of faith but within the categories of the media of today, that is outside of the faith, with different hermeneutics. It was a hermeneutic of politics. The media saw the Council as a political struggle, a struggle for power between different currents within the Church. It was obvious that the media would take the side of whatever faction best suited their world.