Philosophy

Worth watching or reading: Leon Kass's Irving Kristol Address, "The other war on poverty: Finding meaning in America," delivered earlier this week at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner:

The Immortalization Commission Science and the Strange Quest

to Cheat Death

by John Gray

Existential America

by George Cotkin

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Narrowing the Nation's Power: The Supreme Court Sides with the States by John T. Noonan Jr. (University of California Press, 208 pp., $24.95).

A SLIM MAJORITY of the Supreme Court has over the past decade expanded states' immunities against federal authority. These decisions are the target of John T.

A CENTURY AGO, the psychologist, philosopher, and agnostic William James delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. His 20 addresses were published in 1902 as "The Varieties of Religious Experience," which soon became one of the most widely read works on religious belief by an American. Before James, no scholar had devoted such attention to the process--and the effects--of conversion. His basic argument: There is something authentic and profoundly beneficial about religious belief.

BOOKS IN BRIEF

Worth the Fighting For: A Memoir
by John McCain, with Mark Salter
Random House, 396 pp., $25.95

AS A RECOVERING McCainiac, I hesitated to pick up the new John McCain-Mark Salter volume. Their previous effort, McCain's war memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," was so good that I expected "Worth the Fighting For" to be a disappointment.

It's not.

JOHN RAWLS, who died on November 24 at age eighty-one, was the towering figure of academic liberalism. A gentle, dignified, self-effacing man, he taught philosophy at Harvard for more than thirty years and exerted a commanding influence on his profession, single-handedly shifting its dominant picture of itself and the world.

Before Rawls, professors of philosophy, when they addressed questions about politics at all, restricted their analysis to the use of words and their logical relations.

THE MOVIE INDUSTRY is peculiar for many reasons, among which is this: The least important and most interchangeable artists in the community (actors) are the best known and rewarded, while the most-skilled and least replaceable artists (writers and editors) are virtually anonymous. To wit: Everyone in America knows who Adam Sandler is.

The Making of a Philosopher
My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy
by Colin McGinn
HarperCollins, 256 pp., $25.95

COLIN MCGINN is a clever man--the very clever product of that very clever school of British academic thought known as analytic philosophy. His initial impetus for studying philosophy came, he says, from reading Bertrand Russell, and he studied with the formidable A.J. Ayer, the famed practitioner of the analytic style in its most pristine and most ambitious form, whose goal was to turn philosophy itself into science.

Wittgenstein's Poker
The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers
by David Edmonds and John Eidinow
Ecco, 352 pp., $24

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN and Karl Popper met only once--just after World War II, when Popper addressed the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper challenged Wittgenstein head on: Philosophy, he said, addresses genuine problems and not, as Wittgenstein would have it, "puzzles" that disappear when proper mental hygiene clears up our conceptual muddles.