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Books Noticed

Cover for Africa, Empire and Fleet Street

Four recent or forthcoming books that may deserve the attention of some of the readers of this blog, below.

1. AFRICA, EMPIRE, AND FLEET STREET, by Jonathan Derrick. Published by Oxford University Press, this is the story of Albert Cartwright, an anti-colonialist, and the newspaper he ran for decades, the London based WEST AFRICA MAGAZINE.

2. WHITE SHOE, by John Oller, published by Dutton. This one is forthcoming -- March 2019. It tells the story of the Wall Street lawyers of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th who created what are still considered the establishment (or "white shoe") law firms in that vicinity to this day.

3. CONSCIOUSNESS AND PHYSICALISM, by Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove. Published by Routledge. "Physicalism" in the philosophy of mind is roughly what used to be known as "materialism." These authors think it should be regarded not as a dogma but as a research program, and that it is a sensible program. A reviewer in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews cautions that it may strike "orthodox physicalists as thin gruel, and orthodox anti-physicalists as simply lowering the bar for the success of physicalism."

4. PANTHEISTIC DILEMMAS AND OTHER ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION, by Henry C. Sheldon, pub. by The Methodist Book Concern. This is what you might imagine it is, from the title and the publisher's name. It is a straightforward apologia for theism in a Protestant Christian guise. Sheldon is mostly concerned with explaining his rejection of modernistic sorts of religion (including pragmatism, pantheism, etc.) that he thinks are, to adopt an expression I quoted above, "thin gruel" rather than the real stuff.





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