The New Hellenism

Henry directed me to the following: The New Hellenism (lareviewofbooks.org)

As you infer from the URL, that is an essay in the L.A. Review of Books, about a trend in philosophy since 2010, a trend toward a far less academic and more accessible style. The essay is by Crispin Sartwell, an essayist whose prose is always accessible.

Here is a snippet: "In effect, every aspect of philosophy is being transformed or reimagined today, just as Epicurus produced letters or Epictetus aphorisms rather than Aristotelian treatises on logic. The basic forms are not the 20-page journal article with 123 footnotes or the bristlingly dry and difficult 400-page monograph, one-third of which is 'scholarly apparatus.' Rather, what you get from Agnes Callard or Justin Smith is a sharp, unexpected 2,500-word essay in a blog or newspaper.

"One of the shaping influences on the development of public philosophy, the personal/philosophical essay, and intellectual self-help was the New York Times philosophy column The Stone, originally dubbed a “blog” when it arrived in 2010, just in the nick of time. Edited by Peter Catapano, with professorial assistance and inspiration from Simon Critchley, it gave philosophers access to a very large audience. In 2010, every American professor, more or less, read The New York Times, and by a couple of years later, every American philosophy professor, more or less, read The Stone every time it appeared. At first, it featured eminent figures such as Arthur Danto and Martha Nussbaum, but as the column went on, it cultivated younger and less well-known voices as well."

The image above is of Professor Nussbaum.

Good to know. Thank you, Henry.

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