Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Alfred Russel Wallace

Thoughts on my golden age list

In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year.  It makes, I think, an impressive list.  But it will naturally raise questions.... 1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36.  Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole.  2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense?  This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those ...