A theme of the late Adorno was the "organic" connection of linked terms: for the late Adorno, philosophy had the musical task of balancing claims at opposite ends of these organic polarities.

In Plato, Adorno shows, there is no conception of the reality of matter as opposed to Form; in Platonism, matter is merely Maya and illusion. Aristotle's insight was that the Form implies that we have to take an interest in matter because Form is always a Form-of with a material content. A square is in this picture filled with matter of some color; the perfect man has a material biography including encounters with the material (such as the Wedding Feast at Cana: marriage's sanctity is this transit of Venus.)

Nor, in Aristotle-Adorno, would the Form be at all improved by removing, in a Platonic spirit, as much matter as possible in a retreat from the world in search of "pure" form. Most mystics in the Hellenist period were consciously or unconsciously, Platonists who sought through reduction in contact with the material access to a mystical. As the twentieth century Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb has shown, this creates a cleavage or schizophrenia in Western thought: a divorce.

Western mental reservations about the goodness of the received, material, world result from the fact that (as Adorno shows) Aristotle quite straighforwardly prized the Form over the Content, preserving the Platonic value structure. Adorno shows that Aristotle did so because ancient philosophers had no clear conception of the dialectic.

Now, this is a claim of the sort that Adorno's very critics hunt for in the thicket of his prose like Indiana Jones, and, once they find this fool's gold, they fail to read on; for is it not the case that dialectic comes from the Greek?

Dialectic did come from the Greek but Continental philosophers don't mean by "dialectic" its root meaning of conversation, instead something more like talking to oneself in which the philosopher is literally sundered by the overpowering structure of his thought at the point where he realizes that as a part of the historical world he must self-apply his philosophy, treating himself as Other.

It is at this point that contradictions emerge which point the way not to collapse but to a new structure.

Adorno's dialectic, which he found absent in Aristotle, was one in which the Concept makes its own demands upon the thinker who winds up, not compromising with the World Spirit but in wholehearted agreement with its necessity.

We have to cultivate Adorno's remarkable ability to think in three dimensions here and historically; for thanks to Orwell, the very phrase, "wholeheartedly in agreement with the necessity of the World Spirit" becomes Winston Smith at the end of 1984. In fact, Adorno, despite the simple-minded demonology of the American right, was not at all wholeheartedly in agreement with the NOWS after the Holocaust and his negativity, also a matter of paradoxical scorn in American circles, generated his thought after 1945.

The canard of the American right is that European intellectuals of the 1950s like Adorno somehow manufactured the Stalinism of the 1930s (sic.: if you're going to lie, lie big: it is unexplained how the future influenced the past.)

Another canard of the American right is the attempt to pin responsibility for the Holocaust, ahistorically, on European intellectuals, and Adorno is usually in the round-up of the usual suspects. The Hegelian belief in the reality of moral progress is portrayed as generating schemes, for social improvement, which generate schemes, for mass murder, as if privatized schemes do not also have their own potential, almost by default.

For Adorno, there was no empirically attainable way to attain redemption after the death camps. For the Anglo-American philosopher, who Adorno represents in this book as the deracinated Wittgenstein, "die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" (the world is what happens), the Holocaust as a fact therefore closes the matter: we find an echo of this in the facticity of interviews, on horror, of The Guy in the Bar...s seen, for example, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The Guy says "get over it,... don't bring it up, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist." Adorno's nemesis (like the Guy on the Weimar street-car who yelled at young Ted for his pretentious speech, pretentious speech being close to the language of redemption: like the knucklehead on the El who yelled at my kid for reading a book), the Guy is unconsciously influenced by Positivism and concludes from the empirical horror of Stalinism and the Holocaust that there is no "redemption", only revenge, only Tony Soprano, bada-bing.

The Guy in the Bar, an irresponsible philosopher in the sense that this clown witlessly inherits philosophy without examination, is, in his schizophrenic willingness to divorce form from content, in charge of modern American media...in which the form of facticity and polls drive what passes for political thought. Die Welt ist Alles, was Herr Gallup sprachen.

Adorno's ghost is needed to exorcise Guys in Bars, including those with tenure.

Adorno realized that form and content exist in an organic unity. Language that witlessly forgets this is the sort of political language that takes upon a favored form such as "freedom" without bothering to fill the form with content such as free men and women, and instead, in the Name of the Form, fills America's jails.

Half-educated, half-indoctrinated bien pensants are then systematically gulled into support for crime following the empty signifier of the Form. This has in my experience reduced and brutalized smart people to Guys in Bars.

Metaphysics is not palmistry, nor theology, nor the posit of supernatural entities. Nor is it restricted by any known law to the mulish rejection of an excess over der Fall. It is instead an ongoing critique of the very attempt to grope beyond and this critique itself is evidence for the Unseen: it is a rumor of redemption, and that is all we need: that is all we deserve.

Edmund Gurney (1847-1888) was a man this reviewer would have liked to have met. A brilliant man who lived in London, Mr. Gurney was a writer of articles about philosophy, psychology, religion, education, literature and the arts. Additionally, he was schooled in music (his passion), medicine and law and was a champion of both social justice and animal rights.

Gordon Epperson, author, professor emeritus of music at the University of Arizona and famed concert cellist has given us an insightful look at this man in his book, The Mind of Edmund Gurney. More than a biography, much more, The Mind of Edmund Gurney offers the reader an in-depth view of a man who was way ahead of his time. He was a friend to George Eliot, Samuel Butler, Henry Sedgwick, Leslie Stephen and William James, with whom Mr. Gurney had an extensive correspondence. It was through these letters that Professor Epperson was able to fashion a detailed and scholarly look at this complex and charismatic individual.

The Mind of Edmund Gurney presents a vivid picture of a dynamic person of extraordinary accomplishment. Even though he died at the early age of 41, he was able to study and write about hypnosis, psychic research, musical criticism---even poetry, in addition to everything else. He collaborated with F. W. H. Myers, author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, in the first significant studies of hypnosis to appear in England, providing convincing evidence of telepathy. And all of this in a rather providential time in history. Professor Epperson writes, "His personality was powerful, his character complex. He had the capacity to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others, and he made a strong impression...on whomever he had to do with."

The only way we have to meet Edmund Gurney is vicariously, through a well documented, thoughtful and provocative book entitled, The Mind of Edmund Gurney. Gordon Epperson has illuminated a life that might otherwise have been lost to history!

In the 1930s and 1940s it was not unusual that movies were sometimes performed by the same actors on the radio for the Lux Radio Theater. One of the classic examples of this peculiar art form is this radio adaptation of "Miracle on 34th Street," broadcast on the CBS network on December 20, 1948 as a nice little Christmas present to the listening audience (the film had come out during the summer of the previous year). Most of the movie cast is reunited (with Natalie Wood the obvious exception, especially since she appears on the CD cover), with Edmund Gwenn as Chris Kringle, Maureen O'Hara as Doris, John Payne as Fred, Marlene Ames as Susan, Joseph Kearns as Sawyer, and Willard Waterman as Macy. The radio version is just as charming as the classic holiday film, which is required viewing on Thanksgiving weekend as we gear up for the holiday season. The broadcast runs one hour, including the original commercials for Lux Toiler Soap (would I make this up?). Try listening to this while you are working on decorations or holiday cooking since it is a feast for the ears that does not you to the race to the set every time one of your favorite scenes comes along (the ending is especially good in this version).

The critic Anthony Boucher once described the British writer and composer, Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Robert Bruce Montgomery) as a "master of fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek mystery novels, a blend of John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, M.R. James, and the Marx Brothers."

"The Moving Toyshop," published in 1946, was Crispin's third Gervase Fen mystery. This particular whodunit involves an unusual will, a hunt for five eccentric characters named after the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, and of course, a moving toy shop with a corpse in its upper story. The action begins in the Autumn of 1938, when the poet, Richard Cadogan wangles an advance from his London publisher and sets out for a vacation in Oxford.

The reader begins to realize the oddity of the journey he has embarked upon with the poet, when Cadogan hitches a ride with truck driver who quotes Coleridge ("a thahsand, thahsand slimy things lived on and so did I.") but prefers D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Somebody's Lover."

We're entering Fen Country now, where even the truck drivers and police detectives are amateur literary critics, and our detective, Gervase Fen is the Oxford don of English Language and Literature. Dialogue fizzes with cynical witticisms and literary allusions when Fen and the poet, Cadogan go at it, or when Fen takes on any of a number of amateur classicists who populate "The Moving Toyshop."

All of Crispin's Fen mysteries can be read with pleasure for the dialogue alone. This particular book also has a full cast of British eccentrics, including the five Edward Lear characters (one of whom is a murderer).

Here is your first limerick-clue:

"There was an Old Person of Mold who shrank from sensations of Cold; so he purchased some muffs, some furs, and some fluffs, and wrapped himself up from the cold."

Racket through the streets (and sometimes the lawns) of Oxford in Fen's battered, red roadster, Lily Christine III! Make up limericks and shout them out to passing scholars! Join the hunt for the missing toyshop, the corpse, and the murderer! You will enjoy a sometimes farcical, always exhilarating ride.

"The Moving Toyshop" is Crispin on his own home turf (he was educated at St. John's College, Oxford), and at the top of his classical form.

This small volume might be the perfect gift for the aficionado who owns all the other important biographies on Mozart.

Norbert Elias was a sociologist by profession. Looking at the life of Mozart, he asked what influence did the society in which Mozart grew up have on his development as an artist. Elias did not try to explain the nature of genius in terms of sociology, as the subtitle of the US translation implies. Rather, he tried to put Mozart's genius in perspective. The German title of the book made this quite clear: "Mozart. Zur Soziologie eines Genies", which translates roughly as "Mozart: Sociological aspects of a genius". The charm of the book really lies in the fact that Elias did not try to explain away the mystery of genius.

As a small extra for anyone who has ever wondered why so many important composers came from German speaking countries (Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, etc.), whereas France and England produced few composers of the same stature during this period, Elias's essay has a neat, little theory which provides some answers. It also warms the hearts of economists, by the way.

For those who like good, clean spy-type fun, this is a SUPERLATIVE work. Part three in the adventures of Richard Hannay (which started with Buchan's well-known "Thirty-nine Steps"), this is a first-rate thriller set on the eve of World War I, with plenty of atmosphere and hair-breadth escapes, plus an excellent dogfight climax in the skies over France. Along with everything else, it has some sound theological reflections (the title being a character from "Pilgrim's Progress") about courage and fortitude. Highly recommended.

Edmund Calamy (1678-1732), a dissenting minister in London and a historian, was the son and grandson of puritan ministers inside the Church of England. Both of them, along with hundreds of others, were expelled from their church livings for their refusal to submit to the 1662 Act of Uniformity. This event, the so-called 'Great Ejection', was a crucial moment in the formation of religious dissent in England. This book, first published in 1775, is an extensively-revised version, by another dissenting minister Samuel Palmer, of materials originally collated and published by Edmund Calamy, commemorating the lives and works of these ejected ministers.
Editing the autobiography of one of the most eminent of these ejected ministers, Richard Baxter, Calamy included a long chapter listing the ejected ministers and such biographical data as he could find. This is the famous chapter 9 of An Abridgment of Mr Baxter's History of his Life and Times (1702). This chapter became a whole volume of a second edition of the Abridgement published in 1713. And in 1727 Calamy produced a further two volumes of material under the title A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges, and Schoolmasters who were Ejected and Silenced after the Restoration of 1660...
Samuel Palmer attempted to integrate this material into a more readable form, making extensive revisions and additions. He certainly siucceeded in producing something more accessible to eighteenth-century readers and there were several reprints of the book and a second edition in 1802-3. However readability was sometimes at the cost of accuracy and of a reduction of the scholarly value of Calamy's material.
Nevertheless The Nonconformist's Memorial was an important work of collective memory by eighteenth-century dissenters.

¡Hi! I just wanted to comment that on last year, I had the fortune to meet Sir Edmund and his wife in my country, Chile, at Hotel Portillo, (a ski center, where on 1962 the world ski championship took place). I`m a climber and so are my sons and my father. We all met Sir Ed., and had beautifull pictures taken. I told him my dad who is now 83, still climbs every weekend. He congratulasted My dad and told him his knees, didn`t go with him for hiking now. He signed my vertion of this book, over the picture where he appears with George Lowe, going to a State banquet in London (page 64) Glad to meet you Guillermo Fuentes

Edmund Crispin (pseudonym for Bruce Montgomery) wrote "Obsequies at Oxford" in 1944 while he was still an undergraduate at St. John's College, Oxford. It features the advent of Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature, and amateur detective extraordinaire. Another of my favorite characters, the deaf and possibly senile Professor Wilkes also appears for the first time and tells a ghost story right before the first murder occurs. A story within a story. A mystery within a mystery.

Fen solves both the mystery of the "Obsequies at Oxford," and the mystery within the ghost story.

Crispin specialized in creating 'impossible' murders for his Oxford don to investigate. A murder usually acquires the label 'impossible' at the death scene, when someone blurts out, "No one could have gotten past the gate keeper (or into the locked room or through the sky light). This is impossible!"

In "Obsequies at Oxford," we have:

"...Accident practically impossible. And murder, apparently, quite impossible. So the only conclusion is---

"The only conclusion is," put in the Inspector, "that the thing never happened at all."

Now Fen is off and running! A whole troupe of actors and actresses had motives for killing their colleague, and all of them (of course) have alibis.

The story begins when playwright Robert Warner mounts his latest experimental drama at the Oxford Repertory Theatre. His previous play bombed in London and he wants to try out "Metromania" in the provinces before opening it on the West End. His current mistress accompanies him to Oxford, and he unwisely gives his former mistress a role in his new play. Both ladies have other admirers. Their admirers have admirers. In fact, it's hard to keep track of who loves whom without a score card---or in this case, a playbill.

Although its characters sometimes sound frivolous and superficial (and very funny), "Obsequies at Oxford" also concerns itself with the gap between outward, conventional appearances and the inner turmoil that triggered a murder. All of the suspects have valid, psychological reasons for wanting the victim to die, but Fen is skeptical about crimes committed for hate or love:

"I don't believe in the 'crime passionel,' particularly when the passion appears, as in this case, to be chiefly frustration. Money, vengeance, security: there are your plausible motives, and I shall look for one of them."

If you agree with Fen, then you will be able to eliminate ninety percent of the suspects. If you're like me, you'll keep blundering off after red herrings until All is Explained at novel's end. The author doesn't cheat---you'll get all of the clues ahead of the final denouement.

"Obsequies at Oxford" is both a tightly constructed mystery and a literate, witty, British comedy of manners.

NOTE: "Obsequies at Oxford" was also published under the title, "The Case of the Gilded Fly."

Professor Brough delivers Husserl to English-reading audiences with remarkable flair.