Books like The Sight of Death

First remarkable fact: This was written by a philosopher. Second remarkable fact: the study was published at a time when film studies had a strong political orientation, and therefore Cavell’s book was an odd one out, for it had a ‘light-hearted’ subject: seven screwball comedies, made between 1934 and 1949. Its relevance has only been acknowledged in retrospect.

Cavell’s style is colloquial and his aim was to set up a ‘dialogue’ with the films. Even though I am less enamored with his philosophical interventions, this work helped me to truly appreciate all seven ‘comedies of remarriage’ he had selected, and The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) in particular has remained one of my all-time favorites ever since. Any analysis that encourages us to love a movie under discussion is worth recommending.

A photograph gives me the form of the bird, but it remains up to me to see the bird as a bird. And that can be difficult. What do we see when we see a bird? 

The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s masterpiece of descriptive prose, provides an answer, an answer that is as much about how we see as it is about what we see when we see birds. Sometimes we pull ourselves into the sight of others and the world emerges as more than its light. We see by being seen.

Baker achieves this kind of seeing both in his efforts to see a pair of peregrines and in his description of this achievement. 

Events that happen to us can damn us or liberate us. We will not always know which. 

Stories can help show these events and their consequences, even if they might not give them any real or acceptable meaning. But our descriptions of these events can help us see our life amidst the powers of the events. Heda Margolius Kovaly offers an admirable and brilliant example in her memoir Under a Cruel Star.

The memoir is a remarkable achievement of clarity, focus, and wisdom. Her life is more than that.

I could suggest any number of poems and poets of our everyday fate of being lost and found. But for me the modern poet who best integrates the eye seeing with the mind questioning is the great A.R. Ammons.

I have listed just Volume 1 of his collected poems, but I also recommend Volume 2. He writes out of a consciousness that poems are found and shaped out of a life of observation, effort, and passion.

It’s hard to love every artist – we all have different tastes – and I have always had problems with the apparently dry and academic art of Nicolas Poussin. That is, until I saw the exhibition Poussin and the Dance. Not only does it show a more relaxed side to this apparently reserved man, reveling in the fluidity and intimacy of movement, but as an exhibition it was perfectly formed. Every object, whether painting, drawing, sculpture, or vase, had a reason to be there, and each was informed by its presence with the others: a true conversation between artworks that you could enjoy and from which you could learn. And of course, the clarity of the minds which brought these exhibits together is also evident in the writing of the catalogue.

If Brecht is my nature, so are Cézanne’s paintings. Clark understands Cézanne better than anyone else (and there is a vast literature on Cézanne). Was Cézanne a “political” artist? Clark shows that Cézanne—the pillar of modern art—thought seriously about painting his world. And his world was changing, mostly for the worse.

Part of that change involved two-dimensional pictures (literally and figuratively) altering our environment. Cézanne takes the flattening of experience as his subject; that’s Clark’s point—and we’ll never see Cézanne the same way again. 

Paul Thompson is Professor of philosophy and holds the Kellogg chair in agricultural ethics at Michigan State University.

He was the first philosopher to explore the ethics of agriculture. It might be more correct to say he was the first to explore the lack of a specific ethical foundation for agriculture. He is a prolific writer and has published several books and numerous papers on agricultural ethics.

I have met him, read his work, and have benefited from his knowledge.

For the more philosophically minded this is a great short introduction to the major theories of ethicality, including what has been said about ethics by Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Adam Smith, Kant, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and others for our orientations to external world issues of great moment and to the more specific issues of what we owe to each other as relatives, community members, world citizens, and human beings. How do we choose our personal (and national and cultural) ethical choices? What are their roots in religion, family, culture, professional training, and economic conditions (e.g., assumptions of scarcity or human flourishing)? A very good background read for anyone who thinks before acting in negotiation. When do we act from “rights“ and when from “needs”? How should we treat our fellow human beings and have our conceptions changed over time?

This is another important contribution to our understanding of Spinoza as a moral philosopher. It is a denser read than the first three books, but fascinating nonetheless for those already with a little Spinoza under their belt. Rather than concentrating on just the latter parts of the Ethics, where most scholars interested in Spinoza’s moral philosophy focus and where we find the mature discussion of the “free person” who lives under the “guidance of reason”, Sangiacomo is especially concerned with the evolution of Spinoza’s moral thought from his earliest writings to his final, uncompleted work. He considers tensions within, and pressures upon, Spinoza’s understanding of the “Supreme Good” and how to achieve it, and the changes that that account consequently undergoes. Sangiacomo’s thesis is thus both historical and philosophical.

There are a lot of great books about metaethics and a lot of great books about reasons, but this book nabs my top recommendation because Smith makes the topics so deceptively easy to get into and start thinking about. This is the book that I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on that got me into studying and writing about philosophy for a living, and it is also one of the key books that everyone in my generation in my field grew up thinking about and reacting to. It also has a great balance between an overarching project that spans all of the chapters and some pretty self-contained discussions, especially in the earlier chapters, that helps the reader to focus on one question at a time while also getting a glimpse of how philosophical questions can add up to something bigger.