There's a disciplined erotic component to it, so that the height of sexual contact is the embrace, the modest touch, a relatively chaste kiss. An important passage from the surviving 1942 diary (one I quote in the book) relates this… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
I'm a fan of Hugh Kenner, Richard Ellman, Lionel Trilling and Frank Kermode. All these people have taught me how to read - but… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities. — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Many of the greatest works of philosophy seem to me to be valuable not because of their arguments, but because they offer us perspectives… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
As I read Mann in German for the first time, the full achievement - both literary and philosophical - of Death in Venice struck… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
My ethical naturalism sees us as facing the predicament of being social animals without evolved adaptations that make social life easy. The fundamental problem… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film). — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy. — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives. — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
The balance between literature and philosophy in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is different from that struck in the novella, but, as Mann clearly pointed out… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
I don't think that anything of any consequence is known a priori: all our knowledge is built up by modifying the lore passed on… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics… — Philip Kitcher Copy Share Image
