Jonathan Derbyshire

The cultural year 2007

Prospect magazine recently asked its contributors to name the most overrated and underrated cultural events of the year.  I picked the following:

Overrated
God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (Atlantic). For all the shapeliness of his sentences, Hitchens’s pamphleteering on behalf of the “new atheism” is superficial, complacent and historically undernourished.

Underrated
A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (Harvard). Charles Taylor’s gargantuan philosophical history of modernity, which complicates the flattering and simplified story we like to tell ourselves about secularisation, is a major intellectual event. Somehow, it hasn’t yet been recognised as such.

You can read the other nominations here.

The Philosophy of Insults

When the controversy over the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicting the Prophet Muhammad erupted early in 2006, a leading article in the Guardian ...  suggested that John Stuart Mill was a "better guide" to the issues involved than Voltaire. What exactly does the father of modern liberalism have to tell us about insult, offence, and the limits of free speech?

You can read the rest of my review of Jerome Neu's book Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults in today's edition of the New York Sun.