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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I’m reading Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated, an old book positing that the man from Stratford didn’t write the plays, without suggesting a candidate of its own. It is remarkable how little the conversation has changed. Skeptics are still being called crazy reactionary snobs, and orthodox scholars are still being told that they’re appealing to authority, inertia and speculation.
Also going through Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief and James’ The Will to Believe, both short works. So far Clifford’s essay, which posits that one has a moral duty to base his beliefs on verified evidence (or something like that), is beautiful in its initial purity but gets a little confused when it has to make a framework for ethically believing in what others (like experts) say. Well worth reading in light of squabbles over conspiracy theorists.
Just started A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael A. Cook. Liked his Ancient Religions, Modern Politics (an attempt to compare Islam and its impact on politics to other Third World religions) so figured I'd give it a spin. At least, the sections about the emergence of Islam. I care much less about the six hundred pages after that.
Still in the early pre-Islamic period, and nothing is much of a surprise/deviation from the general story of the period as I know it. Interested to see how revisionist he gets, given his association with Crone and that whole school.
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