The Metaphysical Club

A couple of years ago … I guess it was a couple of years after 9/11 … there was a very good book by Louis Menand called The Metaphysical Club, which I admired enormously.

THE LONG-AWAITED, LONG-PROMISED, JUST PLAIN LONG JOHN BANVILLE INTERVIEW - PART I TEV 2005

Brown and his supporters illustrate how clarity of purpose can justify violence, a tragic outcome of commitment something I thought about when reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which also focuses on a handful of New Englanders in Emerson's orbit during the Civil War.

Philocrites: April 2005 Archives 2005

In The Metaphysical Club — definitely worth reading — Menand clearly buys Oliver Wendell Holmes's assertion that "certitude leads to violence."

Philocrites: February 2003 Archives 2003