TLS, July 6 2007

from Harold Love's review of Brian Vickers' Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint", and John Davies of Hereford:

Using computer and stylistic analysis, Vickers proves that "A Lover's Complaint" is not by Shakespeare, but he is too positive that the last poem of the Sonnets is by John Davies of Hereford.


*****

from David Hodgson's "Partly Free," a defence of a limited free will against a wholly materialist explanation of our decisions and actions:
But there can be a positive role for a person's conscious experiences in plausible reasoning, if that reasoning proceeds otherwise than as precisely determined by rules: namely, by contributing to appropriate decisions through gestalt experiences to which we can respond, even though they are too feature-rich to engage as wholes with general rules. My support for this premiss is an original argument of mine, which I will briefly summarize here. I accept that our conscious experiences correspond with physical processes of our brains, and I accept that there is accordingly a sense in which any information contained in our experiences must be contained or encoded in those physical processes; but it is important that this information, as experienced consciously by us, is characteristically combined into unified wholes or gestalts. My suggestion is that, although these gestalts cannot, as wholes, engage with laws of rules of any kind, they may plausibly as wholes make a positive contribution to our decisions, becaise we can respond to them.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wonder how many others of Shakespeare's writings may have been written by someone else, or perhaps by a cohort calling themselves "Shakespeare." There are so many different voices in Shakespeare; that's why I wonder. Was "Shakespeare" a great collaboration rather than a "great man?"
9:31 PM
Jee Leong said…
The very early plays, according to scholars, show signs of collaboration with other playwrights, a practice quite common to the Elizabethan stage. If I am not wrong, most scholars believe that the middle and late plays are written by Shakespeare alone. At least that's the general idea; I don't know the details.
2:54 PM
Anonymous said…
interesting - thanks
1:40 PM
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