Palle Yourgrau

An interesting read if you have any interest at all in philosophy of time and how it relates to Einstein's theory of relativity. Yourgrau highlights an intriguing and under-appreciated relationship between the logician Kurt Gödel and Einstein, which led to a surprise finding by the former: if we accept relativity, then we cannot treat our notion of time as a physically-real property of the universe. The whole idea sounds daunting, and the subject matter most certainly is if you dig into the guts, but Yourgrau wrote this book for the lay audience and did a wonderful job of it.… (meer)

Simone Weil was a strange character, whose personal peculiarities included a disturbed relationship to food and an aversion to physical love, and who presents a challenge to writers and thinkers alike in trying to separate her personal quirks from her philosophy - if indeed they can be separated at all.
I admire Yourgrau's reasoned, sensible, down-to-earth approach to this much-studied young woman who died at 34, partly through voluntary starvation which made her too weak to fight the tuberculosis from which she suffered.
This book takes a serious look at Weil's thought as well as the facts of her life, and succeeds totally in not reducing her to her symptoms, and giving due consideration to the fact that they might not be symptoms at all, but rather her philosophy in action.… (meer)