phlogma

Notes on Rush Rhees, “Postscript” (on Wittgenstein)
Editor’s note: Luno comments on Rush Rhees’ published recollections, a chief source for biographical understanding of certain perceived peculiarities of Wittgenstein’s makeup, specifically, his relationship to his Jewishness, to Otto Weininger, women, and politics. In the course of these notes, Luno offers one of his more remarkable summations of […]

Notes on Virginia Woolf and Otto Weininger
In the October 2, 1920 issue of The New Statesman (p.704), Desmond MacCarthy, writing as “Affable Hawk”, reviewed Arnold Bennett’s just published Our Women. MacCarthy mentioned in passing, and somewhat in support of Bennett’s views, Otto Weininger’s Sex & Character, which first appeared in English in 1906. (A book […]

This is Desmond MacCarthy’s first reply to Virginia Woolf’s letter in The New Statesman. It appeared on October 9, pp.15-6, Woolf’s letter having appeared in the October 2, 1920 issue. See “Weininger’s wake and Woolf’s ire” for context.
[“Affable Hawk” writes: “Sappho was at the height of her fame about 610 B.C. She was a contemporary […]

In Woolf’s story, “A Society”, from the early collection, Monday or Tuesday (1921), a group of young women set out to investigate and evaluate the world by forming “a society for asking questions”.
Clorinda says,
…We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. […]

[Virginia Woolf replied to this review. See “Weininger’s wake and Woolf’s ire” for context.]
704
THE NEW STATESMAN
OCTOBER 2, 1920
Current Literature
BOOKS IN GENERAL
SAMUEL BUTLER used to say when asked what he thought about women, “I think what every sensible man thinks”; and when pressed further he would add, “Sensible men never tell.” This was ominous and also […]

Notes on:
Virginia Woolf, A Room’s of Our Own.
[Paragraph, not page, numbers appear in brackets.]
Chapter One
[1]
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of […]