The Stone Philosophy Links - NYTimes.com Like his predecessor John Paul III, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the German phenomenologist Max Scheler, and wove a keen understanding of philosophical history into encyclicals like "Fides et Ratio," Pope Benedict XVI also seems quite comfortable engaging in philosophical debate. Judging by his interactions with Jürgen Habermas, among others, one might assume that the Pope stands for a political and theological conservatism quite at odds with Marxist tradition. Yet they, and indeed Benedict himself might be surprised to find that, as a post at First Things explains, he evidently has his admirers on the left. Four Italian "Ratzingerian Marxists" of the "Old Left" have issued a "manifesto" hoping to enlist the Pope in their fight against a "consumerist-inflected secularism." Strange bedfellows? Maybe not, considering that a few close readers of Benedict's 2007 encyclical "Spe Salvi" have noted that the Pope cites Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to help refute the plausibility of the thesis that, with the waning of theistic belief, "man himself is now called to establish justice." Moral Truth, Universally Acknowledged? In "After Virtue," Alasdair MacIntyre famously makes the case for Jane Austen as an overlooked, quasi-Aristotelian virtue ethicist of the first rank. In an article in the latest issue of Philosophy Now, Thomas Rodham echoes this claim, arguing that Austen is indeed a moral philosopher whose example has an especially contemporary relevance. While Rodham thinks Austen's literary value is now more historical, and that contemporary novelists like Ian McEwen have developed a "subtle psychological realism" which outstrips her capabilities, he nevertheless claims that her novels contain important insights "intertwined with their literary character but quite distinct from their literary merit." At New APPS, "Reading Plato on Death Row." At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, new books by Hilary Putnam and Brian Leiter considered. At Prospect, Bryan Magee on writing philosophy, and A.C. Grayling on Frank Ramsey. At the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Justin E.H. Smith reviews several recent books on disgust. At 3quarksdaily, Dave Maier on the nature of belief. At the New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr reviews Thomas Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos." On video: Daniel Dennett at Edge, Bertrand Russell in Bollywood, Ned Block on the Mind-Body problem, and a handful of "analytic theologians." At 13.7 Cosmos and Culture, Tania Lombrozo wonders if new echolocation technology can in fact show us what it's like to be a bat. At the Sacramento Bee, Governor Moonbeam as Aristotelian. Justice! the musical?