Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men.

If there are to be appropriate judgments about what questions are significant, you need both the informed views of scientists who know what has been achieved and what future developments are promising and the reflective judgments of representatives of different groups who can identify what kinds of information are most urgently needed.

I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.

I use biography, I use literary connections (as with Platen - this seems to me extremely helpful for appreciating the nuances of Mann's and Aschenbach's sexuality), I use philosophical sources (but not in the way many Mann critics do, where the philosophical theses and concepts seem to be counters to be pushed around rather than ideas to be probed), and I use juxtapositions with other literary works (including Mann's other fiction) and with works of music.

The more you read the novella, the more you should wonder, I think, which judgments are to be taken as bedrock.