Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.
Philip KitcherScience literacy consists in the ability and the desire to follow reports of new scientific advances, throughout your whole life.
Philip KitcherThe variety within Mann's fiction is impressive and fascinating. But Joyce is even more various and many-sided. He begins his career with a wonderful sequence of bleak studies about the ways in which human lives can go awry - in my view, Dubliners is underrated.
Philip KitcherIn my view, all students should be given an initial opportunity to pursue the science track as far as it goes. But for those who quickly decide that track isn't for them, a different style of teaching is in order.
Philip Kitcher