Emily E. Auger has written an excellent review of three volumes on the Tarot by T. Susan Chang: 36 Secrets: A Decanic Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot (Anima Mundi Press, 2021), Tarot Deciphered: Decoding Esoteric Symbolism in Modern Tarot (Llewellyn, 2021), and Tarot Correspondences: Ancient Secrets for Everyday Readers (Llewellyn, 2018). You can read the review in advance form in Volume 10, no. 2 (2022).

We are happy to inform you that we have just published Avery Morrow’s book review of Bahman Zakipour’s Izutsu Toshihiko no hikaku tetsugaku: shinteki na mono to shakaiteki na mono no arasoi (“Toshihiko Izutsu’s Comparative Philosophy: A Conflict between the Social and the Divine”). You can find the review in advance form in Volume 10, no. 2 (2022) of Correspondences.

We’ve just published Hannu Poutiainen’s article Tractatus Logico-Magicus: A Definition of Magic in Three Throws of the Die. The article can be found in advance form in Volume 7, no. 2 (2019).

The title of this essay matches its ambition: its purpose is nothing less than to define magic in modern philosophical terms. Yet the Wittgensteinianism of the title also reflects the irony of this ambition: through the metaphor of a thrice thrown die, the essay foregrounds the aleatoriness of its argument and the elusiveness of its object. Magic, it will be argued here, is a quality that is ascribed to a given object, and it is in that ascription, in the predicative assertion that a thing possesses magic, that its logic must be sought. However, rather than scan the history of esoteric or occult thought for such assertions, the essay will draw upon Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions to argue that magic is not so much a quality in itself as it is the emotional transformation of a pre-existing quality. Following Sartre’s view that emotion effects a magical transformation upon the world, the essay will conclude by arguing that the ascription of magic to a thing is true only if the very act of assertion transforms its ascriptive logic — emotionally, and, therefore, magically.