HERE (if you get the paywall just reset your browser history).
One of the many interesting nuggets in the piece is the following:
In order to understand what happened to him on 2-3-74, Dick used the resources that he had at hand and that he liked best. These were a complete set of the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica that Dick purchased late in 1974 and Paul Edwards’s arguably unsurpassed “Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” published in eight handsome volumes in 1967, one of the richest and most capacious philosophical documents ever produced. Dick’s reading was haphazard and eclectic. Encyclopedias permitted an admittedly untutored rapidity of association that lent a certain formal and systematic coherence to his wide-ranging obsessions.
Critchley wonderfully eschews both the Charibdis of romanticizing mental illnes and Scylla of rejecting out of hand the idea that Dick's experiences might have given him some genuine knowledge. He's hitting up against the very interesting issue (that Catarina and I have blogged about and on which I am writing a paper with Graham Bounds) concerning how one might get truth from fiction, and the aesthetic upshot of this.
[Oops, just noticed that PART 2 is just now up. Going to read that later this afternoon. Between Critchley, Gary Gutting, Williamson, Stanley, etc., it is clear that the Stone is currently the gold standard of popular philosophy. It's been an inspiration for me and Mark Silcox while working on Philosophy and Dungeons and Dragons. More generally, if our discipline had ten more Simon Critchleys I think it would be fantastically easy to defend what we do to budget cutters. But we should be thankful we've got one of him at least.]
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