New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Minds on Monday: The Sense of Beauty Rests On Art

Last week, I argued that art couldn’t be a spandrel, at any rate not a spandrel on norms of beauty. In this, my concluding post on art and beauty, I want to advance two theses. The first is that our sense of beauty comes from art, not the other way around. And the second is that the art capacity is adaptive.

 

Let’s start with the sense of beauty, or more generally, the sense that things have aesthetic value. Throughout this series of posts, I have been sympathetic to Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure. I judge a thing to be beautiful because it gives me pleasure (or displeasure) in a way that is disinterested, i.e., which is independent of my desiring it, or feeling an aversion to it.

Is There Anything New To Say About the Death Penalty? – Part 2

Last week, I shared a glimpse of Willie Francis’ 1947 account of his own botched execution.  I argued that anyone who wants to understand the death penalty must engage with the testimony of people who are facing state execution. 

 Today, I will share a glimpse of another text in Katy Ryan’s important new book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States.   

 Steve Champion, now Adisa Akanni Kamara, is an inmate on death row at San Quentin.  He has been in prison for 30 years, since he was 18 years old.  His essay, “The Sword into a Pen,” narrates his transformation from a gangbanger into an intellectual, poet, storyteller, and activist.

Together with Anthony Ross, now Ajani Addae Kamara, and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, he read and studied work by Plato and Fanon, Heidegger and Che Guevara, Marx and Machiavelli.  “We had gone from thugs to bookworms,” he writes (65).  How did this transformation happen? 

How Something Came To Be From Nothing

[THANKS TO LAURIE PAUL FOR THE POINTER.]

Why is there something rather than nothing? How did there come to be something rather than nothing? Two different questions. A positive answer to the first, especially if a priori, implies that the second question has a false presupposition; if the reason is a priori, then it should have force at every moment of time, and this implies that there never could have been a moment when there was nothing. Conversely, if there is a positive answer to the second—if the Big Bang is an answer, for example—then there cannot be a positive reason for the first.

The two questions seem not to be distinguished by Lawrence Krauss, in a recent book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.

Is the dark night of the soul a fancy term for unbelief?

Recently, I've been reading a lot on divine hiddenness as a challenge to theism, and I find it a particularly interesting and forceful argument in favor of atheism. The idea is, roughly speaking, that non-culpable unbelief is incompatible with the concept of a loving, all-powerful and good God who would want a relationship with his creatures. I was particularly struck by reading about Mother Teresa's persistent doubts about the existence of God, and her inability to feel his presence in the eucharist or his responding to her prayer. Although she had mystical experience early in life, when she went to live with the destitute in Calcutta, her mystical experiences ceased and she was troubled by her continued inability to experience or relate to God.

For decades, she passed through what has been dubbed a "dark night of the soul". On a recent conference organized by the CFI, Dennett talked about Mother Teresa's unbelief, and said that 'dark night of the soul' is, "let's face it, just a fancy term for atheism, a way  of theists to explain away persistent unbelief in a person who is such an exemplar for Catholics and christians more generally '. He wrote elsewhere: "wouldn’t it be wonderful if the outing of Mother Teresa inspired a few thousand of them to come out of the closet and acknowledge their atheism! Then it might start being obvious not only that faith in God is not a requirement for morality". In response to this, theists have argued that Dennett et al do not get "dark night of the soul" at all... For instance, Anne Barbeau Gardiner argued that "The dark night of the soul that saints experience is the highest rung of the contemplative ascent in the Catholic faith. It is a state reserved for a very few whom God prepares for perfect union with Him. In this mysterious dark night, the saints experience a painful abandonment of mind and soul, as if God were absent, when in fact He is more truly present, though deeply hidden, than before." 

It seems to me that both sides of the debate get it wrong. I think there is a qualitative difference between DNS and atheism - for one thing, it seems far-fetched on the part of Dennett to argue that "Perhaps it was her [Mother Teresa's] guilt at being unable to convert herself that drove her to work so hard to convert others to take her place among the believers." But at the same time, DNS hardly seems a boon, reserved for the very few mystics - there is some connection to atheism, since Mother Teresa did express her doubts that God exists in several of her letters.  

Perhaps we can distinguish between atheism and DNS as follows: DNS is an alief (to borrow Tamar Gendler's distinction), a non-reflective belief ("God isn't present, he doesn't respond etc"), but this alief does not translate itself into a reflective, atheistic belief (i.e., "God doesn't exist"). By contrast, an atheist may have an alief that God exists and an explicit, reflective belief that he doesn't exist. Indeed, another possibility are those atheists who admit to having theistic aliefs but disavow theistic beliefs. For instance, Jesse Bering, an atheist cognitive scientist, admits to sensing God's presence, but explains this by arguing (in detail in his recent book The God instinct) that this alief is a cognitive adaptation to facilitate cooperation - a view similar to Ruse's error theory about moral objectivism. If that's true, there is a distinction between DNS and unbelief. An unreflective unbelief is not sufficient for atheism. 

Wikipedia and Philosophy in Canada

I know Wikipedia depends on all of us to edit their entries. I was nonetheless startled to read the entry on Philosophy in Canada. Philosophy of Mind is singled out for a special section of this entry, and here it is in its entirety:

All Group of Thirteen have departments of philosophy with doctorate-level staff members conducting research related to the philosophy of mind. The work of Dr. Paul R. Thagard, at the University of Waterloo, with respect to cognitive functions and coherence, is of note. Charles Taylor, emeritus professor at McGill University in Montreal, has studied consciousness within the context of Hegelianism. Zenon Pylyshyn a psychologist and computer scientist at the University of Western Ontario from 1964 to 1994, has made significant contributions to cognitive science. Other Canadian-born and educated cognitive scientists have made their mark in the US, including David Kirsh, John Robert Anderson, Keith Holyoak, and Steven Pinker.

As I say, Wikipedia depends on all of us, and clearly most of us don't care to touch this entry. What startles me is that there is somebody in the world who thought both that Philosophy of Mind was sufficiently important to rate a section of its own and that the above was an adequate description.

Timothy Noah on Campus Construction

Nice article HERE. The crux (and John Protevi has pointed this out with respect to the University of California system for about a year now):

My inspiration comes from Ernest Davis, Patrick Deer, and Mark Crispin Miller, three NYU professors who, in an April 26 New York Times op-ed (“Expand Minds, Not the NYU Campus”), call on NYU to halt its planned $6 billion expansion. There are unique issues here involving historic preservation—NYU has been slowly wrecking the character of its Washington Square neighborhood for several decades—but Davis, Deer, and Miller also point out that since NYU doesn’t have a monster endowment, the new construction will be funded at least in part by loading up the university with more debt. That will mean higher tuition and more debt for NYU students, and it will also mean that NYU will further price itself out of reach for a growing number of prospective and current students.

The statistics overall are staggering:

Imitation, the sincerest form of something

Yesterday I blogged about the forthcoming Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy volume edited by myself and Mark Silcox. I should note that Blackwell is also doing one (CFP HERE). It's interesting to compare the paper topics in the Blackwell CFP with the paper topics in me and Silcox's book.

I want to make some kind of extended joke personifying each book as role playing characters in combat and my book has a plus seven vorpal sword or something like that. But I'll refrain.

Full disclosure: Mark and I'd originally pitched our book to Blackwell and were rejected on grounds of marketability of the topic. Robichaud's CFP came out after Open Court put me and Mark's book as forthcoming on their website, which I conjecture caused the marketing people at Blackwell to change their minds about the topic.

Is There Anything New to Say About the Death Penalty?

Yes.  And it is said by those who have the most intimate grasp of the issues, and the least authorized voices to speak: the condemned.

Katy Ryan's new book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States, brings some of these voices closer to those of us who share the ambivalent fortune of having a life that the state aims to protect rather than to destroy.

The book opens with the testimony of Willie Francis, a 16-year-old black man who was condemned to death in 1947, in Louisiana, by a jury of 12 white men, solely on the basis of a written confession produced after Francis had been picked up for another, unrelated crime.  Francis survived not one, but two massive electric shocks.  His lawyer appealed, arguing that to attempt another execution would count as "cruel and unusual punishment," thus violating the Eighth Amendment.  The case went to the Supreme Court, but ultimately, Francis lost, and he was executed by electrocution in 1947.

There are so many things wrong with this story, it's hard to know where to begin.  What did Francis have to say about the experience of surviving his own execution - twice - only to be held in prison until a third and final death?

"I sure know how it feels to sit in that chair and have them strap me in and put a mask on my eyes.  I know how it feels to have the shock go through me and think I am dead but find out I am not.  I do not like to talk about it at all, but if it will help other people to understand each other, I want to tell everything" (33).

La Marseillaise

I was asked to do a short presentation yesterday for "Revolutionary Renditions," the culminating event in a spring-semester series sponsored by the International Studies program at LSU reflecting on the 2011 "Arab Spring." I chose the "duel of anthems" scene from Casablanca and commented on three aspects of La Marseillaise (in itself and as depicted in the movie) with regard to the intertwining of the affective, the semantic, and the pragmatic: 1) collective embodiment in music; 2) the temporality of revolutionary solidarity; 3) the universality of the values of the French Revolution and the “rights of man.” First the clip, then below the fold my (roughly sketched) notes for the discussion: 

The Montreal Student Situation

In Ontario, an Arts undergraduate pays over $6000 per year in fees. In Québec, she would pay something like $2300. By 2017, the Québec  number will rise to something over $4000. The issue is not simple, as we have learned. But is it worth this?—widespread destruction of property by students. (The official student body did not sanction this, but refuses to dissociate itself from it.)

 

The influence of gender and philosophical specialization on assessing natural theological arguments - part 1

[X posted on Prosblogion] Earlier on this blog, I have reported results of a survey on natural theological arguments , see here and here. To briefly recall, the survey asked philosophers to rate the strength of natural theological arguments, grouped into 8 arguments that seek to support belief in the existence of God, and 8 arguments that seek to support belief in metaphysical naturalism. My initial analysis indicated that religious belief (theism, atheism or agnosticism) is a strong predictor of the extent to which participants evaluate these arguments. However, in my analysis I examined only the effects of religious belief on the total overall assessments, not the arguments individually. In this post, I will report some fine-grained analyses on how philosophers evaluate individual arguments, as a function of their religious belief, gender and whether or not they specialize in philosophy of religion. Since the statistics are quite detailed, I will make this a two-part post, starting out by the positive arguments. The analyses have been conducted by Robert O'Brien, a statistician at the University of Miami.

Brazilian music on Fridays: Carmen Miranda

As announced last week, today’s post is dedicated to Carmen Miranda. She is widely known as ‘the lady with the Tutti-Frutti hat’, but the title does not really do justice to her talent as a singer and performer. In a sense, Carmen Miranda became a caricature of herself, but the fact remains that she was one of the greatest Brazilian singers of the 20^th century.

In the 1930s, Carmen was the most successful radio singer in Brazil, scoring hit after hit. Besides being a great singer, she was also a great performer, and thus became the biggest star in the sophisticated scene of casinos in Rio de Janeiro. On several occasions, show business-related foreign guests who saw her performing assured her that she would become a smashing hit in Hollywood, but she was not in a hurry to launch an American career. It was only in 1939 that Carmen moved to the US and became the ‘Brazilian Bombshell’, first performing on Broadway and soon after in the movies which became a world-wide hit. To give a measure of her success, “by 1946 she was Hollywood's highest-paid entertainer and top female tax payer in the United States" (according to Wikipedia).

Connecticut Abolishes the Death Penalty -- But Have They Replaced it with a Living Death Penalty?

Yesterday, Connecticut became the 17th state in the US to abolish the death penalty.  It joins New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Illinois as what we might call "new abolitionist" states.  California may be soon to follow, and even Kentucky is making cautious moves towards abolition.

As we celebrate this victory and work towards abolition in other states, we need to remember that state execution is not the only ethically and politically questionable part of the US prison system, even if it is the most hotly debated. 

It is arguably not even the only form of "death penalty," if by death we mean not only the cessation of biological life but also the destruction of psychic and social personhood. 

Stuart Grassian, Craig Haney, Terry Kupers and others have shown that prolonged solitary confinement produces intense anxiety, paranoia, cognitive difficulties, perceptual distortions such as hallucinations, and physical illness in many prisoners.  Charles Dickens called it "secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay." Atul Gawande calls it torture.

A lifetime of solitary confinement without the chance of release amounts to a death-in-life sentence. 

And yet, this is precisely what Connecticut has substituted as an alternative to capital punishment!  Solitary Watch reports (quoting from The Day):

Under the bill, those convicted [of Class A felony murder, which would have otherwise been treated as a capital offense] must be housed separately from other inmates, subjected to twice-weekly cell searches and must change their cells every three months. They would get no more than two hours a day outside their cells and would be allowed only “non-contact” visitation privileges.

Is this any better than a death sentence?

I will pose this question to the eight inmates on Tennessee's death row with whom I meet every two weeks, along with five other "outsiders," for a reading and discussion group.  I will report back to you next Thursday.

Spiros will be merciless, but that's O.K.

Quick bit of shameless self promotion.

Open Court is advertising Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy now (edited by Mark Silcox and myself), and the ad copy is very good. We're  hoping we can have some sort of presentation at next year's Gen Con, which would be the second most nerdiest (and hence, second most awesome) thing I've ever done. Anyhow, the ad copy and table of contents is below. We manged to assemble a really first rate group of people who engage in philosophy, game design, and media theory (some of the authors do all three) and as a result I think this is one of the best of this kind of book.  

This volume will convince readers that the swift ascent of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons to worldwide popularity in the 1970s and 1980s is “the most exciting event in popular culture since the invention of the motion picture.”

My God it stinks to be contingent faculty

Having been non-tenure track for two years after getting my Ph.D, I actually began to perspire about half way through reading THIS ARTICLE.  The author presents ten ways to get yourself fired if you are contingent faculty. Of course some of them contradict each other, but these contradictions just accurately represent the messed up situation.

In addition, ther whole exercise vaguely reeks of Kremlinology. Just as the CIA really had no idea what the various cliques surrounding Andropov were up to, there's something essentially mysterious about people with arbitrary power over you.

Springtime in the Rest of Canada

Surprising developments in Canadian politics. In Alberta, traditionally the most conservative province, a relatively progressive politician wins unexpectedly. In the meanwhile, Michael Ignatieff says some true things about Québec (and Scotland) on the BBC and (of course) is forced to apologize.

Start with Alberta. The election to form the provincial government pitted two women against each other. The still unelected Premier of the province, Alison Redford, a “red Tory”, faced Danielle Smith, the leader of a party of the US style right wing. In conservative Alberta, Smith appeared to lead, while Redford seemed to alienate the right-wing majority (?) with her pan-Canadian, pro-education, campaign. . .

Why tell traditional fairy tales to children?

This blogpost is inspired by Catarina's recent reflections on fairy tales and their morals. I have been a long-time fan of fairy tales. Preferably not the polished versions - even the Grimm brothers were fairly polished, for instance, the witches' discovery that Rapunzel was seeing someone was initially prompted by her pregnancy, but this was censored in later versions of Hausmärchen.

Fairy tales provide a fascinating window onto beliefs and practices in the past. While I think few would still hold the hopes that the Grimms and other collectors held of discovering ancient religious beliefs in them, they have been particularly interesting to evolutionary literary scientists and cognitive anthropologists. Evolutionary literary scientists are interested in finding recurrent patterns of human behavior in fairy tales, for instance, in the treatment of stepchildren (e.g., Cinderella), the competition between mothers and daughters for mates (Snow white). Cognitive anthropologists notice that some elements reliably predict the success of fairy tales over time, for instance, tales with a limited number of counterintuitive elements work best. What I am wondering at is why parents today would still bother to tell traditional fairy tales to their children. This question is considerably complicated by the following observations: 

Referee Follies

"The theoretical point of view which the author has adopted appears to me to lie beyond the limit of paradox," the referee said. "As a work of controversial pleading, his work would do credit to any living author . . . But it is my duty to point out that I have never met with a stronger case of the paradox that a man may be exceedingly able and devoted, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, may fail to take up a sound position in his science."

Had the essay been sent to him by the editor of Mind, the referee ends, "I should have treated it respectfully as a brilliant essay by a very able writer, but should have endeavoured to point out that its positive stand-point and consequently its treatment of the subject were hopelessly inadequate."

Minds on Monday: Why Art Can't Be a Spandrel

In an earlier post, I argued that all humans have a sense of beauty. That is, they have a capacity to derive disinterested pleasure from things, and, in this Kantian sense, to find them beautiful. But, I continued, there is no universal explanation for norms of beauty—such explanations as are offered for why we find certain things beautiful fail to capture all of the things we find beautiful, and admit many things that we do not find beautiful in the Kantian sense mentioned above. Finally, I argued that all human cultures practice art.

In this post, I want to begin to consider evolutionary explanations of the universality of art. Here, I make a simple point: evolutionary explanations should (but typically don’t) account for the essential role of form in art. Accounting for form has a surprising result.

Question for pointers towards decent philosophical research on aphaisa and late first language acquisition?

Somewhere in The Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker discussed research on late first language acquisition. These are deaf people who are not taught sign language as children.

At the time I read this stuff, I did a literature search and didn't find any philosophers talking about these people, and the scientific literature was also pretty narrow. There was a great deal of developmental research showing that the "critical period" hypothesis concerning second language acquisition (that around the age of eleven it gets much harder to learn a second language, and progressively harder as the learner ages after that) is also true for first language acquisition, and that the characteristic deficits for late learners are analogous in sign and spoken language.

Now weirdly, if I remember Pinker right, many of these late first language learners were highly functional people. Many of the subjects were migrant farmers. Also, after learning a first language, many reported having had rich beliefs prior to learning language. I think one reported that when he saw the Pacific Ocean the first time he thought it was God's toilet.

The big dog just barked

The Faculty Advisory Council at Harvard has just issued a memo on library journal pricing. Highlights: 

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals....

Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views: 

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F).

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

The proposed Québec HE fees hike analyzed in a way which can and should be generalized

This Montreal Gazette column, among whose authors are friends of the blog Hasana Sharp and William Clare Roberts (see here and here), is an excellent example of concise and insightful analysis of HE privatization issues; as the post title claims, it need not be limited to the Québec case. Among the highlights: 

The second assumption is that increasing tuition reduces a subsidy to students from high-income families. But if tax rates are progressive, where's the subsidy? The bulk of university costs are paid on April 30 [the Canadian income tax day -- though part of the issue is the effect of different provincial tax rates / HE fees], not when the tuition bill comes due, so any concern with the unfair distribution of burdens ought to express itself in shoring up the progressiveness of the income tax, not in hitting students with increased fees....

Most everyone agrees, at some level, that justice involves those who enjoy the benefits of education bearing also the burdens of education. Where we differ is in our identifications of the primary beneficiaries of university education. Those in favour of the hikes, like Principal Munroe-Blum, believe that students are the primary beneficiaries of university education....

First, the more we stress the future economic benefits that will accrue to those with higher degrees, the more university looks like job training that employers are lucky enough to get employees to pay to undertake....

Sunday political affect news: new fronts in the War on Terror

Criminalizing desire: 

[I]n his opening statement to the jury one prosecutor suggested that “it’s not illegal to watch something on the television. It is illegal, however, to watch something in order to cultivate your desire, your ideology.”

Stimulating PTSD:

But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops.

Some things are worth celebrating

Spent all evening with some people from my church who have done an incredible amount of (often overwhelmingly frustrating) work trying to fundamentally change the social contract with respect to public transportation in Baton Rouge.

The results are in, and the news is wonderful.

Please consider this. One of the most conservative parts of the United States actually voted to increase its own taxes for something that will massively help the least among us. As Andrew Sullivan says, know hope!

It was an exceedingly rough evening. When one third of the precincts were in we were losing by over two to one. From various statistical standpoints, it seemed clear that the measure would not pass. But by the time two-thirds were in we were losing only by ten percent. We all realized that if the improbable trend continued, the tax would pass. But at the point when the counted votes were 55.6% against the tax, a local political guru and radio host officially called it as lost and one of the local T.V. stations ran with that.

At the end of the get-together we just made a toast and prayed. There was nothing else to do at that point, and we just hoped beyond hope that the T.V. stations had it wrong. Now, two hours later, we see that they did.

Very nice Gutting NY Times piece on the Sermon on the Mount

Man it's so nice to have Gary Gutting's gentle meditations in the Stone.

Gutting's piece on the Sermon on the Mount today is HERE (reset your cookies by hitting "Clear Recent History" if the paywall blocks you). Gutting concludes:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.  To profit from its wisdom we need to understand it through traditions of thought and practice within or informed by Christianity.  This does not require membership in any particular church, but it does require immersion in the culture and history of the Christian world.   In this sense, to forget the church is to forget Jesus.

While I agree with Gutting, not just with respect to the Sermon on the Mount (about which he has many interesting particular things to say) but to approaching scripture as a whole, as a liberal Protestant I do feel the need to protest just a little bit. For us, Matthew 25 is absolutely canonical.

Breivik's political physiology practices

In describing the Columbine killers in Political Affect I looked at their ability to handle the bodily intensity of their actions. The problem they faced was overcoming the wide-spread inhibition on cold-blooded killing (as opposed to berserker rage or fugue state killing) [link to draft version here]. One of the problems in using the Columbine massacre for a case study was the suicide of killers, preventing us from hearing what they had to say about the experience. 

Anders Breivik's trial testimony (see here for previous posts on the case) provides fascinating insights into his preparation for and ability to withstand the intensity of his acts (the commentary by the reporters also is important for detailing how difficult it is for the other people in the courtroom to hear the testimony). I call this negotiation of intensity "political physiology" because it involves finding ways to allow a political action that normal physiology prevents (by triggering inhibitions, as in this account of Brevik's testimony: "I thought about it for 1 minute. Whole body resisted. Felt like a year. 100 voices in head saying STOP." Note the resistance of the "body" as well as the psychological aspects of "voices in head"). 

[UPDATE, 20 April 4:10 pm CDT: See here for more traditionally "cognitive" training Breivik did, using Call of Duty first-person shooter game for practice in "target acquisition." Of course there's a heavy affective component here too, but that's not dealt with so much in the article.]

Below the fold are more excerpts from the article emphasizing the dissociative and emotion-deadening political physiology practices Breivik performed, both before and during the events: 

An exciting new venture: the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is a recent initiative founded by an interdisciplinary collective of graduate students at Columbia University.  The Institute provides liberal arts educational opportunities to the local community.  In January, the Institute began offering classes to the public, as well as a Podcast series, a blog, and a journal, and they are in the midst of their first fundraising campaign in support of their ~Archive project.  Information about the fundraising campaign can be found at their Kickstarter page.   

Their mission statement reads: 

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research provides liberal arts educational opportunities to local communities. At the same time, it provides material and intellectual support and space for young scholars to teach, write, research, publish and, put simply, work.

The ideologies of love

(This post is dedicated to Eric and Sarit, who are getting married this weekend, and to my husband and myself, who are celebrating 10 years of marriage today!)

This past week, Ronald de Sousa (Toronto) was delivering a series of lectures on the philosophy of love at Leiden University. The material presented corresponds to the building blocks of the monograph on love he is currently working on. As is well known, Ronnie has made decisive contributions to the philosophy of emotions, in particular in his books The Rationality of Emotions (1987, MIT) and Emotional Truth (2011, OUP). He is now focusing specifically on romantic love – that many-splendored thing – combining elements from philosophy, literature and the neuroscience of love; so there are many reasons to look forward to the end-result, given that this plural, integrative perspective seems to be exactly what is required to make sense of such a rich and complex topic.

Due to other commitments, I could only attend one of the four lectures he delivered; but as many of the points he raised connect nicely with some of my previous posts here at NewAPPS, I figured I might as well write a post on the lecture. The overall thesis of the lecture is that most of our mainstream conceptions of love are ultimately ideologies of the pernicious kind. Ronnie started with the mother of all love ideologies: Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium. According to the myth, human beings used to be somewhat round creatures with eight limbs and two faces, and came in three kinds: male, female and androgynous (which allows the myth to offer an account of sexual orientation as well). They were then chopped in two by a furious Zeus, and thus started to wander around the Earth missing ‘the other half’ of themselves. Aristophanes claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other again, they never want to be separated and feel ‘whole’ again (192c).

Brazilian music on Fridays: Roberto Fonseca

As some readers may recall, sometimes I cheat a bit and post songs that are not strictly speaking Brazilian (such as with a post on Cesária Évora and one on Spinetta). For this week, I was planning on a post on Carmen Miranda (which will still come soon enough!), but then in the train on my way to Groningen I somehow started listening to Roberto Fonseca’s 2007 album Zamazu, and was reminded of how absolutely fantastic the album is. Plus, some of it was recorded in Brazil, with a Brazilian producer and Brazilian musicians, so I guess I’m not cheating too much here…

Roberto Fonseca is one of the most talented Cuban musicians of his generation. As a pianist, for years he accompanied la crème de la crème of Cuban music (e.g. Ibrahim Ferrer) before launching his solo career. I do not know his other solo albums as well, but Zamazu is an absolute masterpiece. My favorite song of the album is ‘Zamazu’ itself, but for some strange reason I could not find it on youtube. So instead here is my second favorite, ‘Clandestinos’; I especially like the low notes at the beginning and the end of the song. I did find a very cool live version of 'Zamazu' though, at the North Sea Jazz Festival here in the Netherlands (can't believe I missed that one!), which you can also find below the fold. I love how the singing accompanies the piano rather than the other way rond!

What Is There For GPOS To Do? A Rorschach Test

Eric’s latest is a little breathless, and I believe that I have made my position clear. So let me just summarize a view, hoping that I am not simply exposing myself to another crosscheck from the Ghentish enforcer.

Here is my general view. (I apologize for my lack of historical erudition, and the resulting lack of nuance in the next few paragraphs.) Way back when, in the 1940s say, there were two major differences between General Philosophy of Science (GPOS) and General Epistemology (GE). The first of these was that GPOS was worried about the relationship between theory and observation (T/O). The second was that GPOS tended to be technical: logical empiricism meant something like what the name suggests. GEists such as the Rodericks–Chisholm and Firth–and Moore didn’t concern themselves with T/O and used ordinary discourse.

It seems to me that GPOS has ceded territory on both fronts.