New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Relativisim, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

By: Leigh M. Johnson

If you haven't already, you should read yesterday's Stone article in the NYT by Justin McBrayer entitled "Why Our Children Don't Believe There Are Moral Facts." There, McBrayer bemoans the ubiquity of a certain configuration of the difference between "fact" and "opinion" assumed in most pre-college educational instruction (and, not insignificantly, endorsed by the Common Core curriculum). The basic presumption is that all value claims-- those that involve judgments of good and bad, right and wrong, better and worse-- are by definition "opinions" because they refer to what one "believes," in contradistinction to "facts," which are provable or disprovable, i.e., True or False.  The consequence of this sort of instruction, McBrayer argues, is that our students come to us (post-secondary educators) not believing in moral facts, predisposed to reject moral realism out of hand. Though I may not be as quick to embrace the hard version of moral realism that McBrayer seems to advocate, I am deeply sympathetic with his concern.  In my experience, students tend to be (what I have dubbed elsewhere on my own blog) "lazy relativists." It isn't the case, I find, that students do not believe their moral judgments are true--far from it, in fact-- but rather that they've been trained to concede that the truth of value judgments, qua "beliefs," is not demonstrable or provable.  What is worse, in my view, they've also been socially- and institutionally-conditioned to think that even attempting to demonstrate/prove/argue that their moral judgments are True-- and, correspondingly, that the opposite of their judgments are False-- is trés gauche at best and, at worst, unforgivably impolitic.

Anonymous reviewing is not enough to counter implicit bias, so what can we do to mitigate it?

This article in Aesthetics for Birds has some interesting statistics on the percentage of papers authored or co-authored by women and minorities in the top print aesthetics journals: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics. About 20% of articles in these journals are written by women in the period from 2010 onwards. When we look at memberships of professional aesthetics organizations, the percentage of female aestheticians is about 32%. So that means women are underrepresented in JAAC and BJA. What can account for this disparity? JAAC keeps a record of gender and geographic location of submissions.

Sherri Irvin finds "It is notable that over the past three years, women authors have submitted to JAAC at a rate substantially higher than the rate at which they are published in JAAC from 2010-2014, and closer to the proportion of women members in the ASA. During 2 of the last 3 years, the acceptance rate for women has been lower than for men. Though the differences seem small (only 2-3 percentage points), another way of putting them is that in 2012-3, men were 21.4% more likely than women to have their manuscripts accepted, while in 2013-4, they were 11.6% more likely." She also writes "US submissions tend to be accepted at a rate slightly over 20%, while submissions from non-English-speaking countries tend to be accepted at far lower rates".

JAAC practices double-anonymous refereeing. I am in the statistics, since I've co-authored an article that was published in JAAC in 2011. My co-author and I were very pleased with thoroughness of our reviewer, who is one of the few experts on the aesthetics of paleolithic art. We could guess who he was, and it turned out (as he later communicated with us) he also had an inkling as to who we were. Aesthetics is a small world. The only time I reviewed for JAAC I didn't know who the author was, so I believe I reached a verdict that was unsullied by considerations of the author's identity. But was it? Thoughts about the identity of an author can play a role in one's decision, even if you don't want to, this is after all how implicit bias works.

Really just a wonderful performance, and a bit about teaching

Georgetown, like many Jesuit schools, requires philosophy of all undergrads - two courses.  Since most of these students are not going to go on in philosophy, some of us spend a fair bit of time reflecting on what best to aim for in such a class. I don't really think the first steps of professional training are the goal - and so try more to instill habits of philosophical reflection - the examined life - that might be useful to them in the future. As part of this, a few of us have tried to tailor courses to particular groups of students. For myself, this has meant a philosophy of music course - now in its second iteration. I'm not any kind of expert in the area, but I know a bit of philosophy, have a history in music -I was an orchestral trumpet player, was one course short of a music performance major, and have performed with everything from brass quintets to rock bands to professional orchestras - and I'm a thoughtful guy, so I figured I could fake it. 

For the first assignment in this course, I ask them to select a performance of a piece of music to analyze in Aristotelian terms - a piece that generates an understanding conducive collective emotional reaction in the audience by way of the integration of all the elements, in such a way that nothing is superfluous.  

Well, really I have nothing to say in this post.  I just wanted to offer you this performance, by one GU student, that was selected by another as the topic of his analysis for the assignment.  

Waves of Mind-Wandering in Live Performances

I'm thinking (again) about beeping people during aesthetic experiences. The idea is this. Someone is reading a story, or watching a play, or listening to music. She has been told in advance that a beep will sound at some unexpected time, and when the beep sounds, she is to immediately stop attending to the book, play, or whatever, and note what was in her stream of experience at the last undisturbed moment before the beep, as best she can tell. (See Hurlburt 2011 for extensive discussion of such "experience sampling" methods.)

I've posted about this issue elsewhere; and although professional philosophy talks aren't paradigmatic examples of aesthetic performances, I have beeped people during some of my talks. One striking result: People spend lots of time thinking about things other than the explicit content of the performance -- for example, thinking instead about needing to go to the bathroom, or a sports bet they just won, or the weird color of an advertising flyer. And I'd bet Nutcracker audiences are similarly scatterbrained. (See also Schooler, Reichle, and Halpern 2004; Schubert, Vincs, and Stevens 2013.)
(image source: *)

Why do the inauthentic features of forgeries escape us, whereas it seems so easy to see they were forgeries afterwards?

I was looking for the source of the following picture (see below), to find out more about it.  The picture seems, to the casual observer, to be an early modern engraving, perhaps from Germany or the Low Countries. It shows a man who looks out of the confines of his world (the edge of the firmament), to look beyond, a nice illustration of the work of the metaphysician, theologian or scientist. However, a bit of poking around on the internet reveals that the engraving is probably a forgery - i.e., a late 19th century wood engraving that is deliberately made to resemble an early modern drawing. It appears first in Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire. The engraving was probably made on commission or by Flammarion himself to accompany the following text “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch…” This text appears in the first edition of L’atmosphère but the engraving only appeared in the second edition.

Now that I look at it again, I wonder how I could ever have believed this to be an authentic early modern illustration. The borders, for instance, do not look authentic. The anatomy and pose of the man are unusual for 16th century iconography. It seems that artistic forgeries, when they are believed to be genuine, look genuine. Once we know, however, that they are forgeries, the many inauthentic elements seem pretty obvious: how could past art critics have been fooled? 

 

Deathbed philosophy

Last night I heard the Vertavo Quartet perform Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C♯ minor, Op. 131 in de Kleine Zaal of de Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. On his deathbed, Schubert had this piece performed. [Schubert was, in fact, no stranger to composing a haunting  C-minor quartet (unfinished).]

Whatever Schubert intended with this request, I cannot imagine a greater compliment from one composer to another.

Let's leave aside, those professional philosophers for whom philosophy is primarily a job or an interesting diversion from which one can 'retire.' Let's imagine, rather, those ('the infected philosophers') for whom philosophy is a necessity. Such an infected philosopher would keep at philosophy to the very end. Yet, on her deathbed, would she turn to a work by somebody else (e.g., as Hume did with Lucian), would she keep teaching (Socrates), would she, in fact, try to complete her last work(s), would she seek consolation, or would she ask to re-read or hear one of her own results/works?

On Poetry, Philosophy, and Politics and the "Holocaust"

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt--Celan.

Yesterday, I posted a very lengthy (by our blogging standards) piece about the role(s) the purported contrast between understanding and explaining the Holocaust can play in the arts, ethics, and social science. It was framed as a response to a two-part review by Mark Lilla. I was careful not to motivate my disagreement with Lilla in political terms. In fact, I avoid mention of "politics," "Israel," "evil," "Hitler," (etc). Interestingly enough, three out of four published comments on the piece thus far (two by fellow NewAPPSies),* focus on political abuses of the Holocaust in Israel or Stateside (or elsewhere); these comments seem to target primarily what they take to be the political and legal implications of Lilla's position.

On the "inexplicability" of the Holocaust

Every advance in research that adds a new complication to our understanding of what happened on the Nazi side, or on the victims’, can potentially threaten our moral clarity about why it happened, obscuring the reality and fundamental inexplicability of anti-Semitic eliminationism.--Mark Lilla, NYRB, 21 November.

In a two-part article, which is a review of two films and some books, Mark Lilla presents us two competing approaches to the Holocaust: one -- represented by the author Hannah Arendt -- attempts "to find a schema that would render the horror comprehensible and make judgment possible;" the other -- represented by the film-maker Claude Lanzmann prior to the film (The Last of the Unjust) under review -- embraces a "refusal to understand." Without wishing to obscure the differences between Arendt and Lanzmann as presented by Lilla, the point of aiming and obtaining understanding, or not, is in some sense moral on their views. (I return to this below.)

As the passage above reveals, Lilla's position also embraces the "fundamental inexplicability," of "anti-Semitic eliminationism" by which he appears to mean the Holocaust of the Jews.* But in Lilla's approach the inexplicable has no stated moral purpose. In fact, in the passage above, Lilla offers us an asymmetry in the possible consequences of obtaining new facts, insights, even "understanding" of a historical event: (i) in the moral sphere they can undermine (or fortify) "moral" judgment; (ii) in the epistemic sphere, they leave untouched what is fundamentally inexplicable. To be sure, in the moral realm certain forms of historical explanation are presupposed; in particular, one needs a functional or teleological account why something happened before one can obtain "moral clarity" or not.  But Lilla's position also involves the further claim that even with some such "understanding," an event can  remain fundamentally inexplicable. We are not told much about what remains elusive such that a functionally or schematically understood event is still not just a mystery, but at bottom a mystery.

On angry and lovable old men

One day is equal to every day [Unus dies par omni est.]--Heraclitus, the obscure.

Almost nothing so boring as old people speaking to young people about old age and general decay. Yet, this is the 'hook' of Seneca's twelfth Letter, in which he goes out of his way to present himself as an angry old man who sees decay and death everywhere--nothing like the image of Stoic, apathetic wisdom one might expect. More important, he shows the persona 'Seneca' failing at enjoying the available life's variety of pleasures (marked by different Latin words, e.g, delectavit, voluptatis, iucundissima, etc). It might be the case that the old cannot really avoid looking death in the face, but it is not obvious that we all must fundamentally do so, especially because Seneca himself seems to make a hash of it. While the letter is nominally addressed to the young Lucilus, it is really an admonition to himself to embrace and love [complectamur...et amemus] old age. In recounting his foibles (and other aged men), he wishes to become a true friend of himself such that he is capable of moderated love (sans madness) (recall Letter 9).

It is, after all, not shameful [inprobe] to hope for another day, every day, in old and young alike. (In recounting his foibles, Seneca does not name his more shameful desires.) One might think such lack of shame, which is constituted by the recognition of a binding norm one fails to live up to,* is an instance of living without necessity. But that can't be quite right because in context Seneca treats the denial of necessity as equal to the possibility of ending one's life rather than the hope for another day. 

The Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Disasters

[this post originally appeared in Aesthetics for Birds as a guest post] Hayao Miyazaki's animation movie Ponyo features a tsunami. The tsunami is shown in its full threatening and destructive power, yet is rendered with a great aesthetic sensibility. On several occasions, Miyazaki expressed his aesthetic delight in natural disasters, and defended it as follows:

There are many typhoons and earthquakes in Japan. There is no point in portraying these natural disasters as evil events. They are one of the givens in the world in which we live. I am always moved when I visit Venice to see that in this city which is sinking into the sea, people carry on living regardless. It is one of the givens of their life. In the same way people in Japan have a different perception of natural disasters.

Miyazaki is not the only artist to find inspiration in natural disasters. William Turner depicted with gusto a hapless steamboat, struggling in a snowstorm. That we find aesthetic delight in natural disasters is puzzling. Why do we sometimes delight in natural disasters? And is it morally appropriate to do so? These questions have not often been addressed because both aesthetics and psychology have tended to focus on positive and pleasurable aesthetic properties of nature, such as the delicacy of a flower, the slow twirling of autumn leaves, the majesty of a waterfall. But we are not only be moved by nature (as Noël Carroll describes our intuitive and visceral response to nature) in its delicate, pretty form, but also in its destructive form.

Seneca and Wallace Stevens on Solitude

A naturall foole that could never learn by heart the order of numerall words, as One, Two, and Three, may observe every stroak of the Clock, and nod to it, or say one, one, one; but can never know what houre it strikes...Nor is it possible without Letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or (unless his memory be hurt by disease, or ill constitution of organs) excellently foolish. For words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the mony of fooles...one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice; one Prodigality, what another Magnanimity...such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not.--Leviathan, 1.4

Night nursed not him in whose dark mind
 The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,
 Making harsh torment of the solitude.

 The walker in the moonlight walked alone,
 And in his heart his disbelief lay cold.--Wallace Stevens.

Despite the helpful reminder of 3AM Magazine, we at NewAPPS failed to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium. Seneca's mysterious, terse (under 325 words) tenth Letter, brought me back to Stevens' early poetry. Stevens talks of the (nightly) "torment of solitude," faced by the poetic mind (who happens to be a religious skeptic). Yet, Seneca seems to suggest that some of the very best people should seek solitude; in particular they should living with their conscience [conscientia] (recall eight letter). But presumably Stevens's poetic disbeliever is expressing his conscience faitfully.

Marc Hauser's Second Chance

One annoying feature of re-reading other people's scholarship, is the possibility of discovering that one's  treasured ideas may well be anticipated by others. Memory and self-deception can be funny like that. So, it's probably not uncommon that folk really fail to attribute to others what is due to them without realizing they are in the wrong. Even when the mistakes are honest, they still involve injustices, and these may be quite large given that they may, say, reinforce gender related unfairness,  too. Such injustices are not easy to excuse or forgive when one feels that one's work or presence has been silenced or unfairly ignored. Even so, we try to cope with this kind of injustice. Yet, faking data or copying (and pasting) texts without attribution is legitimately an unpardonable sin in the Academy, especially if it is part of a pattern of such (plagiarism/faking) cases. One might be willing to give a student a second chance, but recoil from letting a confirmed fraudulent senior scholar back into the fold. Paradoxically many of us treat such cases as worse sin than many crimes on the 'outside.' (Coetzee's Disgrace reflects on this.)

It is, thus, understandable that the good folk at Retractionwatch react with dismay that prominent scholars, including philosophy's very own Philip Pettit, are willing to endorse Marc Hauser's forthcoming book, Evilicious. What really rankles Retractionwatch is that Hauser has not  owned up to his record of misconduct and "only acknowledged “mistakes.”" (As they write: "But we do prefer when those given a second chance acknowledge that they did something wrong. That might start with noting a retraction, instead of continuing to list the retracted paper among your publications.")

Mentors, Anxiety, and Boy-Wonders...

But then this "as if" proposition raises the question, psychoanalytically speaking, of latent content...He ends up rather where some began, resting the notion of analyticity on the notion of possible worlds. His contentment with this disposition of the analyticity problem makes one wonder, after all, how it could have been much of a motive for his study of convention.--Quine, "Foreword" to David Lewis Convention.

A few weeks ago I posted about boy-wonders. (Recall I tried to give it a fairly precise characterization.) While various institutional features of the phenomenon were discussed in my post and subequent discussion, the psycho-dynamic dimension was largely ignored. (Part of me suspects that's because these days it is thought very bad form to explain behavior with even a mere allusion to Freud among Anglophone philosophers.) But as it happens I was mulling Quine's curious foreword (partially quoted above) on the same day as I read the following unrelated book-review:

The relation between a literary father and a literary heir is always one of mutual idealization. Similar cross-idealizations of éminence terrible and enfant gris occur in other fields and in both sexes. The most common variety seems to be prompted by a young person’s wish to find a mentor, a word that points directly to the fantasy behind the wish. In the Odyssey, the Ithacan elder Mentor is not a mentor at all; the protective guide who takes Telemakhos in hand is Athena disguised as Mentor, a divinity filling a role that no ordinary mortal could manage.

Not all celebrated writers attract idealizing literary children. Those who do seem to have an unusually sharp divide between their public image and their private self...

What the literary father seems to find in an ideal son is an image of his younger self as it might have been without its weakness and doubt....What the literary son seems to find in an ideal father is an image of what he might become if he could overturn the barriers left inside him by his real father. Each hopes to find in the other a relief from anxiety that no idealizing fantasy can give.---Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books (reviewing Greg Bellow's Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir. [Sadly no mention of Fenelon (neither does English Wikipedia entry on mentor, although the Dutch version does--ES.)]

'Creep' turns 21

The Rolling Stone Twitter feed informs me that ‘Creep’, the first single by one of the greatest bands of all times, Radiohead, was released exactly 21 years ago. At first unsuccessful as a single, it then attracted more attention when Radiohead’s first album came out (Pablo Honey) in 1993. It has since become one of the greatest classics of the 1990s, in particular receiving countless cover versions, as it allows for an astonishing number of interpretations, ranging from ethereal to hard-core, from pop to experimental. (Everyone can recognize themselves in the lyrics, as everyone has had days of feeling like a creep/weirdo who doesn’t belong here.) In retrospect, it may well have been the first indie song to have become mainstream, even more than any of the Nirvana tracks of roughly the same period.

Radiohead has since notoriously taken up a more experimental approach (especially since the turning point that was Ok, Computer in 1997), and some of their early music seems quite far removed from what they have done since. (Heads-up for my two favorite songs from their latest album, The King of Limbs (2011): 'Codex' and 'Separator'.) Still, I’m a big fan of each of their albums, including The Bends (1995), which some current fans look down upon, but which has great tracks such as ‘High and dry’. Looking back to 21 years ago, we can only conclude that the promise of what was to come is already contained in ‘Creep’, which remains one of the best songs of all times IMHO. (In turn, some of the chord progression seems to have been 'borrowed' from ‘The air that I breath’ by The Hollies, but there’s really no comparison here between the ‘original’ and what Radiohead did with ‘Creep’…)

Popper, Middlemarch and falsifiability

Victor Gijsbers has a nice analysis of this passage:

Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.

Lehrer interviewed.

New blog, Aesthetics for Birds, has a nice interview with Keith Lehrer, although I would have liked to see a bit more critical engagement on the very notion of 'experience' that Lehrer relies on throughout the discussion (e.g, "The experience fills in the meaning of my words, I hope, adding something beyond linguistic meaning.").

A New Album (*Interlocuter*) for Charity by The Monads!

Our friends, The 21_st Century Monads, write:

So what we are going to do is this. You can purchase the uncompressed .wav files by taking the following steps. First, make a donation to the charity of your choice in the amount that you think is appropriate.  There is no minimum donation, but we of course recommend that you be generous!  

Second, send an email to the following email address:

[email protected]

In this email, simply tell us that you have made a charitable donation; you don’t need to tell us where if you don’t want to.  We’d appreciate if you’d tell us the amount donated since we would like to know how much money has been raised in this fashion. However, we won’t require that you do this.  There is no minimum amount you must donate (and obviously no maximum amount either).  We are simply going to take your word that you have made a donation.

After you have sent the email, you will receive an email in response that will contain a link directing you where to download a .zip file that contains all the songs.   Also included in this package will be liner notes, a .pdf with a printable cd-booklet, and bonus remixes of four of the songs.

No money needs to go into our pockets even temporarily and there are no overhead costs.   Every cent of every dollar you donate will go straight to the charity of your choice, and in return you get the full album immediately in a higher-resolution format.   We aren't trying to make money with this endeavor -- we are trying to do a little good for others.

Philosophy Haikus

The worlds of Lewis   

though merely possible

contain flesh and blood
  
More here.

On Leo Strauss and the Philosophers

"Strauss' interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end." M.F. Burnyeat.

Although we philosophers are thought of as a cerebral bunch, our loathings can be pretty intense. I need not mention the hundred-year, fraternal civil war, which around here we label a 'divide,' between analytic and continental philosophy; we are not known for our fondness for what passes as 'theory' among literature and cultural studies departments (and I have experienced plenty of uncivil behavior from folk in, say, science studies in return).  But when professional philosophers are not just puzzled by the Straussians they encounter, we reserve a special kind of bile and invective against them, especially as Strauss's students found their ways into advising Goldwater and Reagan (and beyond); once I was halted in my invective against Wolfowitz by (The University of Chicago's) Ralph Lerner's, 'Paul once sat in that chair, and was no less passionate than you.' Undoubtedly a few of us were at least mildly irritated by reading Steven Smith's very respectful review of books on the legacy of Strauss in a recent New York Times Book Review--"doesn't he know that 'Strauss is not a Philosopher!'"?

In his famous essay, Burnyeat (a former teacher) overreached.  Invoking  "ordinary scholarship," Burnyeat treats Plato (surprisingly Popperian) as a "radical utopian," primarily relevant for opening up "a reasoned debate on the nature and practicality of a  just society" (emphasis in Burnyeat). Given that Burnyeat was in no sense an ordinary scholar, who also searchingly pioneered the historiographical construction of the classics, these lines are painful read; Burnyeat reduces the significance of Plato's political philosophy to being a forerunner of Rawls. Those of us living in the shadow of the surveillance state may find Strauss' "anti-Utopian teaching" ("invented" or not) about Plato a useful touch-stone, sometimes. For in Republic and Laws surveillance are ever-present and its limits thematized. The cause of Burnyeat's overreach is that Plato's Laws has always been a blind-spot to him (and until recently ordinary analytic scholarship).

At some level, Burnyeat must have known he overreached, because he allowed the original and reprinted version of the piece to have a clear reference to a famous short story by Oscar Wilde, -- which may be read as an allegory on philosophical madness [Murchison is introduced as a truth-teller] ! -- that ends with that enigmatic "I wonder."

On optimal trouser rolling strategies

One of the saddest and scariest things about human beings is how we can work so damned hard for year after year and then derive so little satisfaction when things actually come to fruition. I don't know how ubiquitous this is, but it is somewhat pronounced both in academia and the music world, two fields that typically require a nauseating amount of effort for years on end just to make a bare living.

Consider music. There's an overwhelmingly affecting point in the recent Ramones documentary where the original bassist and songwriter (who later died of a heroin overdose) is reflecting on his bulimia and massive intake of anti-anxiety medication; he says something to the effect of "All my dreams came true. Why can't I be happy?" This isn't just rock music either. There is a small literature suggesting that successful orchestra musicians (with a job market very similar to academia) have pretty low job satisfaction when compared to other fields.

In academia I've noticed in particular two kinds of virulently unhappy successful people. The first is the person who just got tenure and all of the sudden faces an overwhelming existential crises, analogous to when deep sea divers come up too fast and their bodies can't handle the depressurization. That is, at every point prior to tenure, from gradeschool through being an Assistant Professor, there is ususally a ton of outside pressure to do specific tasks to get to the next point. And some people who thrive when being told what to do find it horrifying to be any other way. 

This is a weird thing, because the pressure of going through tenure review is itself so harsh. I know plenty of people who actually went on prescription happy pills for the first time in their life during tenure review, only to get off them after the tenure was resolved and move on unscathed. But two people I cherish did just fine during the tenure review only to completely fall apart afterwards. One was institutionalized and is no longer an academic and the other is dead. 

Free Improv and the Environment: listening, but also hearing

[This is guest post by Alistair Isaac, who is about to join the Edinburgh department. Recall Mohan's post.--ES]

I'm a long-time fan of a form of music one might call "free improv": improvised sound unconstrained by any traditional melodic or harmonic structure (a movement which grew out of free jazz on the one hand and minimalism and punk on the other—note this usage is more restrictive than wikipedia's definition). One thing about this music which has puzzled me is the large gap between the excitement of experiencing it live and the stillborn dullness of most of it as recorded—especially true of the more minimal varieties, e.g. Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Keith Rowe, or Axel Dörner.

Here I draw attention to one relevant factor: the shared experience within a single sonic environment possible only during live performance. When performer and audience are listening to the same sounds, the performer's improvised response can illustrate how she heard those sounds, thereby retroactively affecting the audience member's own experience in the moment. But this dynamic interaction also defeats the possibility of capturing that moment with any mechanical recording device. Consider for example this instance by the Boston-based duo Nmperign:

Materiality and creativity

William Gibson in The Paris Review: 

I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

Evelyn Fox Keller in The Century of the Gene: 

[One might] consider the mature mRNA transcript formed after editing and splicing to be the “true” gene. But if we take this option (as molecular biologists often do), a different problem arises, for such genes exist in the newly formed zygote only as possibilities, designated only after the fact. A musical analogy might be helpful here: the problem is not only that the music inscribed in the score does not exist until it is played, but that the players rewrite the score (the mRNA transcript) in their very execution of it. (63)

Aesthetics for Birds guest blogger series

The Aesthetics for Birds blog (run by Christy Mag Uidhir; slogan derived from Barnett Newman's dictum that "aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds") begins its guest blogger series with Jesse Prinz's post, "Wonder Works: Renovating Romanticism About Art": 

Among the many divides one can find among competing theories of art, none is wider and more ideologically entrenched than the gulf between experiential theories and various forms of institutionalism.  Experiential theories say that something counts as art in virtue of the kind of experience it affords, such as a distinctive emotional state.  Institutional theories emphasize the context of presentation--to a first approximation, something becomes art on this view when it is places in a gallery, or the equivalent.  Here I want to suggest, heretically, that the experiential theories are right, but also that they can be reconciled with the institutional approach.

LSU A great place to generate low Erdős–Bacon number?

Cogburn's most recent post made me wonder if LSU is a great place to generate low Erdős–Bacon numbers.

"A person's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that person and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from American actor Kevin Bacon. The lower the number, the closer a person is to Erdős and Bacon, and this reflects a small world phenomenon in academia and entertainment."--Wikipedia. [HT: Wayne Myrvold] So, for example Bertrand Russell's Bacon number is  the result of an appearance in a Bollywood film. 

On Patterns of Exclusion when we focus on "Significant Figures"

In his excellent (because informative, generous, yet critical) review, Nick Wiltsher writes:

Thus, though avowedly not a historian's history, this is still a history of sorts: an unabashed example of great-man historiography, and I emphasise the gendered term here. The 16 selected philosophers are all men, and the four-page index of names includes about a dozen women. It might be that all the significant thinkers in European aesthetics in the last 200 years were men. More likely, it might be that conceptualising a history of anything in terms of 'significant figures' leads us too easily into consideration of canonical males. This may seem a dreary complaint, but it is only dreary because it keeps being made, and it keeps being made because it is important. I am not at all accusing Wicks of sexism or misogyny; rather, the invitation is to consider the possibly deleterious effects of apparently innocent approaches, and the alternative effects a different approach might have yielded...Wicks is quite right to choose the philosophers who fit his thematic focus [i.e., "the socio-political uses to which art and aesthetic theory may be put"--ES], and the book is all the better for having such a focus. The problem comes where Wicks selects thinkers who do not obviously have a great deal to say on the theme, and tries to force them to say something about it....It is almost as if Wicks felt compelled to include chapters on these significant philosophers, and then further compelled to fit them to the theme. Again, he writes well about their ideas, but those ideas seem out of place. Conversely, some of the philosophers Wicks includes bear obvious relevance to his theme, but less obvious relevance to the subject of aesthetics."

Aesthetics blog aims to fly

Aesthetics For Birds announces a whole number of exciting projects, including: (a) new guest-bloggers (including our very own Mohan); (b) interviews with artists; and (c) interviews with philosopher-artists.

And a bit of 4th of July political art

Suheir Hammad

Postcards from Death Row

The art of letter-writing is dead – except in prison.  While people on the outside exchange staccato texts and tweets, people on the inside still compose long letters by hand or on typewriters.  They write with their whole hand, not just with their thumbs. 

We shouldn’t get too misty-eyed about this persistence of a lost art behind bars; after all, it’s a sign of deprivation.  If prisoners had access to cell phones and the internet, they would be tweeting, too – and perhaps their voices would be more difficult to silence. 

And yet, everyday practices such as letter-writing or texting cannot help but shape our Being-in-the-world.  A letter is a material thing: you can hold it in your hands, and you can lose it.  The temporality of letter-writing is much slower than texting; you can’t expect an immediate response, and so there’s more time to reflect on the impact your words might have on the receiver.  If you know that the mail is delivered at a certain time every day, then there’s no point in obsessively checking your inbox.  This might not help to decrease your anxiety, especially if you feel like your life depends upon the response; but it also doesn’t feed an addictive relation to delivery mechanism. 

Somewhere in between the letter and the text message is the humble postcard. 

It Must Give Pleasure

Argument is, of course, the life-blood of professional philosophy. I wouldn't want to do away with argument, or professional philosophy; I am no traitor to my trade! But when I am told -- as is often the case -- that  argument is intrinsic to philosophy, I get rebellious.  Take, for example, this poem:

"To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason." Wallace Stevens

Tattoo as art

Here's an interesting (though somewhat long) article on tattoos as art: 'Will a tattoo ever hang in the Louve?' The article focuses on the recent history of tattoos, mostly in Europe. I was however reminded of the fantastic art history/aesthetics courses I followed with Leon Kossovich back in São Paulo as an undergraduate. We discussed in particular the tattoos on the bodies found in the Pazyryk burials, dating back to the 6th to 3rd centuries BCE. These people were horse-riding Scythian nomads of the Eurasian steppes, and as such, their artistic production consisted predominantly of surfaces and media they could easily carry around: jewelry, tapestry, and of course, body art -- tattoos. (See below the fold for a sample.)