New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

More on whether great literature makes us better people

The latest The Stone installment is a piece by Gregory Currie (Nottingham) where he examines critically the claim made by several prominent people – he mentions in particular Martha Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge – that reading “great literature make[s] us better”. He points out that in the philosophical debates so far, proponents of this view have presented arguments on how literature and fiction might have this effect, but no compelling evidence to the effect that it does have the purported effect. He adds the parenthetical remark:

 Suppose a schools inspector reported on the efficacy of our education system by listing ways that teachers might be helping students to learn; the inspector would be out of a job pretty soon.

When reading the piece, I was intrigued by the claim that there is no, or hardly any, empirical evidence on the effects of reading literature for moral traits such as empathy, kindness etc. Currie seems correct in noting that authors such as Nussbaum and others coming from the philosophical perspective do not refer to empirical data potentially corroborating the position; but is it true that there are virtually no empirical results on the issue?

The soul of man pictured

Source: Jan Comenius, Orbis pictus
(Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1887).

The illustration above is from Jan Comenius’ celebrated, oft-reprinted school-book. The Orbis sensualium pictus presents, in words and in pictures, “all the fundamental things in the world and all the acts of life”. In pictures because, after all, “in Intellectu autem nihil est, nisi priùs fuerit in Sensu” (a famous Aristotelian slogan). Knowing requires us to exercise our senses, perceiving by their means the differences of things, so as to lay the foundations of wisdom and right action. (Pictures, I should note, were still an expensive novelty, especially in books meant for children. Comenius had to have the Orbis printed in Nuremberg, not in Patak where he was teaching.)

Lichtenstein: 'Landscape with Philosopher'

 

Yesterday I visited the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective at Tate Modern. It is a wonderful exhibition, which clearly reveals that Lichtenstein as an artist went much beyond the (apparently) 'easily digestible' pop-art paintings that he is famous for (especially the ones inspired by comic books). One of the most rewarding parts of the exhibition were the landscapes he painted at the very end of his career, such as this 'Landscape with philosopher', painted the year before he died (1996). It is one of the most poignant, dignifying representations of a philosopher that I've ever seen, and one which I can only hope contains something true about us philosophers.

Some assaying provoked by Coetzee...

My friends, the serious historians of philosophy, often look down at (Analytical or even Continental) work that engages critically with authors from the canonical past; 'as if such classic texts could coherently be criticized from present perspective--we all know that involves vicious anachronism!' Even those employed in Analytical departments tend to prefer contextual understanding and sympathetic exegetical imagination over attempted refutations. (In fairness to the serious historians: they also look down at work that mines the past for useful insights.) These historians say they want to understand the past on its own terms and sometimes they also insist that in doing so we can understand the present. But (with a nod to Nietzsche) my friends are, in fact, quiet undertakers (the brilliant ones) or museum guards (the mediocre ones); they never imagine being a Maharal to the past and make it live.

Will the web transform philosophical praxis? If so, how?

Let's stipulate an expansive notion of 'technology' such that (a) linguistic, mathematical, and logical developments also count as 'technology' and, thus, (b) a lot of philosophical breakthroughs are  preceded by technological ruptures. (Sometimes they redefine philosophy so much that we do not recognize the successor disciplines as "philosophy.") If so, is the web transforming or about to transform philosophical praxis? I use "praxis" to distinguish this question from the one about to what degree professional philosophy is being transformed by the web.

Let me first say what I do not mean with this question. The web *is* transforming philosophical scholarship by facilitating amazing storage & information retrieval (etc.) capacities. I used to spend huge amount of time in libraries (to look at old books and and to scan journals)--now I am genuinely surprised when I enter a library. There are regular on-line/skype seminars on papers, books, topics, etc. The web brings together distributed audiences previously unknown to each other. Blogs have created dedicated intellectual communities, and spawned philosophical movements and catapulted some echo-chambers to professional prominence. (We are probably living in a new golden age of philosophical correspondence--I bet Leibniz would have adored email.) Citation practices are being influenced by blog communities, phil papers, and google.scholar., etc. All of this is swell, but it does not challenge what we mean by "philosophy." (So here I am also ignoring all the exciting ways the web changes how we teach philosophy, and maybe I shouldn't.)

New Disability Icon

Thanks, in part, to the efforts of philosopher Brian Glenney (an expert on the Molyneux question, and the author of a very fine piece of scholarship on Adam Smith), Gordon College introduces a "new icon, a person leaning forward, arm in the air as if to push the wheels." See here for more on this story. [HT Jeroen de Ridder on Facebook.]

Oscar Niemeyer dies at age 104

Oscar Niemeyer, the great Brazilian architect, just passed away at age 104, 10 days short of turning 105. The news has been a bit everywhere, so I suppose most readers will have seen it already, but some will be surprised to hear that he was actually still alive until yesterday. What most people probably do not know is that Niemeyer was not only alive but also kicking: he continued to be productive as an architect all the way until the end of his life. It was particularly remarkable that he continued to get involved in projects whose completion he knew he would not live long enough to see, but this did not deter him. (An uncle of mine was a long-time collaborator of Niemeyer, from whom I heard this and other interesting bits about Niemeyer.)

It is fair to say that Niemeyer was one of the greatest, most influential architects of the 20^th century. He is perhaps best known for his design of the government buildings of Brasilia, the built-from-scratch capital of Brazil inaugurated in 1960, but his projects are everywhere to be seen, mostly in Brazil but also elsewhere. (Check here for a complete list of his works, H/T Luca Baptista.) If one had to use only two words to define Niemeyer’s work, these would be: concrete and curves. He explored like no one else the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete, in particular through curvilinear shapes; see for example the famous Sambadrome arch in Rio de Janeiro (below the fold).

Weekly Philo of Economics: Accountants and Greatness of Soul in Ruskin and Adam Smith (with a PS about Coetzee/Swift)

"[T]he sentiment or affection of the heart, from which any action proceeds, and upon which its whole virtue or vice depends, may be considered under two different aspects, or in two different relations: first, in relation to the cause or object which excites it; and, secondly, in relation to the end which it proposes, or to the effect which it tends to produce: that upon the suitableness or unsuitableness, upon the proportion or disproportion, which the affection seems to bear to the cause or object which excites it, depends the propriety or impropriety, the decency or ungracefulness of the consequent action; n.."--Adam Smith, (The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS) 2.1.Intro.2, 67.)

"Magnanimity: greatness of soul...capacity of heart, the great measuring virtue, which weighs in heavenly balances all that may be given, and all that may be gained"--John Ruskin, (The Political Economy of Art, 81-2).

"[F]itness or propriety of affection can be ascertained or judged of. That precise and distinct measure can be found nowhere but in the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well informed spectator."--Adam Smith, (TMS 7.2.1.49, 294)

One of the least discussed but singularly important aspects of Adam Smith's moral philosophy is that judgments of propriety -- the core Smithian moral judgments --, which from the point of view of a spectator, consists of mentally inspecting, as it were, the proportionality of the two (complex) relata that enter into a cause-effect relation. (Recall here.) One of the relata (the temporally prior cause) is itself a relation between an exciting cause (say, a desire of the person judged), which produces a sentiment of heart (that is, a motive in the person judged), while the other relata (the effect), is (also itself a relation between) the action of the person judged and its contextually or situationally foreseeable effects (that is, consequent to the motive). (See also TMS 1.1.3.6, 18.) According to Smith we paradigmatically judge others and ourselves in particular situations. As Sam Fleischacker first pointed out to me, this brings Smith remarkably close to Samuel Clarke's position (as Smith recognizes--TMS 7.2.1.49, 294 is offered as a correction to Clarke.) Throughout TMS Smith repeatedly insists that judgments of propriety can be "exact."

Are hand axes works of art?

It's hard not to be fascinated by hand axes, those enigmatic guide fossils of the Lower Paleolithic. Hand axes were symmetrical tools produced by diverse species of hominids from about 1.7 million years ago. A small proportion of them are highly symmetrical, finely finished and polished, much beyond what you would expect for purely practical purposes. The beauty of such extreme hand axes has made some people muse whether they could be considered as artworks. For instance, the philosopher of art Gregory Currie describes a British hand axe as follows:

a piece of worked stone, shaped as an elongated tear drop, roughly symmetrical in two dimensions, with a twist to the symmetry which has retained an embedded fossil. In size and shape it would not have been a useful butchery implement, and is worked on to a degree out of proportion to any likely use. While it may be too much to call it an “early work of art,” it is at least suggestive of an aesthetic sensibility (Currie, 2009, 1).

Archaeologists have voiced similar sentiments:

If one stresses aesthetics […] at least a borderline, case of art before modern humans is provided by a tiny proportion of the billions of Acheulean handaxes produced in Africa and, subsequently, Eurasia from about 1.5 million to 35,000 years ago (if the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition is included). An estimated 1 in 100, or perhaps even 1 per 50 (which is an enormous number, given the total amount of handaxes) shows up symmetry and regularity seemingly beyond practical requirements (Corbey, Layton & Tanner, 2008).

So can we go a bit further and argue that these hand axes are, or could be, works of art?

Fatherhood: Familiar, but undefined.

Before my son was born (nearly three years ago) I showed very little interest in children. I was not 'anti-', just indifferent in the way that I am still indifferent about, say, Nascar racing, clubbing, or (I apologize to my academic friends) wine-tasting. On a glorious late afternoon after I got my flu-shoot I was walking along the Brouwersgracht (see here for a picture, but imagine less leaves on the trees), grateful for the lack of rain and thinking about various deadlines. When I walked by a crowded playground (see here, but imagine lots of children), I stopped and looked at the kids absorbed in their play. Before I knew it I was filled with joy, fatigue and innumerable number of other recently familiar feelings. After a moment's immersion in the scene and the accompanying feelings, it occurred to me that some kind of associative mechanism had done its work.

While I have an impossible-to-find publication that argues there are fatal problems in Hume's account of the associative mechanism, I never doubted that we do associate. But this may have been the first time I felt the mechanism's existence as a kind of brute force that could overwhelm a prior disposition otherwise. But this realization did not please me; rather, I was reminded of another fact--I completely lack a vocabulary for the recently familiar feelings that accompany the recurring mixed joy-fatigue state. (Not all of these are joy.) Echoing Socratic midwifery, Hume famously describes the fate of his philosophical works with parent-child metaphors, but it occured to me that many of the  philosophers (e.g., Plato, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume,  Adam Smith, Nietzsche) that I have been thinking about during the last fifteen years, or so, died childless (or at least without acknowledging their children). A few of them had very intense experiences tutoring young men, but their accounts of the passions  do not offer me the concepts to name the feelings. Reading Rawls or other more recent philosophers and economist hasn't helped. Has, say, feminist philosophy made a difference on this score? It ought to, so I would love to hear from informed readers.

Žižek and Kant: on philosophical taboos (or: on the demise of philosophical history)

Slavoj Žižek calls attention to and connects the following two passages in Kant:

A people should not inquire withany practical aim in view into the origin of the supreme authority to which it is subject; that is a subject ought not to rationalize for the sake of action about the origin of this authority, as a right that can still be called into question  with regard to the obedience he owes to it....[this] sets forth an idea as a principle of practical reason: the principle that the presently existing legislative authority ought to be obeyed, whatever its origin. (6: 318-9 and the German).

For a people already subject to civil law these subtle reasonings are altogether pointless and, moreover, threaten a state with danger. It is futile to inquire into the historical documentation [Geschichtsurkunde] of the mechanism of government, that is, one cannot reach back to the time at which civil society began (for savages draw up no record of their submission to law; besides, we can already gather from the nature of uncivilized human beings that they were originally subjected to it by force). But it is punishible to undertake this inquiry with a view to possibly changing by force the constitution that now exists. For this transformation would have to take place by the people acting as a mob, not by legislation. (6:339-40 and the German [The parts in bold are omitted by Žižek (because he is focused on a slightly different question--ES.])

As Žižek notes, Kant legislates a philosophical taboo (recall here.) A people cannot call into question obedience to present (lawful) government. This is not the place to explore  if Kant allows either exceptions to such obedience or  if a government stops being lawful (say because its laws become at odds with itself (recall my recent posts on Smith and Emerson and Thoreau) or  because it has no de facto authority (recall my posts on Hobbes, Hume, Smith) etc.), such that no obedience is warranted anymore. Moreover, I am also going to pretend as if the events of the French Revolution have nothing to do with this doctrine of Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Rather, Kant's taboo limits the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) on practical grounds (if not plain raison d'État). For, history has to stop just where it gets interesting. Moreover, if history is not allowed to tell the origins of (any) us as a political unity, it cannot provide a genuine causal account of our unity and, thus, is incapable of offering full explanations. (It's only when one lowers one's expectation of what a proper causal account is that such history gets allowed back in.) The taboo is especially striking because it goes against the classical ideal that inquiry into politics is among the highest philosophical goods (I'll remain agnostic on what the correct reading of Aristotle is).

Kant's taboo helps us better understand the demise within philosophy (and history) of history as a genuine philosophical enterprise. This has caused a so-called Kuhn-Loss for philosophy: we are incapable of recognizing much of Xenophon,  Polybius, Machiavelli, and, say, Hume's History, as properly philosophical, nor (as I noted recently in response to Hazony's book), the main narrative of The Hebrew Bible.

A puzzle for evolutionary aesthetics: the evolutionary basis for our appreciation of the sublime

Stephen Davies, an insightful philosopher of art (with specialism in music and naturalistic approaches in philosophy of art) has just written a wonderful book, The Artful Species. Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution, forthcoming with OUP. This book presents an evolutionary approach to art behaviors and aesthetic sensibility. What is particularly interesting in this book is that Davies attempts to link approaches in evolutionary aesthetics to more classical approaches in philosophy of art.

For example, the 18th century aestheticians regarded two qualities as primary: the beautiful and the sublime. As Davies notes, evolutionary approaches to art and aesthetics (EAAA) have payed a lot of attention to the former, but almost nothing to the latter. To explain why we find some things beautiful, EAAA examine the fit between properties and our evolved nature. Classic examples can be found in sexual selection theory, where aesthetic appreciation of physical traits is explained in terms of the fact that such traits reliably signal fecundity in potential sexual partners. Evolutionary approaches to landscapes, similarly, propose that we like park-like landscapes that are congenial to hominids, with animals, trees for shelter but still good visibility, and water in proximity (my picture from the beautiful Blenheim palace grounds is an example: these gardens were designed by "Capability" Brown in line with principles that EAAA would predict).

Evolutionary explanations of art can account for why we find this beautiful...

When the Viewer is a Projection of the Artists, and Other Magic Tricks

As recounted here, on Friday my old classmate, painter Harm van den Berg, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, Door Schildersogen (From a Painter's Perspective),  he co-curated at Arti et Amicitae. (It's closing today.) Two out of thirty-two pieces in the show have magic in the title: Roger Cremers' The Magic Lantern.

And Wouter van Riessen's The Magician:

We look anyway!

On Friday my old classmate, painter Harm van den Berg, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, Door Schildersogen (officially translated as From a Painter's Perspective, but I like "Through Painter's Eyes" better),  he co-curated at Arti et Amicitae. (The show includes a painting by him.) The exhibit, which closes soon, presents a painter's selection of thirty-two contemporary painters that work or are trained in the Netherlands.  The exhibit is a self-conscious step away from conceptual art, spectacle, and the recent fascination with disaster tourism (recall here and here). Even Holland's master-disaster-artist-tourist-guide, Ronald Ophuis, is presented with a more standard portrait. (Unsurprisingly, some critics have called the exhibit, which includes a mixture of very abstract and more representational art, "boring.") In this post I focus on two of the cityscape paintings in the exhibit:

Jaring Lokhorst's NYC:

Patricia Spoelder - Flat:

Intuitive musical knowledge: can a performer of early music be largely ignorant of historical practice?

Since about 14 years, I have been playing the Renaissance lute, a 15-stringed pear-shaped instrument of the guitar family. When performing Renaissance music, I have musical intuitions that guide my interpretation. Are these anachronistic western standards I'm imposing on the music, or do I in some sense really have knowledge about how this music is supposed to be performed due to my familarity with it? 

The interesting thing about the lute is that its current practice does not follow continuous, living tradition, but entirely the result of careful and ongoing historical reconstruction. Lutes fell into disuse in the 18th century, and interest for them was only rekindled in the 1960s, as part of a general tendency in musical practice towards historical accuracy. The way lute players position their hands, the playing technique, phrasing and interpretation of the music has been carefully reconstructed, using instruction books, letters, paintings and other sources. The interpretation of the music is particularly challenging: most lute music is written in tablature (of which there are at least 6 standardized notations), which is rather underdetermined - to put it mildly. There are almost no indications of tempo (no metronome indications) or dynamics. It's just the bare notes. As an illustration, here are the opening bars of a piece I'm currently studying, Dowland's Earl of Essex galliard:

Tim Kreider's ode to Ray Bradbury

If apropos anything, someone asks you what side you are on, it is always felicitous to respond, "truth and beauty."

In this respect, I highly recommend Tim Kreider's NY Times tribute to Ray Bradbury HERE (if you are blocked by the pay-wall, just reset your cookies or "Clear Recent History" in Firefox).

When I read Bradbury's books as a young child I had no idea that the stuff of his nightmares were actually coming to pass. Nor could I have realized the extent to which I would later organize my life around fleeing those very things.

Kreider's conclusion is perfect:

I think of Ray Bradbury’s work often these days. I remember “The Murderer” whenever I ask for directions or make a joke to someone who can’t hear me because of her ear buds, when I see two friends standing back-to-back in a crowd yelling “Where are you?” into their phones, or I’m forced to eavesdrop on somebody prattling on Bluetooth in that sanctum sanctorum, the library. I think of “Fahrenheit 451” every time I see a TV screen in an elevator or a taxi or a gas pump or over a urinal. When the entire hellish engine of the media seemed geared toward the concerted goal of forcing me to know, against my will, about a product called “Lady Gaga,” I thought: Denham’s Dentifrice.

It is thanks to Ray Bradbury that I understand this world I grew into for what it is: a dystopian future. And it is thanks to him that we know how to conduct ourselves in such a world: arm yourself with books. Assassinate your television. Go for walks, and talk with your neighbors. Cherish beauty; defend it with your life. Become a Martian.

Also check out the song at right. Bowie understood Ray Bradbury. For all the suffering it entails, it is still infinitely better to be Martian than caveman.

Inconsequential Adornian musings on art

As an undergraduate in São Paulo, I took four courses in aesthetics, but in truth three of them were art history courses (by one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Leon Kossovich). We covered topics such as the tapestry of Siberian nomads and the development of art in the Persian Empire, from the Assyrians all the way to the Sassanids. The only ‘proper’ aesthetics course I took was on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, and for my final essay I drew a comparison between Rousseau and Adorno on their respective criticisms of art. This must have been the last time I thought seriously about aesthetics, and since then, whenever I gave it some more thought, I was still convinced (and still am) that Adorno had hit the nail on the head with his concept of the paradox of objectification of artistic expression in (modern) art.

First part of fantastic Critchley piece on Philip K. Dick

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.

Aion and Aeon (Flux), or, the work of association

From a FB post by Jason Read (he of the great blog and meme) comes news of a documentary film on a sci-fi film script (UIQ: Universe Infra-Quark) that Félix Guattari had worked on. The last line of the description of the film is not a bad formula for what Deleuze calls Aion in Logic of Sense: "[Silvia] Maglioni & [Graeme] Thomson aim to isolate the singularity of UIQ in the virtual dimension of what it might have been and what it may yet become." In my caffeinated brain, Aeon Flux popped up, my nominee for best bad sci-fi film evah! Your nominees for that category?

Philosopher, Steff Rocknak, Awarded Prestiguous Sculpture Commission in Boston

Congratulations to Stefanie Rocknak, a distinguished Hume scholar -- not to mention a most underrated -- and professional sculptor! Rocknak has been selected to create a statue to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe in Boston, the city of Poe's birth. See for more details, here.

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.

Marvels past

Source: William Miller Photography.

Cutting-edge technologies provide apt objects for nostalgia. Their time is brief, their promise of a dust-free, odor-free, worry-free future so quickly fades that one hardly has time to notice, or to resent, the hyperbole. The Polaroid process was once a marvel—it still is, really: pictures in a instant, film that develops itself, yielding, in just seconds not days, the image of your loved ones or of the natural wonders you think you’d like to be reminded of someday.

But sometimes you pulled the layers apart too soon. Or you kept the film too long. The chemicals did their work, regardless. William Miller (via La Boîte verte) has collected “Ruined Polaroids” with striking results. Some, like this one, look like Abstract Expressionist paintings, others like the remains of mysterious disasters or the surfaces of faroff moons.

Miller has also published striking photographs of the polluted waters of the Gowanus Canal. See his weblog for more.

You can still buy a Polaroid Instant Camera. “Instant is back!” says the company’s website.

Artists and philosophers in the society of the spectacle

In commenting on a recent book review, I argued that some art can be unjust (in the way that disaster tourism is unjust). I did so because we philosophers should not conspire with artists that want to lower the stakes in art, or (as I argued here) in philosophy. The very practice of a search after an extensional definition of mere art (in the absence of a claim about good or unjust art) trivializes how we ought to think about art and philosophical reflection on it. Some aesthetics professors chided me unconvincingly (because they are unwilling to question their practice), but here I focus on the satirical, critical response from the Dutch novelist, Arnon Grunberg (here and here; in his blog he reminds me that I was in the audience at a 2008 public lecture of his when he compared some art to disaster tourism). We have discussed these issues on our blogs. Now, Grunberg responds as follows:

"Who isn’t a factory worker in the society of the spectacle? I’m very much aware of the fact that much art that claims to criticize the system, that sells itself as being critical, is in fact just one of the pillars supporting the system.

The artist in our societies (the West) is a conformist out of necessity and by temperament. He is too much dependent on an audience to not know what conformism is all about. He serves the powers that be with enthusiasm, especially when the artist claims to be an idealist is my experience...

Introducing the term “unjust art” is a standing invitation to censorship that we don’t need and that is not going to solve anything.

And keep in mind that the censor is very much a factory worker in the society of the spectacle as well."

Philosophers as Performance Artists

My musings on James Young's review of a recent book by Lehrer, prompted a useful discussion here on NewAPPS, but it also provoked a response from the widely translated and very successful Dutch novelist, Arnon Grunberg; he rightly discerned that my view demands that gatekeepers of art do their jobs. (How could I think otherwise with the name "Schliesser?") But here I want to focus on the final paragraphs of his piece:

"It’s even possible that we are pieces of art without knowing it.

Mr. Schliesser is a philosopher, and a gem of a human being for that matter, but to me he is also a piece of art. Whether he is a good, a mediocre or bad piece of art is not that important. I, for one, would like to buy him and put him on my desk, that’s how much I like him as a piece of art.

One of my goals in life is to set up an exhibition in an important and pleasant museum where you can meet the philosopher as a performance artist."

On dismissive reviews (updated)

I have been mulling a very smug, dismissive review of a recent book by Keith Lehrer. The review is clearly (and probably rightly) annoyed that Lehrer does not engage with recent scholarship in aesthetics. This kind of calling out is necessary function of reviews. (We need a lot more of it. See here for a great instance.) I also am not against folk using terms from the philosophical lexicon correctly in print. (I am one of those vain morons that is proud to have contributed an entry!)

I have never been a fan of Lehrer's philosophizing, so what follows is not particularly motivated by admiration for Lehrer. I am also no fan of his painting, which fits the definition of kitsch without somehow being an ironic statement on my bourgeois taste. I just find the review deeply problematic; I am not sure I have put my finger on the problem, so what follows is still tentative.

On writing a love poem

"One of the best ways to write a love poem, it turns out, is to insist that this is not what you are doing. And then to do it anyway." (More here.)

HowTheLightGetsIn

This looks like a most enjoyable way to spend a few days in late May in Hay on Wye.

Dredge: new frontiers

Some of the largest structures built by humans are invisible or go largely unnoticed. The shorelines around big cities like New York have been almost completely subordinated to the needs and wants of their inhabitants. Dredging plays a large role in the building of artificial boundaries between land and sea. BLDGBLOG, a must-read for anyone interested in architecture, reports on an exhibit by the Dredge Research Collective.

The Dredge Cycle is landscape architecture at a monumental scale, carving the coastlines and waterways of continents according to a mixture of industrial need and unintended consequences. Thus far, dredge has remained the domain of logistics, industry, and engineering, a soft successor to the elevated freeway interchanges and massive dams that captured the infrastructural imagination of the previous century.

Weekly Philo of economics: Dragons live forever

[This post is dedicated to Scaliger, for whom Mary Trivers lives forever.]

"A dragon lives forever but not so little boys/Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys./One grey night it happened, Jackie paper came no more/And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar./ His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain/Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane./Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,/ So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave..."

 

The Fibonacci sequence, plant growth, and Vi Hart

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

The Fibonacci numbers are those in the following sequence of integers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 etc. By definition, the first two numbers are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The sequence is named after Fibonacci, aka Leonardo of Pisa, who introduced the sequence (known already in Indian mathematics) to Western audiences in his famous book Liber Abaci (1202) – which, by the way, is also one of the main sources for the dissemination of Hindu-Arabic numerals in Europe, no less. (Fibonacci had learned ‘Eastern’ mathematics while studying to become a merchant in North Africa -- see an earlier post on the importation of Indian and Arabic mathematics into Europe through a sub-scientific, merchant tradition.)