virtual philosopher

Twilight of the You Tube Idol...

There is a nice faked movie sequence of Nietzsche here ...the head movements are a bit of a giveaway...

Tate Modern Course on Louise Bourgeois - Advance Warning

Transformations: Louise Bourgeois’ Art About Life

Led by Nigel Warburton. Venue: Tate Modern.
Monday evenings 19th Nov.- 10th Dec. 2007. Booking details now available from Tate Modern.

This 4-session course investigates Louise Bourgeois’ art from a philosophical angle. Rather than dwelling on art historical connections, participants will have the opportunity to explore and discuss her work through the key themes of Life into Art, the Ambivalent Body, Transforming Pain, and Artistic Style. Bourgeois has declared that her work is about life: this course will provide a framework within which to examine that claim in the presence of the wide range of her art assembled for the major retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern. Each session will focus on a single theme, triggered by Bourgeois work, but will also address wider issues about the nature of art and expression.

the missing posts

I've cut and pasted the eleven recent posts that mysteriously vanished from my weblog below:

11. What am I? How should I live? Virtual Philosophy Again...

In a recent discussion between Susan Greenfield and Ren Reynolds on Radio 4's The World Tonight (linked from here), Susan Greenfield worried that Face Book  and Second Life might lead some impressionable people to a virtual life via avatars etc. that would diminish their interpersonal skills in the real world. This may or may not happen (empirical evidence is needed here, not just hunches). Ren Reynolds stressed the possible complex skills that we can learn in virtual environments. But underlying the whole debate was the question of what the self is and what, if anything, is wrong with someone choosing to live a life in which their interactions are mainly or solely via virtual worlds or social spaces on the internet.

In my experience the internet has made it much easier to maintain real contact with people rather than harder...and for many an internet link up is the start of a real world relationship not the end of it. But this might not always be the case. What wasn't considered was the impact on those who don't develop virtual skills: how will they achieve socially appropriate interaction in the future? They might be the ones left adrift and excluded from all kinds of interaction, like many of the illiterate of today.

10. Pointy-Headed Academic Tries to Come to Terms with Coffee Shop

Stanley Fish has just undermined his credibility completely by pronouncing on Starbucks...read about it here.

9. Stephen Law Attacks Faith Schools Down Under

Stephen Law has let rip against faith schools again, this time while on tour in Australia. You can read his thoughts here. I of course support the general thrust of this.  But I worry that he might be attacking a straw man.  Do faith schools really seek to indoctrinate? If so it is liable to backfire on them. No one likes to be brainwashed...

I found the way religion seeped into my education a significant factor in making me a critical atheist. if someone tells me I have to say 'Amen' then that takes on the force of a paradoxical injunction and results in my silence...and I don't think I'm unique. Perhaps the best way to guarantee critical thought about religion is to exemplify hypocrisy and dogmatism...teaching liberal values may backfire when adolescents are looking for something to react against. They may end up dogmatists. The most dangerous type of religious education could be a liberal one...

8. Has anyone noticed how connected we are getting?

My children take mobile phones, email, personal websites, blogs, social sites, podcasts, the lot for granted and use them with a dexterity that always surprises me. I'm only just coming to terms with the demise of the typewriter... But unlike the typewriter, these other technologies are connecting us to a degree that has never happened before. Perhaps this is a platitude, but I'm struck by how easy it is to exchange ideas, information and phatic noise with a larger number of people than has ever been practicable before.

What is bizarre to me is how slow off the mark philosophers have been in adopting the new media. Most now have websites (these are usually rather dull and only updated every six months or so), a few have weblogs, but, particularly in the UK, the scope for using philosophical audio and video files on the web is huge. Check out the iTunes Philosophy section (within 'Society and Culture') and you'll find more on Zen and Knitting than you will on Philosophy as we know it...The power of the voice in Philosophy is immense. To date only the few have had much access to major philosophers in action, speaking, debating, explaining. With Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and I are providing a series of interviews with top philosophers for general consumption. And I'm slowly podcasting my book Philosophy: The Classics, chapter by chapter...Some US universities are putting out some serious audio-visual philosophy webcasts too...But isn't it time a few more philosophers dusted off their microphones? We could provide an informal university that could surpass any actual university in breadth and quality of presentations...You can check out what is currently available at www.epistemelinks.com and at Ethics Videos Online.

7. Podcast on Rousseau's Social Contract

I've just posted another podcast chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics on www.philclassics.libsyn.com. It's on Rousseau's The Social Contract. You can listen to it streaming here.

6. Denis Dutton on Sloppy Writing and Sloppy Thinking

Philosopher Denis Dutton, editor of the excellent Arts and Letters Daily website who used to run the Bad Writing competition was interviewed for Australia's Radio National station on clarity in writing. You can listen to this streamed here, or read this transcript. He has some interesting things to say about difficult philosophy and difficult writing. He also quotes this amazing piece of obfuscation from Judith Butler as an example of writing that fails to communicate anything whatsoever (except, perhaps, as Dutton suggests, a desire that listeners fall down at her feet):

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways, to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and the rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure, inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony, as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power".

Apparently, when this amazing sentence was held up for ridicule, defenders of Butler claimed that it did mean something, but then proceeded to argue at great length with each other about what it could possibly mean...

Dutton isn't against subjects that require difficult writing - he's spent much of his life reading Kant, Aristotle and Wittgenstein. These are thinkers who are struggling to be clear about subjects at the edge of human understanding. But what upsets him - quite rightly - are those who pretend to be deep by hiding behind obscurity.

For more examples of mangled prose read the Press Release for the Bad Writing Competition 1996-1998.

If you want to know where I stand on this subject, Stephen Law interviewed me on the topic of clarity on his weblog here.

5. Audio interview: Jonthan Wolff on Disadvantage

Jonathan Wolff, author (with Avner de-Shalit) of a new book on the topic discussed disadvantage with me for this interview in the Philosophy Bites podcast series.

Listen to Jonathan Wolff on Disadvantage.

4. Bloggers have so far only interpreted the world...

Are we on the cusp of a weblog revolution? What would happen if bloggers of the world united behind a single cause? Possibly not very much except for a lot of typing...But if you are more optimistic than me about this, read this proposal to change the world by means of a blog action day - this post includes 16 reasons why bloggers will transform everything and why you are wrong if you dismiss us as egotistical ranters going on about our own bugbears...My view is that bloggers do better through pulling in different directions - homogeneity would be the equivalent of an excess of CO2 in the blogosphere. But don't let me spoil the carnival.

Bill Thompson has an interesting article about blogs and why journalists should read and write them.

3. Did Rembrandt make a portrait of Descartes?

I came across this aside in Mariët Westermann's book Rembrandt (Phaidon, 2000):

"An eighteenth-century record of a drawing by Rembrandt of Descartes, unfortunately lost, hints that the artist may have met the philosopher.' (p.13).

They shared a patron in Constantijn Hugygens, so surely would have at least known about each other if not met. How intriguing too that both should have been obsessed in different ways with the self. Rembrandt's self-portraits, despite some art historians' stubborn attempts to declare them simply tronies (genre character studies) - are deep investigations of his changing appearance and the self that is revealed through this (incidentally, by far the best book on this topic is H. Perry Chapman's Rembrandt's Self-Portraits (Princeton, 1990) - she reads the paintings as a quest for individual identity - against the counterintuitive majority art historical view). Descartes' cogito obviously puts the self as thinking thing at the centre; but from a literary point of view too, the Discourse on Method and the Meditations with their first person narratives have strong parallels with Rembrandt's investigations of reality from the viewpoint of the reflective self.

Surprisingly, I can't find any art historians who make the first person links between these two geniuses. Descartes is usually just brought in as part of the cultural background in art historical writing.

Does anyone know of any comparative discussion of these contemporaries' self-obsessions? And does anyone know more about the putative portrait of Descartes?

This sounds like raw material for one of those two-hander rather didactic plays about ideas...with Descartes chatting about his discoveries while Rembrandt paints him, surrounded by self-portraits.

2. Free Speech, Relativism, Holocaust Denial

There is a very interesting discussion of the EU proposal to criminalize Holocaust denial in relation to issues of free speech here (I found the link on the excellent Arts and Letters Daily).

1. Tim Williamson on Vagueness - audio interview on Philosophy Bites

In the latest episode of Philosophy Bites, Tim Williamson, author of an important book on the topic, explains what vagueness is and why it matters. In the process he gives his own solution to such classic Sorities paradoxes as 'the heap'.

Listen to Timothy Williamson on Vagueness

 

 

11 posts have disappeared from my weblog

I'm not sure if I have been sabotaged or whether Typepad is malfunctioning, but 11 of my posts this month (August) have suddenly vanished from my weblog and don't even appear in the August archive (though most of them should be accessible from the 'Recent Posts' list on the right)...One of the first to disappear related to Freedom of Speech and Holocaust denial -  so if I were paranoid I'd think my site had been targeted...more likely this is just a blip. I've re-posted it below:

There is a very interesting discussion of the EU proposal to criminalize Holocaust denial in relation to issues of free speech here (I found the link on the excellent Arts and Letters Daily).

Simon Blackburn interviewed on Moral Relativism for Philosophy Bites

Are moral choices simply relative, a matter of culture or taste? Are genuine moral disagreements possible? Should we just tolerate different ways that people choose to live? Download Simon Blackburn interviewed on these important questions from Philosophy Bites or listen to this interview streamed here. In the course of the discussion Blackburn outlines his own quasi-realist position.

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In a recent discussion between Susan Greenfield and Ren Reynolds on Radio 4's The World Tonight (linked from here), Susan Greenfield worried that Face Book  and Second Life might lead some impressionable people to a virtual life via avatars etc. that would diminish their interpersonal skills in the real world. This may or may not happen (empirical evidence is needed here, not just hunches). Ren Reynolds stressed the possible complex skills that we can learn in virtual environments. But underlying the whole debate was the question of what the self is and what, if anything, is wrong with someone choosing to live a life in which their interactions are mainly or solely via virtual worlds or social spaces on the internet.

In my experience the internet has made it much easier to maintain real contact with people rather than harder...and for many an internet link up is the start of a real world relationship not the end of it. But this might not always be the case. What wasn't considered was the impact on those who don't develop virtual skills: how will they achieve socially appropriate interaction in the future? They might be the ones left adrift and excluded from all kinds of interaction, like many of the illiterate of today.

Stanley Fish has just undermined his credibility completely by pronouncing on Starbucks...read about it here.

Stephen Law has let rip against faith schools again, this time while on tour in Australia. You can read his thoughts here. I of course support the general thrust of this.  But I worry that he might be attacking a straw man.  Do faith schools really seek to indoctrinate? If so it is liable to backfire on them. No one likes to be brainwashed...

I found the way religion seeped into my education a significant factor in making me a critical atheist. if someone tells me I have to say 'Amen' then that takes on the force of a paradoxical injunction and results in my silence...and I don't think I'm unique. Perhaps the best way to guarantee critical thought about religion is to exemplify hypocrisy and dogmatism...teaching liberal values may backfire when adolescents are looking for something to react against. They may end up dogmatists. The most dangerous type of religious education could be a liberal one...

My children take mobile phones, email, personal websites, blogs, social sites, podcasts, the lot for granted and use them with a dexterity that always surprises me. I'm only just coming to terms with the demise of the typewriter... But unlike the typewriter, these other technologies are connecting us to a degree that has never happened before. Perhaps this is a platitude, but I'm struck by how easy it is to exchange ideas, information and phatic noise with a larger number of people than has ever been practicable before.

What is bizarre to me is how slow off the mark philosophers have been in adopting the new media. Most now have websites (these are usually rather dull and only updated every six months or so), a few have weblogs, but, particularly in the UK, the scope for using philosophical audio and video files on the web is huge. Check out the iTunes Philosophy section (within 'Society and Culture') and you'll find more on Zen and Knitting than you will on Philosophy as we know it...The power of the voice in Philosophy is immense. To date only the few have had much access to major philosophers in action, speaking, debating, explaining. With Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and I are providing a series of interviews with top philosophers for general consumption. And I'm slowly podcasting my book Philosophy: The Classics, chapter by chapter...Some US universities are putting out some serious audio-visual philosophy webcasts too...But isn't it time a few more philosophers dusted off their microphones? We could provide an informal university that could surpass any actual university in breadth and quality of presentations...You can check out what is currently available at www.epistemelinks.com and at Ethics Videos Online.

I've just posted another podcast chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics on www.philclassics.libsyn.com. It's on Rousseau's The Social Contract. You can listen to it streaming here.

What am I? How should I live? Virtual Philosophy Again...

In a recent discussion between Susan Greenfield and Ren Reynolds on Radio 4's The World Tonight (linked from here), Susan Greenfield worried that Face Book  and Second Life might lead some impressionable people to a virtual life via avatars etc. that would diminish their interpersonal skills in the real world. This may or may not happen (empirical evidence is needed here, not just hunches). Ren Reynolds stressed the possible complex skills that we can learn in virtual environments. But underlying the whole debate was the question of what the self is and what, if anything, is wrong with someone choosing to live a life in which their interactions are mainly or solely via virtual worlds or social spaces on the internet.

In my experience the internet has made it much easier to maintain real contact with people rather than harder...and for many an internet link up is the start of a real world relationship not the end of it. But this might not always be the case. What wasn't considered was the impact on those who don't develop virtual skills: how will they achieve socially appropriate interaction in the future? They might be the ones left adrift and excluded from all kinds of interaction, like many of the illiterate of today.

Pointy-Headed Academic Tries to Come to Terms with Coffee Shop

Stanley Fish has just undermined his credibility completely by pronouncing on Starbucks...read about it here.

Stephen Law Attacks Faith Schools Down Under

Stephen Law has let rip against faith schools again, this time while on tour in Australia. You can read his thoughts here. I of course support the general thrust of this.  But I worry that he might be attacking a straw man.  Do faith schools really seek to indoctrinate? If so it is liable to backfire on them. No one likes to be brainwashed...

I found the way religion seeped into my education a significant factor in making me a critical atheist. if someone tells me I have to say 'Amen' then that takes on the force of a paradoxical injunction and results in my silence...and I don't think I'm unique. Perhaps the best way to guarantee critical thought about religion is to exemplify hypocrisy and dogmatism...teaching liberal values may backfire when adolescents are looking for something to react against. They may end up dogmatists. The most dangerous type of religious education could be a liberal one...

Has anyone noticed how connected we are getting?

My children take mobile phones, email, personal websites, blogs, social sites, podcasts, the lot for granted and use them with a dexterity that always surprises me. I'm only just coming to terms with the demise of the typewriter... But unlike the typewriter, these other technologies are connecting us to a degree that has never happened before. Perhaps this is a platitude, but I'm struck by how easy it is to exchange ideas, information and phatic noise with a larger number of people than has ever been practicable before.

What is bizarre to me is how slow off the mark philosophers have been in adopting the new media. Most now have websites (these are usually rather dull and only updated every six months or so), a few have weblogs, but, particularly in the UK, the scope for using philosophical audio and video files on the web is huge. Check out the iTunes Philosophy section (within 'Society and Culture') and you'll find more on Zen and Knitting than you will on Philosophy as we know it...The power of the voice in Philosophy is immense. To date only the few have had much access to major philosophers in action, speaking, debating, explaining. With Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and I are providing a series of interviews with top philosophers for general consumption. And I'm slowly podcasting my book Philosophy: The Classics, chapter by chapter...Some US universities are putting out some serious audio-visual philosophy webcasts too...But isn't it time a few more philosophers dusted off their microphones? We could provide an informal university that could surpass any actual university in breadth and quality of presentations...You can check out what is currently available at www.epistemelinks.com and at Ethics Videos Online.

Podcast on Rousseau's Social Contract

I've just posted another podcast chapter from my book Philosophy: The Classics on www.philclassics.libsyn.com. It's on Rousseau's The Social Contract. You can listen to it streaming here.