Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.
Jesse Norman, a very able philosopher and man of practice, has been elected as the new MP to represent the Hereford and South Herefordshire constituency. Philosophically speaking, Jesse has several strings to his bow. I first came to know him as an Oakeshottian – he edited The Achievement of Michael Oakeshott(Duckworth – unfortunately, no longer in print)- and he provided valuable assistance and good counsel to me in my setting up the Oakeshott Association. Jesse is a bona fide Oakeshottian – unlike others running for public office who have sought to shallowly appropriate the name. I also know Jesse through a shared interest in the Sabre Foundation(donate some $$ now!). Here are Jesse’s academic interests which include his technical work on Pierce. Jesse will bring a touch of class to that most vulgar of all pursuits, politics. I hope that this is the beginning of a distinguished career, that great things lie ahead for him and that his keen intellect and subtlety isn’t corroded or dumbed down. I wish him well.
Here is a chapter from a book by Michael Dawson, Brian Dupuis, and Michael Wilson (all of the Biological Computation Project, University of Alberta) that has just come my way and is entitled From Bricks to Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science of LEGO Robots. In fact, all the chapters in draft are freely available to be downloaded from the book’s dedicated webpage. This offer will cease on publication of the book – which will be VERY soon. There is also a nicely produced 15 minute mini-documentary on the publisher’s site featuring Dawson and Depuis (click the video tab).
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.
Check out this piece in The New York Times by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Mrs. Pinker). She of course has in mind departments that where a lack of philosophical culture licences uncritical and obscure thinking.
Theo alone insisted that Theory was no hoax but was intended as the most imperialist of cognitive campaigns, having designs on all the disciplines. Culture owns knowledge, and departments of literature own Culture. It follows (at least if logic can be said to hold constant in the face of frenetic Culture) that departments of literature can legitimately claim dominion over us all.
Here’s another review of Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind (Do also check out Rob Rupert’s critical notice here). It helps that Mirko, the blog author, has as his advisors, Andy Clark and Julian Kiverstein. Mirko is also working as co-translator of Supersizing into Italian. Great stuff – this guy is going places.
Here’s a new book on Oakeshott by Edmund Neill. Heretofore I haven’t come across Neill’s work but if Noel O’Sullivan says he’s OK, I guess that’s good enough for me. Two quibbles. First, it falls within a series entitled Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers – I thought that by now we’d gotten past these unhelpful Procrustean categories. Second, $130 for 160 pages – that’s taking the piss. Here is a review of said book by Till Kinzel. Stay tuned for Paul Franco and my co-edited book.
Here’s an interview with André Kukla plugging his book (see above) from 2006 (which I’ve only just come across). I know Kukla through his technical philosophical work: two titles remain vivid to me. Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science and Studies in Scientific Realism. The former was a well-needed tough-minded antidote to the vulgar relativism that was characteristic of the day (no doubt, still is in some quarters). The latter, I recall having to get printed-on-demand. In many ways Kukla reminds me of Colin McGinn (the subject of my last post). Both had psychology and philosophy as a joint interest; both also have a no-nonsense clarity in their approach. I felt honoured to meet Kukla in person in 2006 at the EPISTEME conference at the University of Toronto. Speaking of EPISTEME, Kukla and a talented then-student of his, Joel Walmsley, produced a lovely paper for the issue I was editing entitled “Mysticism and Social Epistemology.”
