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Ip Chun

Born on this day and still going. I had the privilege of chi sao‘ing with sigung (master’s master) some 15 years ago in London and afterwards bumming a smoke from him outside. It’s also been three years since the loss of one of my sifus. bruce leeEmbodied cognitionG.K. Khoeip chunmartial artsWing Chunyip man

Problems at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ethics

The very excellent Seth Vannatta in Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship. I’d suggest that readers also think about Wittgenstein’s idea in the Tractatus that ethics and aesthetics are one — on which much has been written. I’d also refer readers to the collection of essays entitled Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection.   aestheticsAlfred North WhiteheadethicsFurtwänglerHans-Georg GadamerImmanuel KantJohn DeweyLudwig…

Oakeshott on friendship

Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a…

Largest Private Collection of Islamic Art

It’s one of those delicious cultural ironies (of course there are a few other examples) that a significant amount of Islamic art preservation (and more besides) is down to one Nasser Khalili, a Jewish Iranian-born academic and former art dealer. Ownership is nothing but a myth, we are only a temporary custodian of what we…

Walker Percy Wednesday 94

Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which? Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion,…

Complexity Explained

With my good chum Péter Érdi at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mega shindig. Check out Peter’s excellent book (the title is as bold as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained) and now that Peter is head honcho for Cognitive Systems Research consider submitting something to them — it’s a very ecumenical journal with a nice balance between the philosophical and…

Nick Lowe @ the Beeb

The immensely talented, subtle, dignified and classy Nick Lowe performing live for BBC4. Nick’s Christmas show last year was the most satisfying live show I saw last year. Catch him if you can — real musicianship, not bread and circuses. musicnick lowe

Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux on ‘Bourgeois Equality’

I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian. That description would flummox the regressives’ crude social ontology and their perversely illiberal hierarchy of victimhood. Anyway, it’s well-worth listening to the very kind and deeply talented Deirdre McCloskey whom I had the good fortune to meet in…

Chuck Norris vs Communism

Very roughly analogous to the corrosive effects that the internet has been to our out-of-touch and typically regressive gatekeepers, so too was VHS the corrodent to the Romanian communist state. Now, as then, these gatekeepers entertain the shallowest of insights into the dynamics of situated moral psychology, deluded by their lazy rationalistic disparaging of “low brow” culture, the elites of all…