Author: manwithoutqualities

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robert nozick

Anarchy, State, and Utopia: Critical Exposition

Below is an extract (the first section of Chapter 2) of Ralf Bader’s most excellent and crisp Robert Nozick (pp. 10-14). Famously, Nozick begins his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia with the claim: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)’ (p. ix). This claim…

walker percy

The Walker Percy Option

H/T Brian Smith. Charlie Clark in Fare Forward. One of Percy’s most lost characters speaks more truly than he knows: “I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn’t that where…

music

Remembering Gary Thain

One of the all-time bass greats. Glad to see that there are a few Thain aficionados out there. Audio Culture has a rough and ready page dedicated to the man. This YouTube comment pretty much sums up his status. bassgary thainuriah heep

walker percy

Walker Percy Wednesday 170

The longer we think about it, the more mysterious the simplest act of naming becomes. It is, we begin to realize, quite without precedent in all of natural history as we know it. But so, you might reply, is the emergence of the eye without precedent, so is sexual reproduction without precedent. These are nevertheless…

bernard williams, david hume

Williams: Hume on Religion

The vulgar perhaps need a religion: if so, polytheism may well be better, as doing less harm. The sophisticated may well do without one: the trouble is that the religion they may be tempted to embrace may be even worse than the primitive one. Here also, and in some ways parallel, is a distinction that…

music

Form and Function in Human Song

Here’s a recent open access paper in Current Biology along with a journalistic write-up in The Harvard Gazette. The present research provides evidence for the existence of recurrent, perceptible features of three domains of vocal music across 86 human societies and for the striking consistency of form-function percepts across listeners from around the globe—listeners who presumably…

philo of alexandria

Philo of Alexandria: Where’s David Runia?

It is quite astonishing that this encyclopedia entry makes no mention whatsoever of the doyen of recent Philonic studies — David Runia. This surely cannot qualify as mere oversight: it is akin to an ostensibly reliable overview of recent Hellenistic scholarship without ever citing A. A. Long. Anyway, to get a sense of just how central Runia…