It might be useful to look into the workings of these accidental stumblings into poetic meaning, because they exhibit in a striking fashion that particular feature of metaphor which has most troubled philosophers: that it is “wrong”-it asserts of one thing that it is something else-and further, that its beauty often seems proportionate to its wrongness…
As this year marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution I’m astonished by the ubiquitous uncritical flirtation with this brand of totalitarianism, the body count far exceeding that of even the Nazis. As someone who has read Darkness at Noon several times, a book given to me by someone who used to have sympathies, Michael Scammell makes…
Here is a freely available paper by Julija Potrč that I chanced across and is to be found in Acta neophilologica. The image below is of a paperback I picked up for $10 this past summer to add to my CoD collection of covers. In Confederacy, the normal existential mode of the main character is…
Albert Carel Willink ArtCarel Willinkpaintingpompeisurrealism
At last, now available on DVD. The blurb: [A] modern look at traditional New Orleans music, drawing upon the city’s unique heritage to examine the fragility of tradition itself. The performance-based music documentary highlights the resilience of New Orleans musicians, accustomed to hardship and dedicated to their city, their culture, and their music… The non-fiction…
Interesting — I hadn’t come across this paper before. (H/T Steve Stewart Williams). I need to assimilate the implications for a chapter I’ve been working on entitled “Pathologizing Ideology, Epistemic Modesty and Instrumental Rationality.” [T]he substantive findings we present here offer a direct challenge to common assumptions and interpretations that political attitudes and behavioral tendencies are shaped…
Roger Scruton and Timothy Williamson discuss the relationship between philosophy and science, introduced by Tim Crane: But is it science? naturalismPhilosophyRoger ScrutonscienceScientismTim Cranetimothy williamson
Keith Spera reports boogie woogieFats DominoKeith Speramusicnew orleanssecond line
The most excellent Kristóf Nyíri has alerted me to his freely available self-published book Pictorial Truth: Essays on Wittgenstein, Realism, and Conservatism. Kristóf and I have corresponded intermittently over about thirty years, my coming to him first through his absolutely fascinating early-to-late eighties work on Wittgenstein when, pre-web, I wrote to him expressing my enthusiasms. He has,…
A young Falkland Islander walking along a beach and spying a dead dogfish and going to work on it with his jackknife has, in a fashion wholly unprovided in modern educational theory, a great advantage over the Scarsdale high-school pupil who finds the dogfish on his laboratory desk. Similarly the citizen of Huxley’s Brave New…
manwithoutqualities 