Publisher’s blurb: “How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of…
Here is someone doing interesting interdisciplinary work as an English don without plying the usual woolly pseudo-inquiry tripe. See article here. distributed cognitionEmbodied cognitionEvelyn TribbleExtended MindExternalismMemoryphilosophical literaturePhilosophy of mindshakespearesituated cognition
This excerpt is quite possibly Percy’s most intense piece of writing at least within the domain of his fiction writing. In the 1930s I found myself visiting distant cousins in Germany. My father took me. They lived in the university town of Tübingen, where my cousin Dr. Hans Jäger was professor of psychiatry. He had…
Low, released the week Bowie turned thirty, marked a new beginning. After burying himself in white powder in Los Angeles, he fled to Berlin for some personal detox and began his famous “Berlin trilogy.” Side one of Low consists of seven synth-pop fragments; side two consists of four brooding electronic instrumentals. Bowie sings about spiritual…
A tape recording of a conversation with novelist Yukio Mishima (1925-70) has been found in which he talked about his view of literature and life and death about nine months before he committed suicide by disembowelment. — The Japan News. JapanJohn besterMishimaphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima
It astounds me that even some of the most well-read of people have no sense of who Rex Warner is. My introduction to Rex Warner was via his translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War some thirty years ago when I was studying the philosophy of history. Soon after I came to discover Rex Warner as novelist by…
Commemorating the birth of the master. I think that of his more recent recordings The Bright Mississippi stands as his best, far exceeding his posthumous American Tunes. I must be the only one who thinks that Toussaint’s collaboration with Elvis Costello is thoroughly overrated, though that doesn’t compromise AT at all. Though he has his moments Costello for the most part comes off…
The latest issue of JMB is now available. I especially want to bring your attention to the Critical Notice of Susan Haack’s latest book Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law reviewed here by Erica Beecher–Monas. Erica Beecher–Monasjournal of mind and behaviorsusan haack
Waiting with bated breath for Who the F is Frank Zappa? I chanced upon this documentary called Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words. Like George Carlin, more than ever we need Zappa. Even The Guardian gets his value: he along with Bowie was the most articulate, independent-minded and philosophical, the funniest and artistically, the bravest of…
Though there is nothing new in this phenomenon here’s a nice example of good science reporting by Jesse Singal, someone who has consistently taken on the left and the right on at best questionable or at worst outright junk science, the worst offenders these days emanating from the intersectional identitarians. It would be interesting to see how…
manwithoutqualities 