This conclusion is disappointing for those who hoped that we could argue somebody into morality. But Williams is adamant that this was always an ill-conceived hope. The very excellent A. W. Moore taking on the devastating brilliance of Bernard Williams. Williams wants to challenge the idea that moral notions are through and through pure . .…
I realize that Runnin’ Down a Dream is going on for a decade old, but I’ve only just been able to view it via Netflix. Reading about Petty c. ’79 when there was still serious rock journalism (Melody Maker and NME) he always struck me as a man of integrity and decency without resorting to the shallow and ubiquitous…
a quasi-eschatological faith in historical progress Well put Damon! Here is one of the more insightful, philosophically literate and least hysterical or pompous analyses. On this topic I have written the following in a forthcoming paper. Epistemic humility is not seen as a cultural virtue: it is the zeitgeist of the modern age that we exist…
Forthcoming from the very excellent Mark Rowlands. Cognitive scienceMark RowlandsMemorypersonal identityphenomenologyPhilosophy of mindRainer Maria Rilkeself
Sensitively directed (i.e. unobtrusively) and superbly edited documentary about the last generation of blues musicians playing the thoroughly diminished Chitlin’ Circuit — one of whom has sadly since passed on since this film was made. For me, the revelation of the film were the ladies — Barbara Lynn and Carol Fran. Catch it if you can. Barbara LynnBilbo WalkerbluesBobby RushCarol…
Based Mom and Based Goddess let rip on the toxic cocktail of cultural infantilization, the new Stalinism (kangaroo courts), free-speech, identity politics, advocacy posing as academic inquiry, willful ignorance of the past, the ethics of teaching (intellectual dishonesty), utopianism, “cultural appropriation”, radical social constructivism, and on crapping on the “secret people” (gamergate) — totemic of those whom the…
David Marquand in the New Statesman on “something is stirring among Chesterton’s secret people”. Here is a review of Marquand’s Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain England and the English now face the primordial questions that face all self-conscious political communities: “Who are we?”, “Who do we want to be?” At bottom, these questions are philosophical, in a…
Write-up here. Bernie WorrellFunkadelickeyboardsmusicparliamentTalking Heads
You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces — John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces [t]he bewildering mechanisms of power in stories such as The Trial also “point to something much more sinister”—the idea that arcane bureaucracies become self-perpetuating and…
David Boucher’s article from a decade ago freely available here. The shit-storm that we are now in is a consequence of complicitous “ruling class chatter” (Left and Right) and “enlightened” technocracy, a politics of faith that has become way out of wack with the politics of scepticism. The European Union required of its aspirant members formal…
manwithoutqualities 