My chum Corey Abel’s usual elegance and eloquence. Kurth, by the way, is one of the great performers. Here is a free author’s copy. Socrates pointed out that self-satisfaction is the death of philosophy. To pursue wisdom one must desire it. But to desire something, one has to understand not only its appeal but also…
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind remains as important as ever, and as misunderstood, 25 years after the 1980s culture wars. Allan BloomBloomClosing of the American MindHarvey MansfieldKarl PopperLeo StraussPlato
Michael Lynch and Alan Sokal enagage in a most civil dialogue: Defending Science: An Exchange. Readers might also be interested in Susan Haack’s Defending Science-Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism and James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars – two cracking reads – and both past contributors to EPISTEME. Alan SokalChristian fundamentalismChristianityDavid HumeEpistemologyGodMICHAEL LYNCHReason
Here’s a curiosity (well not really, Zappa was always the most articulate and most sceptical of “beat” composers). Here is Zappa responding to passages from Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. “On Junk Food for the Soul” New Perspective’s Quarterly, 1987 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ THE NATURE OF MUSIC “Music is the soul’s primitive and primary speech……
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed…
