Here is a recent paper freely available. And in the video below is my favourite (the greatest) dancer – she talks about her craft. Here are some previous dance-related/cognition postings.
Mishima
One of my favourite philosophically orientated novelists is Mishima. I can’t attest to the reliability of this bio-sketch but it’s a start. There is not much scholarly literature on Mishima but here is an appreciation in, of all places, the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Paul Schrader made a superb attempt at expressing Mishima’s thinking (insofar as one can) in a cinematic mode, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, here review by Roger Ebert. According to Schrader, the weak link in the film was the lead actor who was way too matcho. This said, Ken Ogata does a great job and Schrader (aside from Herzog) has pushed the bounds of what philosophically can be articulated on film – namely, Mishima’s thoughts on aesthetics. Bravo to Coppola and Lucas for producing this tricky subject matter and letting it be directed by someone who tends to rub Hollywood (and others) up the wrong way. Amazing that Mishima is still a taboo topic in Japan.
Here is an interview with Mishima:
Here is a full version of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters:
Ignorance is Bliss
Here’s an article in The Economist that my colleague, Roger Koppl, who has done terrific work in the field of forensic evidence, alerted me to. The article mentions Itiel Dror who I’ve been in correspondence with though Roger. I know Itiel’s work through his co-edited Cognition Distributed. Here is his co-authored “extended mind” chapter.
Freedom of Speech
Given that issues of freedom of speech are in the news here is a philosophical take on the notion of Freedom of Speech.
Kitcher reviews Parfit
Philip Kitcher reviews Derek Parfit’s massive two-volume tome On What Matters.
Review of Steve Pyke’s Philosophers
On several occasions I’ve featured Steve Pyke’s work – Habermas of two posts back has been Pyked. Here is a review by a philosopher of Steve’s book. There is also brief mention in The New Yorker. The image featured above is of course Jerry Fodor.
Philosophical Training to Professional Blogging
Some of the most talented professional bloggers in the U.S. have backgrounds in philosophy. Is this just a coincidence or is there a causal relationship between philosophical training and the demands of professional blogging? In addition to learning about the philosophical backgrounds and abiding interests of three of the most prominent bloggers in the U.S., we’ll discuss how the emergence of this new journalistic medium could provide a new substantive professional venue for some of our most talented students and a significant outlet for public philosophy.
Three bearded ones comprise the panel:
Here is a previous post on the social epistemology of blogging
Habermas and Oakeshott
Here’s a recent article published in Political Studies.
Safety, Luck, and Gettierization
Sandy Goldberg gave an excellent talk yesterday. I’m looking forward to seeing some version of this coming out as a fully-fledged paper. Sandy is of course referring to one of the most famous papers in post-War philosophy.
Abstract. According to the widely-endorsed safety condition on knowledge, S knows that p only if: not easily would S believe that p were p false. It is natural to think that the safety condition on knowledge – or perhaps some version of it, relativized to grounds or methods – can be used to diagnose failures of knowledge that obtain owing to epistemic luck or gettierization. In this paper I argue against this natural view: there can be cases of justified, true, safely-formed belief that nevertheless suffer from a form of epistemic luck (and so fail to be knowledge). As a result, I argue, we would do well to reconsider the anti-luck condition on knowledge. In particular, we should think of the satisfaction of the modal component of this condition as something that must be explained by the subject’s epistemic access to the fact that makes her belief true. When we do so in the context of perceptual cases, as I do here, we see that the causal condition on perceptual knowledge, which everyone will acknowledge, has a non-negligible role to play as part of the anti-luck condition on such knowledge.
Here are some photos of the wonderfully irrepressible Sandy in action. Also, check out his latest book Relying on Others, a work I’ve mentioned before.
manwithoutqualities 