Sunday, September 29, 2013
Un Cammino Attraverso la Commedia
Scott D. Moringiello took a Journey Through the Comedy of Dante, two cantos a day for 50 days, at dotCommonweal.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Just don’t think about it
Benjamin Kunkel reviews Introduction to Antiphilosophy, by Boris Groys, at the London Review of Books.
"for him Stalinism succeeds the avant-garde just as a guest accepts an invitation. Far from betraying the avant-garde, Stalin merely scuttled a transitional movement in order to fulfil on the grandest scale that movement’s goal of unifying art and politics. Much of the classical avant-garde, Russian and otherwise, had after all demanded, in reaction against the sterile autonomy of l’art pour l’art, ‘that art move from representing to transforming the world’: ‘Under Stalin the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life of a society was organised in monolithic artistic forms.’ These forms, Groys concedes, were ‘of course not those the avant-garde itself had favoured’. Throughout he writes about Stalinist cultural policy with a hair-raising mixture of political neutrality and aesthetic appreciation."
Sunday, September 15, 2013
How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree
Susan Dominus in the education issue of The New York Times
Monday, September 2, 2013
Dissent of Man
John G. West reviews Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel, and Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott, at the Claremont Review of Books.
"For all of the discussion and debate provoked by his book, he ultimately offers a rather simple, if profound, objection to Darwinism: 'Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.' In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?The letter mentioned is to William Graham, July 3, 1881, available at the Darwin Correspondence Project.This objection is not new. Indeed, it reaches back to Charles Darwin himself. Darwin published a lengthy tome, The Descent of Man, purporting to prove that his theory of unguided evolution could explain basically everything, including man's mind and morals. Yet in his private writings, he expressed a lingering reservation over the impact of his theory on the trustworthiness of reason. In a letter written in 1881, he disclosed that 'with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a
mind?'"
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