Archive for category Reviewage
How Did We Get Here?: Fukuyama on The Origins of Political Order
Posted by Tom McDonald in Reviewage on December 11, 2011
In his new book The Origins of Political Order,
Dawkins’ “The Magic of Reality”
Posted by Dylan Casey in Reviewage on November 13, 2011
To the extent that we talked about Richard Dawkins at all in the new-athiesm podcast this summer, we never got around to properly discussing science as wonder. Dawkins makes this argument in a really beautiful new book “The Magic of Reality”. Illustrated by Dave McKean, it’s ostensibly a children’s book, structured around a series of basic questions like “Who was the first person, really?” and “What are things made of?”, but, as he presents in the introduction, it’s a book aimed at showing that there is distinction between myth and science and that the account of the world through science is astonishing and wonderful.
Though it’s out as a hard-cover book, you should check out the iPad version if at all possible. That version includes a number of clever and wonderful mini-apps to illustrate some key scientific concepts and discoveries. I particularly liked the scalable solar system and Newton’s light-splitting experiment.
You can read a review of paper book from the Guardian newspaper.
Dylan
Buddhism Naturalized?
Posted by Seth Paskin in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts, Reviewage on November 7, 2011
Sweater vests increase rigor
Given our recent exploration of moral theory, the excitement around our announcement of a Euthyphro episode and my own current interest in Buddhist thought, I guess it was inevitable that I would stumble across and then buy this book. Or perhaps it was that Mark mentioned it in an email which I had overlooked. In any case, the author, Owen Flanagan (pictured to the right), is a philosopher at Duke University. Pat Churchland also thinks highly of him and I guess that’s good enough endorsement for me.
As a self-proclaimed analytic philosopher, Flanagan is a fan of science. And he’s a fan of being a moral person. He’s just published a book called The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized in which he argues that all of the major ‘wisdom traditions’ (read: religions) are incompatible with science. Since the traditions are where we get ‘being a moral person’ stuff, it’d be great if we could find one (or find a way to make one) that was compatible with science so that people who prioritize the scientific world view could also have a moral system to lean against. [This is my characterization, I don't think he'd put it that way]
The Tree of Life’s Contingent Universe
Posted by Daniel Horne in Reviewage, Things to Watch on October 20, 2011
I can write nothing on Heideggerian scholar*/(anti)Hollywood director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that hasn’t been better written elsewhere. Even so, the film has just come available on DVD and digital download, so I thought I’d recommend it to anyone who has been interested in PEL’s recent religion episodes. (Suggestion: try to watch the HD version of the clip.) If I had to try to connect the film’s theme to recent topics, I’d call attention to Malick’s ruminations on life’s utterly contingent nature, and whether it suggests the presence or absence of God.
While the film isn’t perfect (somebody please explain the ending!), a movie with existential dinosaurs beats a two-hour couch-warming session with another Transformers sequel. Trust me.
*I can’t find a decent link, but Malick translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons for Northwestern University Press before he abandoned graduate study.
-Daniel Horne
Film Review: “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on September 24, 2011
Entirely relevant to our feminism episode is this film directed/adapted by John K. from “The Office” from the novel by David Foster Wallace, which I’ve not read.
Is it amusing to see numerous comic actors give monologues that display keenly that self-consciousness–philosophical reflection–does not guarantee virtue? Yes. Does it (in its cinematic form) amount to a coherent thesis on how feminism has affected men (that this is the purpose of the interviews is not revealed until the last minute of the film, so my asking this is a spoiler, but I can’t see how knowing this would matter much to a viewer)? No, not that I can glean.
We’ve got a guy who takes advantage of his amputee status to manipulate women into sleeping with him. Another taking advantage of a woman’s grief to sleep with her even as he sympathizes with her. A man who serially reveals to women that he has intimacy issues that he should have revealed earlier, implying that because he’s revealing these issues, the cycle must be breaking (it’s not). We have repeated thoughts and hopes by men that a woman can save them from the horribleness that is them. And ultimately all this sexism and dysfunction becomes related to tales of sexual assault: a person can treat another person as an object, a thing, in a variety of ways.
More Analytic vs. Continental: What is the “Situation of Reason”?
Posted by Tom McDonald in Reviewage on August 14, 2011
The living Hegelian dialectic in hardback!
The disciplinary identity of philosophy is in question. So says John McCumber in “Reshaping Reason”, where he makes a serious argument with evidence of trends pointing toward a sort of Hegelian synthesis in American philosophy to overcome the “Fantasy Island” of analytic thought and the “Subversive Struggle” of continental thought.
“Fantasy Island” and “Subversive Struggle” are McCumber’s well-reasoned nicknames for the two schools. Here are his two primary criticisms of the schools: (1) analytic thought traps itself in present tense language, ignoring the substantive insights of Hegel and Heidegger about the temporal present-past-future structure of thought or the subject; (2) continental thought dooms itself by pretending that it can continue to talk intelligibly while getting rid of the concept of true statements, irrespective of social construction — that’s why so much continental philosophy is bad.
McCumber gives to the analytic tradition that philosophy must cede ground to science on much of its old territory, but insists that there is one job (at least one, but he discusses others) only philosophy is uniquely situated to do, and that is the “situating” of reason and knowledge as such, especially their being situated in time. It’s a very Hegelian idea: after science, philosophy becomes the practice of understanding — to be sure, with handy dandy new post-Fregean analytic conceptual tools — the historical becoming and meaning of knowledge in the context of the present. This is a job that can actually have relevance for the public (you know, all those weird people outside the walls of academia?).
MediaSplozion: Imposing Philosophy on Bits of Popular Culture
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on August 4, 2011
When we started this blog, I opined that pretty much anything we watched, listened to, or read could be the subject of an off-the-cuff philosophical rant, and while I did this a few times without much exertion, I’ve since let movie after book after album after TV show fly by without so much as a comment. Have I lost my ability to see philosophy in anything? Do I have too much respect for you the readers to subject you to my frivolity. Certainly not.
And so I force myself, late at night, less than an hour after turning 40 years old, to spin out a pseudo-philosophical paragraph each on a few things I’ve enjoyed recently:
1. Big Love: Is polygamy inherently exploitative? The message of the show seems to be that while certainly it can be, it’s an open question whether it needs to be. At least some of the characters involved seem for the most part psychologically healthy, and have a rationale for what they do. It’s depicted (presumably based on research) as a matter of real religious conviction; is it meant to thus be a reductio ad absurdum against religion itself? Certainly there are some scenes (featuring a self proclaimed prophet on a polygamist compound) that strongly convey how duping religion can be, but at the same time, nearly all of the characters depicted are religious in some way; it’s just a matter of disagreement between faiths. Pretty engaging overall; nice, subtle comedy, and thought provoking without being heavy handed about it.
2. Game of Thrones. We had free HBO for a weekend, so I splurged on this, and have reread the first two books in the series (I’d read the first three several years back), which I enjoyed immensely. It’s set in something like Hobbes’s state of nature, where life is cheap, unless you’re of noble birth, in which case offenses upon you are met with hundreds riding to your aid to be slaughtered, and then you probably get killed or at least maimed anyway. A lot has been written on the sexual politics, but more interesting is the moral ambiguity: even characters set up as horrible in the first book become protagonists (the narrator rotates each chapter between half a dozen people, which change somewhat for each book) as time goes on: everyone has their rationales and is trying to make their way through a horrific situation. I don’t feel like I can rate the TV show, as I see it only as an illustration of what I already know and like in the books,
Hattiangadi on Meaning in Language
Posted by Tom McDonald in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on April 21, 2011
Oughts and Thoughts: Scepticism and the Normativity of Meaning
Note that this is not global skepticism about the objective facts that science is supposed to study. This is the fairly typical contemporary view that if language requires interpretation, then its meaning-content is ‘merely subjective’ or even ‘merely intersubjective’. This is skepticism about whether in language the semantics or meanings expressed, e.g., conceptual contents like “the distinction of the 18th-century powdered wig” or “comedy” or “the zombie in cinema”, are themselves ‘a matter of fact’.
Kojève on Hegel: “The Concept” is Time itself
Posted by Tom McDonald in Reviewage on April 10, 2011
Having read many commentaries on and interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology, I’ve found Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
In this book Kojève gives the most convincing argument as to Hegel’s basic rightness in his grasp and description of “the Concept,” i.e., the concept of concepts. (He Capitalizes the big concepts a lot, but it’s not so obnoxious in context.) Kojève argues that Hegel is the first to understand that the Concept = Time itself. Human Reason or thinking itself, “the Concept,” is the concrete location where Time becomes capable of grasping itself, where Existence grasps its own Temporality.
Notes on Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” Part 1
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Reviewage on March 31, 2011
For our atheism episode (which has, incidentally been pushed back to be recorded in late May or possibly June… sorry, Russ!), I’m trying to read through the most popular of the “new atheist” books, and I’m sure we’ll only end up discussing some select portions of the books in any detail, so as I’m going through these, I’m going to generate a few blog posts to fill readers in on some additional points and help myself remember what I’m reading. My point here is primarily to give points from the books, not to cast judgment upon them, so don’t take this as an endorsement (or rejection).
Daniel C. Dennett is the only actual philosophy professor among the most popular of these folks. (Sam Harris was a philosophy undergrad when he wrote his major works and has just recently earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience; Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens is a “columnist and literary critic.” I know Peter Singer also argues for atheism, and he’s as famous a philosopher as they come, but he’s not been considered part of this movement for some reason.) We read a little bit of him and devoted maybe 10 minutes of our discussion to him in our philosophy of mind episode, which didn’t go very well, in that Wes at least really dislikes him, yet we didn’t go into enough detail on the arguments of his article to clearly convey why Wes dislikes him. To sum up the critique, he’s not known for, say, clearly and charitably presenting the views of past philosophers and saying exactly how his position differs from them. Instead, he uses a popular style to make his points, with a heavy emphasis on specifically citing scientific work
Logicomix!
Posted by Daniel Horne in Reviewage on March 23, 2011
In the recent Frege episode, Mark related the famous anecdote of how Bertrand Russell, the man who “discovered” Frege, later confounded him by pointing out a paradox apparent within his logical system. As Wes recounted, Russell’s own attempt to ground mathematics in logic was also later frustrated by a young Kurt Gödel, whose early incompleteness theorems crippled the central purpose of Principia Mathematica.
Anyway, those of us who suffer nausea upon seeing the character ∀ can nevertheless relive those heady days with Logicomix. A comic book about the quest for absolute logical certainty makes an unlikely choice for an award-winning New York Times bestseller, but I must say its an entertaining read. To steal a brief recap from the NYT book review:
The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.
Spoiler alert, per Seth: “Founding anything always fails.”
-Daniel Horne
TV Review: “Being Human”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on February 25, 2011
More ethics on TV! (Hear our discussion of “Walking Dead.”)
“Being Human” is a Sci-Fi network show based on a British TV show (by the power of induction, I can pronounce the original better than this despite having never seen even a second of the British version) that follows in the footsteps of “Smallville” and probably other shows by relying on a certain kind of teen appeal: long stretches of modern “indie” rock, dreamy characters in teen-identifiable situations, etc.
That aside, the show is at least attempting to confront ethical dilemmas on a weekly basis. For example:
1. If you regularly turn into a were-wolf and kill everyone around you, should you allow your friends and family into your life to help you with your problem, or keep them at a safe distance so you don’t kill them?
2. If you are a 200 year old vampire who’s killed lots and lots of people but now want to be nice, how vigorously are you obligated to fight your former-friend vampires who still kill lots of people? Should you just live and let them live (and kill)?
3. If you’re a ghost and know who killed you, should you haunt the murderer until he’s insane or dead, or should you get over it and move on?
Louis CK on the story of Abraham
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage, Things to Watch on November 29, 2010
If you wanted some more detail on the story of Abraham as discussed by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, here’s a version by comedian Louis CK (yes, with swearing):
This presentation shows the challenge Kierkegaard or any other Judeo-Christian apologist faces in defending a belief system that would make this story a central, celebrated piece of its faith.
Boghossian vs. Goodman on Fact Constructivism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on November 15, 2010
One book we’d mentioned on the episode as a counter to Goodman’s epistemology was Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism.
Boghossian’s target is any theory of knowledge that says that facts are constructed, reflecting the contingent needs and interest of some society, and that consequently some different society with different needs could construct facts so as to make any given statement that is true according to our current conception false according to the opposite conception.
I think saying only that you should be able to see that this doesn’t capture Goodman’s view: Yes, facts are constructed according to Goodman, meaning that they’re only true relative to a world wherein we build the components for such facts by positing some ontology and standards for judging a statement about that ontology true, and yes, the choice of ontology is not dictated to us by evidence, but neither is it true for Goodman that anything goes, that you could construct a world such that any given statement “true for us” given our conceptual scheme would be false under some other scheme.
Irony in Music II: Jonathan Coulton
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on November 12, 2010
Following up on my post on Weezer and the follow-up discussion of irony, I submit for your consideration Jonathan Coulton:
Despite this being a cover (well, lyrically), it’s pretty typical of what I’ve heard of him: he sings pretty folk songs much like the many many individuals regularly highlighted by Performing Songwriter magazine, but with goofy lyrics much like They Might Be Giants. Also like some TMBG songs, there’s angst packed into a lot of the tunes, so that, for instance, a love song aimed at a laptop or from the point of view of a super-villain is still a love song, and in fact the lyrics can make this kind of song more palatable to emotionally skewed people like myself who might find a straight version too sappy or just plain ordinary to stomach. So he sings entirely with a straight face, with generally more subtlety than, say, Weird Al, but he still definitely produces novelty songs with more-or-less straightforward jokes, unlike the weirdness of Pavement or Robyn Hitchcock that in most cases still counts as rock (or in the case of Hitchcock, surrealist ranting) rather than comedy.
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Philosophy of Art and Stephen King’s “Duma Key”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on November 10, 2010
Somewhere in between and overlapping with Nelson Goodman and Kierkegaard, I subjected myself to one of Stephen King’s recent books, Duma Key.
When the artist main character is doing something really great, he goes into some sort of a trance. He doesn’t understand his work, doesn’t know where it comes from, doesn’t really know much about art history. He does recognize as he’s doing it and when it’s done when a work seems really great to him are viewed by others, amateur and professional alike are entranced, such that stylistic comparisons become irrelevant. (It’s of course great for an author that he doesn’t have to actually produce the works; descriptions are inevitably vague enough that they could fit either a masterwork or a piece of amateur crap, so King is able to sell their quality via character reactions and mood elements. This will be more difficult when it inevitably becomes a movie or mini-series.)
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Two Books about Zero
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on October 30, 2010
Following up on yesterday’s post about nothingness, here are two books, one by a scientist and another by a mathematician, about the origination and subsequent history of the mathematical notion of zero: Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea,
I’ve not read either of these, but they’re both well rated, though ten years old now, so they won’t include the recent developments in the history of zero, such as when Cheney’s approval rating went to zero after he blocked out the sun with his evil globally warming cosmic hate rays.
The only specifically Buddhist account of this I can find is The Logic of Unity: The Discovery of Zero and Emptiness in Prajnaparamita Thought,
-Mark Linsenmayer
Troll 2: Doubly Reflexive Irony and the Best Worst Movie
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Reviewage on September 22, 2010
I recently sat through the Rifftrax of Troll 2 (see my previous post re. Rifftrax) and felt the need to relate my fascination with flavors of irony to the so-bad-it’s-good movie experience.
Just to clarify, the Rifftrax guys claim that they don’t actually like bad movies. These movies are simply bad, so the humor in what they do is their addition, and comes in part (and this is me filling in the gaps here) because humor is more natural and easy when it’s reacting to something than when it proceeds from a vacuum; so I can make occasional jokes about philosophers but have a very hard time writing stand-up comedy. In short, humor should be occasional, i.e. a reaction to an occasion, not forced. The fact that MST3K/Rifftrax is forced in that the jokes come constantly creates its own challenges and internal resonances, meaning that getting steeped in their project is more rewarding than listening to just one riffed movie, and a lot of the appeal is the particular people doing the riffing as opposed to just the jokes in isolation (I find it hard to get into the various imitators on the web).
Now, my family got HBO when I was maybe 12 years old (that would be 1983) and for years I would watch virtually anything that channel would show, and after that until at least a couple summers into college my buddies and I would rent movies constantly, covering anything horror/sci-fi-looking no matter how obviously crappy, so I’ve seen my share of Ghoulies, Crawlspace, Troll (not in any way related to Troll 2, even legally), Silent Night Deadly Night, Phantasm, Witchboard (OK, I had to look up the name of that one; I just have an image of Tawny Kitaen all deviled out)… the list goes on and miserably on, but I will likewise say that while we appreciated crap, we weren’t sophisticated enough to enjoy crap for crap’s sake. We hoped that the movies would be good and cheered when they had a plot. In fact, any movie based on a book was automatically OK with us, because that meant that something would have to actually happen.
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Trainwrecks: Weezer on Irony
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Reviewage on September 22, 2010
Reflections on the poptastic Rivers Cuomo.
Weezer is one of my favorite bands, and as in the case of most of my favorite bands, I like all of its eras and permutations, whereas most critics and fans latch on to one (the first) era and are frustrated or disappointed by the rest. Strangely, I got into them late in the game: around 2004 or so; I didn’t like “The Sweater Song” when it came out much, as it seemed affected, too trendy (the trend being grunge), and I was put off of the album by a review that talked about Cuomo’s apparently pro-Dungeons & Dragons lyrics.
Anyway, most critics like their first two albums, which were raw and displayed recognizable emotion. They displayed irony, but it was a kind that could be easily recognized as such: 90′s snotty teen irony, with occasional faux hip hop lingo (“What’s with these homies dissin’ my girl?“), a retro Happy Days-themed video.
With their third album and most subsequent work, they started consistently singing in tune and toned down the grunge somewhat, alienating a lot of their fans, and as Cuomo has aged, he’s cared even less about record-store clerk purism. The irony has also become more subtle and I would say more humble; sneering requires a self-regard that most self-reflective people outgrow. Even the self-mockery becomes less severe, and the distinction between pretending an air of frivolity and being frivolous becomes moot.
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