January 2012
1 post
“Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: —
(1) Books to...”
– Oscar Wilde, “To Read or Not to Read” (1886)
December 2011
4 posts
“In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest form of...”
– Edward Mendelson, Early Auden, page 172. I have been thinking of this immensely provocative passage while reading Siobhan Phillips’s fascinating new book The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. (via ayjay)
“Comedy … is not only possible within a Christian society, but capable of a much...”
– W. H. Auden (via ayjay)
November 2011
3 posts
“Now the pathos involved in the triumph of the therapeutic is this: One reason to...”
– Another major provocation from A Secular Age. (via ayjay)
“His happiness, I think, was his rhetorical secret weapon. One doesn’t suspect a...”
– Will Wilkinson on Milton Friedman’s rhetorical power.
October 2011
5 posts
“He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the...”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky, describing his meeting with Charles Dickens in London in 1862. (via ayjay)
Dusty’s response is too good to be true.
WatchOwen Flanagan and Alex Rosenberg talk naturalism.
Oh du lieber Augustin
Did you know that “The More We Get Together” takes it melody from a song called “Oh du lieber Augustin,” which was written in 1679? I didn’t either, until about five minutes ago.
At this time Vienna was struck by the bubonic plague (see Great Plague of Vienna) and Augustin was a ballad singer and bagpiper, who toured Vienna‘s inns entertaining people. The Viennese...
WatchThis is what I get for deciding the signal to noise ratio on Bloggingheads had gotten too low. I almost missed Dan Sperber!
September 2011
10 posts
“I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (via ayjay)
“It seems to me that most of our high-level political concepts like...”
– Will Wilkinson
Robin Hanson, meet Thomas Hobbes
Hanson on why physicists get more respect from the public than economists:
They key difference, I think, is that more interested parties see themselves as losing if the public listens to economists, and these parties therefore dispute economists in public. Such interested parties also influence individual economists, and so weaken within-economics consensus. In contrast, few care enough about...
“I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often.”
– an interviewee from Lost in Transition as quoted by David Brooks
I’m not crazy about Brooks’ take on this kind of thing, but I like the (inevitably smug, libertarian) counterargument even less. I would like to stake out a position in opposition to the pro-post-virtue crowd that is...
“We have now to operate upon what we ordinarily operate readily and...”
– Gilbert Ryle, “Abstractions” via Bryce Huebner
August 2011
5 posts
“At bottom, Rosen’s counter to the self-legislating, radically self-making...”
– The conclusion of Robert Pippin’s fantastic foreword to Stanley Rosen’s Hermeneutics as Politics.
Explaining changes in the value of male and female...
Trying to square two passages from Reihan Salam’s latest column in The Daily.
Passage A
Hakim convincingly argues that women are more richly endowed with erotic capital then men, due in large part to what she calls the “male sex deficit.” Basically, the sexual appetite of men starts quite high and dwindles slowly, if at all. That of women, in contrast, starts at a lower level and tends to...
“Many libertarians seem to feel they have discharged most of their info moral...”
– Robin Hanson on why he is not a libertarian
“What of our view of humanity changes if, when parents achieve an “attunement...”
– Fooled by science. The New York Review of Books. (via cdixon)
FODOR FTW
May 2011
2 posts
“Much of the violence was to be portrayed indirectly. A soldier is shot, but...”
– On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line
“The design philosophy of the past few decades has made it more difficult to be...”
– Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Matt Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, at TEDxEast. (via curiositycounts)
April 2011
3 posts
“If you are looking for a career where your services will be in high demand, you...”
– Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
Pish Tosh: The Unmade Argument Against the Welfare... →
pishtosh:
The idea of rights achieves concrete form through the living possession of property. So embodied, the soul that retains it more easily comprehends the abstract idea of rights of which property is the specific and familiar instance. The idea of rights is, so to speak, made flesh through the…
WatchJamy Ian Swiss, via Farnam Street
Great video, especially the stuff at the end about the burden of knowledge and the denial/transformation of experience. I think about this a lot with regard to empirical moral psychology. To what extent does commitment to a moral principle depend upon ignorance of the psychological processes underlying that commitment? How does our experience of the moral...
March 2011
1 post
“I had imagined graduate school as a shining city on a hill, but it turned out to...”
– Errol Morris (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
February 2011
6 posts
Watch
“There’s something about the union demonstrations in Madison, and the excitement...”
– Will Wilkinson on tribalism, left and right
A sober, empirical perspective on morality and politics deflates the enthusiasm that comes with feeling like your team is under siege. Most of the time, this is a good thing.
“1) The soy industry has worked tirelessly to discount the studies indicating...”
– Soy: 10 Reasons Why Not
“I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this...”
– Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (via yeahwellimdead)
Wow.
January 2011
8 posts
Man shot in Egypt protest →
The modern condition: you try to prepare yourself to watch footage of an Egyptian protestor being shot, but just as you screw up the courage to click play you are bombarded with a 10-second Michelob Light ad that makes the experience even more horrifying than it would have been otherwise.
The Prague Cemetery, coming in 2011 →
This isn’t breaking news, just news to me. Very, very good news.
WatchThe first 100 meter freedive (on record). I did not expect this to be so moving, but it is.
December 2010
25 posts
