Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The future is big with every possibility of Achievement and of Tragedy” —A.N. Whitehead I recently had a brief, small-talk type conversation with someone who asked me what it was like to be a parent. Not having adequate time to prepare and deliver a profound and wise thought (as I wish I could always do!)…
“Embodied mind theory and process theology lend themselves to an appreciation of metaphorical thinking, which takes concepts from one domain and links them with another, forming what Whitehead calls blended contrasts. The metaphors then become means by which subjects can be understood that could not be understood in more literal thinking. […] But process theology…
So I’m doing a new podcsast and the first episode is now out! The show is a talk-show format and, full disclosure: I’ve never done a talk show before. I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been, plus I was nervous because we were broadcasting live, so It’s a little shaky in places,…
“The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, an ethics that has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as I will argue, normative as well. In this paper I will also propose that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the …
“Art is like masturbation. It is selfish and introverted and done for you and you alone. Design is like sex. There is someone else involved, their needs are just as important as your own, and if everything goes right, both parties are happy in the end.” –Colin Wright I had a conversation with a friend…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Taylor Swift vs. Spotify (#Swiftify) controversy lately. It brings up some really great questions. One of them is, ‘how should we think about the value of art?’ Most people I’ve talked to don’t feel too bad for Taylor Swift specifically, because they’re perfectly aware that she’s not hurting…
“One attractive answer is that works of fiction are thought experiments. Like literary fictions, thought experiments neither are nor purport to be physically realized. Nevertheless, they evidently enhance understanding of the phenomena they pertain to. If fictions are thought experiments, they advance understanding of the world in the same way that (other) thought experiments do.”…
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…
I went to a great talk last night which featured Dr. Aaron Meskin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His aesthetic research is really interesting. It addresses such topics as the effects of exposure to bad art and the nature of aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. Basically, what I took…
Poetry is a manifestation of the spirit as it triangulates itself through the desires and limitations of meat; meditative inklings of immortality, and the play in the manipulation of aestheticized materials. It forgets about itself as code making, has the supreme confidence of handling elemental fuels. The word then is not only fit referent but…