Month: July 2011
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On 3 moods toward the past: smashing, worshipping, and loving while transcending
The 1st Mood: The Past Must be Smashed. “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” –F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909) “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” –Faulkner Thanks to Faulkner, Ibsen, and Chekhov, we recognize that the past cannot be wiped out or destroyed. In…
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A philosophical review of Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, published in 2009, might just as well have been a play or a dialogue. The first part takes place in Venice, the second part in Varanasi. The protagonist Jeff Atman–yes, that is his surname–is a freelance journalist who writes about art, music, and celebrity. He attends…
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On relics and textiles and spiritual weight
There aren’t a lot of relics lying around these days. Occasionally, someone finds the likeness of Mary or Mother Theresa in a pancake or in a splintered oak tree. Then TV crews flock to the scene and interview the yokels. A bunch of bunk that. Makes for good TV though, something that Murdoch knew. More…
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Rethinking financial prosperity
Update (7.27.11) Nice broadside from Vinay Gupta regarding Umair Haque’s larger project. What is Wealth? I take it one of the philosophical consequences of the housing bubble, the economic downturn, and the debt crisis has been to compel us to rethink our conception of prosperity. “What is wealth? What does it mean for a nation or…
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Tell that to Quine! (& other miscellany)
1 “That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger anyone…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 