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 Continue Reading …
Boghossian vs. Goodman on Fact Constructivism
Are You Experienced? Are You Ready to Rock?
My previous post about parody songs is of course a much too transparent and potentially exceptional case of the role of associations in music appreciation, since the joke in question is about style, meaning the art is “about” its style in an obvious way, whereas you might argue that art more typically works within a style but the style is Continue Reading …
Irony in Music II: Jonathan Coulton
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 Continue Reading …
Art That Jay Mentioned: Jenny Saville
Editor’s Note: Jay Bailey, excellent guest from our Nelson Goodman discussion, has been good enough to help us make sense of some of the art references. -ML Jenny Saville, Shift, 1996-1997, oil on canvas While the four of us brought up many examples of art (Nascar is exempt from that classification because I still don’t understand that nonsense nor the Continue Reading …
Philosophy of Art and Stephen King’s “Duma Key”
Somewhere in between and overlapping with Nelson Goodman and Kierkegaard, I subjected myself to one of Stephen King’s recent books, Duma Key. Serendipitously, it’s about artistic creation, and while he of course throws in supernatural/horror elements, the way he does this actually plays off some of our preconceptions about art creation and viewing that I think are worth spelling out: Continue Reading …
Topic for #30: Schopenhauer’s Twist on Kant’s Epistemology
Schopenhauer is widely known for being influenced by Buddhism’s claim that life is suffering and for in turn influencing Nietzsche, but his major influence is Kant. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, was originally written (in 1813) as S’s dissertation but was later expanded and clarified for proper publication (in 1847). He considered this his core Continue Reading …
Yukio Mishima and St. Sebastian
When I was in college, I came across the work of Japanese Author Yukio Mishima. He was a brilliant, if conflicted, soul who ultimately committed ritual suicide. There’s no point in me trying to encapsulate him in this post – check him out on the web. Certainly one of the more interesting characters you are likely to come across. For Continue Reading …
Nelson Goodman on Induction (Grue and Bleen!)
On our Goodman episode, I start out by trying to give a short explanation of Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction.” When we’re presented with evidence for a general claim, how do we tell which general claim the evidence is in support of? Goodman contrasts the predicate “green,” which we might think we can project to future cases when we see Continue Reading …
Catherine Elgin on the Epistemic Efficacy of Stupidity
One of the chapters that I referred to from Nelson Goodman’s final book, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences,was “The Epistemic Efficacy of Stupidity.” I’ve found that article online (I can’t swear it’s exactly the same as the version in Reconceptions, but it seems to have all the elements intact) here. It critiques both the correspondence and coherence Continue Reading …
Periodic Request for iTunes Store Ratings
The feedburner statistics are notoriously up-and-down on a daily basis, but we did for the first time see our subscribership go briefly above 1000 after posting the new episode, so we’ll count that as a milestone. Moreover, all of our past episodes up to #27 have now been downloaded over 2000 times, with #28 hitting 1000 downloads within two days Continue Reading …
If I Were a Rightie
Recent political events have driven me to either reject the citizens of my country as a bunch of morons or find it within me to empathize with them in some way, so in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms which he used to explore other viewpoints and with a tip of the hat to Schopenhauer the pessimist (whom we’ll be reading Continue Reading …
Goodman and Quine’s Nominalism
I referred on the podcast to Goodman’s 1947 article “Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism.” You can look at it here. The philosophical content is in the first couple of chapters; in fact, I’ll just give you the first half of the first chapter here: We do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities — classes, relations, Continue Reading …
PREVIEW-Episode 28: Nelson Goodman on Art as Epistemology
On Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978). With guest painter Jay Bailey. What’s the relationship between art and science? Does understanding works of art constitute “knowledge,” and if so, how does this relate to other kinds of knowledge?
Lewis Lancaster on Buddhism in the Modern Age
To counter some of the fluff I’ve been posting, here’s a whole lecture by Lewis Lancaster, founder of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (which he explains in the lecture) that says something about the content and history of Buddhism: Watch on youtube. I’ve not watched the whole thing, so I can’t guarantee that he doesn’t conclude the lecture by saying Continue Reading …
Two Books about Zero
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,by Charles Seife, and The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero,by Robert Kaplan. I’ve not read either of these, but Continue Reading …
Alan Watts on Nothingness
I got a call for some Alan Watts in our Buddhism discussion, so here’s one of many clips of his from youtube that touches on a theme discussed on the episode (i.e. nothingness and the interdependence of opposite, plus a quick statement without much explanation of Big Self) and which has some good background music that makes the whole thing Continue Reading …
B.S. about Jesus and Buddhism
Could Jesus have been taken to India as a child and taught Buddhism? Hmmm? Hmmm? Here’s something that apparently showed on the BBC at some point: Watch on youtube. OK, some silly speculation here (and more amusingly told in Christoper Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal),but a few points of comparison are made here between the Continue Reading …
Nagarjuna on Ultimate Truth (Yet More Westerhoff)
I will end my Westerhoff/Nagarjuna coverage with one more selection from right at the end of Westerhoff’s book: According to the Madhyamaka view of truth, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it. All one is left with is conventional truth, Continue Reading …
Nagarjuna on the Thing-in-Itself (More Westerhoff)
Our Nagarjuna episode seemed to conclude that ultimate reality is beyond our ability to speak about it. The objects of our experience are a shared fiction, and the most we can do with language is to show that they’re fictional; even the terms we use to accomplish this (like emptiness) are themselves constructs, serving only this negative, critical function. So, Continue Reading …
Westerhoff on Nagarjuna on Metaphysically Basic Entities
One of the topics we didn’t really get into on the podcast, and which in our Buddhism reading I actually found the most interesting, is the metaphysics of basic elements of the world. Nagarjuna argues that reality has no ultimate foundation, and in the episode we discussed that in terms of the possibility of Cartesian “substance” being basic or Spinoza’s Continue Reading …
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