Phi Fic means Philosophical Fiction. Each episode, we have a candid dicussion on a heady work of of fiction, full of SPOILERS. Join host Nathan Hanks and readers Cezary Baraniecki, Daniel St. Pierre, Laura Davis, and Mary Claire, plus the occasional guest.
To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence… –Death in Venice
Join us for our discussion of the extraordinary novella of beauty, desire, and morality.
Hear more Phi Fic discussions at PhiFicPodcast.
How Plato’s “Phaedrus” Influenced Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”
This beautiful novella draws heavily from Plato’s conception of love, but to what extent?
Art and Beauty: A Marital History
Art and beauty have a peculiar kind of relationship and have been uneasily coupled since perhaps the beginning of human history. But the two have always been separable, as the 20th century demonstrated. Art always occupies a particular time and space, but beauty resides somewhere in the excitement of our brains, and we as a species still crave art that excites in this way.
The Aesthetics of Football
Entry into the end zone is admission to a place that can only be reached against opposition, passage through a door that cannot open without people trying hard to keep it closed. The poetry in a touchdown is success against the odds. A beautiful game is one where both teams play their best, each pushing the other to a higher standard—competition as collaboration.
Soul Dust: A Well Supported Stab At The “Why” Of Consciousness.
Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey claims, does not add or enhance some survival ability (as, say, wings allow birds to fly). Consciousness improves the chance of survival because it makes life worth living. Being phenomenally conscious grants import, meaning, and ego, essentially fooling us into striving towards fulfillment.
Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty? (Citizen Edition)
On Critique of Judgment (1790), Part I, Book I. What is beauty? Kant thinks that finding something beautiful is different than merely liking it. It’s a certain kind of liking, not dependent on your idiosyncratic tastes (like your preference for one color or flavor or tone over another) or on your moral opinions. He wants these judgments to be subjective in the sense that they’re not about the object, but about the fact that people receive pleasure from it, yet he also wants them to be universal, so that if I (correctly) find something beautiful, then I expect others to feel the same way, and moreover, if they have taste, they should.
Learn more.
End song: “Cool Down” from Mark Lint & the Fake Johnson Trio (1998), newly resung/remixed.
Episode 105: Kant: What Is Beauty?
On Critique of Judgment (1790), Part I, Book I. What is beauty? Disinterested pleasure!
Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
On George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896). What are we saying when we call something “beautiful?” Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying “yay!” without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate experience–we don’t “infer” the beauty of something by recognizing some natural qualities that it has–we can nonetheless analyze the experience after the fact to uncover a number of grounds on which we might appreciate something. Learn more.
End song: “Sense of Beauty” by Mark Lint. Read about it.
Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
On George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896).
Topic for #77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty
On 5/16 the regular foursome recorded a discussion of The Sense of Beauty (1896) by George Santayana. What is “the beautiful?” Do we have a “sense” by which we grasp it comparable to what Hume describes as the moral sense? Listen to the episode. Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp Continue Reading …
Science Determines Beauty
This Reuters video (and I’m sorry about the 30 second commercial that you have to sit through to get to it) depicts “Britain’s Most Natural Beauty,” where the contest “wasn’t just a matter of subjective beauty, but settled with science. Researchers said that the distance between facial features, and the width and length of the face are deciding factors for Continue Reading …