Latest Posts by ilunado - Page 2
After only about nine months of life, people even forget who their mothers were
Kurt Vonnegut Gálapagos
A Very Short Fact: or rather, 10 very short facts. Here are the top 10 facts you should know about atheism.
“The name [atheism] is a historical accident. It’s only because we live in a historically theistic culture, that atheists have to be defined in negation to that.”
[Atheism: A Very Short Introduction by Julian Baggini]
Like the Very Short Introductions on Facebook for more from the series.
Analytical philosophy, or some recognizable descendant of it, should be able to make a richer contribution to ethics than has often been the case up to now. If it is to do so, it will need to hold on to two truths which it tends to forget (not only in ethics, but most damagingly there): that philosophy cannot be too pure, and must merge with other kinds of understanding; and that being soberly truthful does not exclude, but may actually demand, the imagination.
Bernard Williams “Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look”
What the music says may be serious, but as a medium it should not be questioned, analysed, or taken so seriously. I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself.
David Bowie (1947–2016) in Rolling Stone, 1 April 1971 (via oupacademic)
The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal (via wordsnquotes)
Emotion is a motion, action, process, and a destination
Ander Monson Letter to a future lover
Because you look around and find them looking at you. Then you become yourself to yourself. You exist. Your home has meaning. But that is not exactly it. It is not about me, but about flesh shot through with spirit, the dogs so adamantly in their bodies that they become mind. It is about the thought of dogs.
Colin Dayan With Dogs at the Edge of Life
The Silent World of dogs...
In this sequence of Jacques Cousteau ‘The Silent World " (from min. 50:05 to 58:07 approximately), the Calypso follows a herd of sperm whales and fatally hit a small breeding. Soon, many sharks congregate around the body and begin to devour it. The sailors are horrified and fascinated. But suddenly got mad. They attack the sharks, lift them up to the deck and killing them, with axes and maces. The crew's dog seems to not support the slaughter of sharks and goes away, or is only afraid ...? The sailors finally calm down and play curiously with barnacles accompanying sharks. Colin Dayan begins his book 'With dogs at the edge of life' narrating this sequence and observes: "... only the dog responds with what we can interpret as spot-on in Its gentle, unremitting regard".
https://youtu.be/3jH2QkP-Bvg?list=PLNbb3PVOt4uJ9SfgG0WqA0qv9aK4wALwb&t=3004
Día internacional de la filosofía 2015
Today is World Philosophy Day! In 2005, the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), recognized the third Thursday of November as a time to celebrate philosophy. To celebrate World Philosophy Day this year, we’ve compiled a collection of books and articles on social and political philosophy, including Rousseau and Hobbes, “Why Do We Need Political Philosophy,” and “The Physician’s Right of Refusal: What Are the Limits.”
Celebrate philosophy and explore the complete collection.
Image: Thinking Man, Rodin, by Satyakamk. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Don’t trust the preacher, don’t trust the newspaper, don’t trust the radio set, don’t trust the billboards, don’t trust the pretty label on the liquor bottle where it says eight years old; it’s all big black lies. When I hear the whistle, I don’t even believe the train’s coming. I got a radical nature, and I can’t help it.
Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel
Oliver Sacks sobre la música
The late, great Oliver Sacks on 9/11 and the singular power of music to provide solace.
The moral law is more exigent than the law of an actual liberal republic, because it allows no emigration, but it is unequivocally just in its ideas of responsability.
Bernard Williams Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
There are genuine ethical, and ultimately metaphysical, concerns underlying the worries about ought and is and the naturalistic fallacy. At the heart of them is an idea that our values are not “in the world,” that a properly untendentious description of the world would not mention any values, that our values are in some sense imposed or projected on to our surroundings. This discovery, if that is what it is, can be met with despair, as can the loss of a teleologically significant world. But it can also be seen as a liberation, and a radical form of freedom may be found in the fact that we cannot be forced by the world to accept one set of values rather than another
Bernard Williams Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
What I want to do today is to consider what is involved when we seek to understand our own and others' lives backwards, reflecting on earlier thoughts, feelings and emotions, and responding emotionally to them. The idea I want to put forward is that everyday explanation of what we think, feel, and do is narrative in form, presenting what happened from a possible multiplicity of perspectives: not just the perspectives of those involved in what happened, but also the perspective of the narrator—the person who is giving the explanation. Seeing our everyday explanations in this light enables us also to see how emotional responses to value can be recognised in this potential multiplicity of perspectives. Things swim in emotions. In this respect, everyday explanation is extremely close to fictional narrative, and this is because they are both species of the same genus—the genus story.
Goldie, P., Narrative and perspective
Not just the way we see red when we get angry—that too, moreover; it is only erroneously that one considers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon!—but rather like this: things swim in emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of "gently lying there"
Robert Musil
The Diffusion of Useful Ignorance – Thoreau on the hubris of our knowledge, and the transcendent humility of not-knowing.
Complement with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on living with mystery in the age of knowledge.
Imagination may lead us along a path of dreams and associations, transforming our thoughts in response to some perception; or it may focus on the presented object, transforming our perception in response to our thoughts. Just where wine is situated between these two exercises of our imaginative powers is one of the deep questions that all winos must ask, if they are to understand their dear companion. Is wine like daydreams or like art? Does it point inwards to our subjective impressions and memories, or outwards to the world – bringing order as Tintoretto, Wordsworth or Mozart brought order, by reshaping the objects of our perception?
R. Scruton, I drink, therefore I am
Why, I briefly wondered as I took seat on the sofa [with Roger Penrose], did everyone but me seem to find caffeinated beverages more conducive than alcohol to pondering the mystery of existence?
Jim Holt Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
An enthusiasm for logic and number might overwhelm the ability to make good judgements, and form clear arguments. Today ‘economic’ argument prevails everywhere over political or ethical argument, but the sense of ‘economy’ this implies is a remarkably attenuated and impoverished one: it’s meaning has been cheapened.
Keith Tribe, The Economy of the Word (via oupacademic)
Las cinco emociones básicas a través de la música
Wendy MacNaughton charts the five basic human emotions in music. Couple with these essential reads on music, emotion, and the brain, then see the science of how music enchants the brain.
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For more ideas on expanding your learning horizons, check out Noodle.
Incommunicability, it would seem, was invented [in the eighteenth century] in order to take the banality out of mediocrity. It was incommunicability that enabled normal people in the literature at hand to come up with a story which others could find interesting.
Luhman Love as Passion
After one glass of bourbon, [Michael Stocker and I] agreed that our work consisted largely of reminding moral philosophers of truths about human life which are very well known to virtually all adult human beings except moral philosophers. After further glasses of bourbon, we agreed that it was less than clear that this was the most useful way in which to spend one’s life, as a kind of flying mission to a small group isolated from humanity in the intellectual Himalaya.
Bernard Williams, “The Liberalism of Fear” (Princeton: Princeton, 2005). Damn, he’s good. (via fuckyeahbernardwilliams)
What characterizes an epoch need not therefore necessarily be 'new' in the sense of appearing for the first time. Epochal signification may very well be connected with famous figures who are only now being moved into the centre of the historical stage.
N. Luhmann Love as Passion. The Codification of Intimacy
From within love, we conceal the chance nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained fate awaiting) and that who we may or may not be meeting on airplanes has no sense beyond that we choose to attribute to it — in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves.
Alain de Botton Essays in Love
No. I'm not making a problem out of a personal question, I make of a personal question an abscence of a problem.
Foucault, in The Chomsky-Foucault debate on Human Nature
...we must be very careful not to exaggerate the uniqueness of our species. The ancients apparently never gave much thought to this practice, the opposite of anthropomorphism, and so we lack a word for it. I will call it anthropodenial: a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves.
Frans de Waal
It's all on TV. So handling the cold metal, feeling it next to his skin that first time: it was easy. And when things come to you easily, when things click effortlessly into place, it is so tempting to use the four-letter F-word. Fate.
Zadie Smith 'White Teeth'
It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, "Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me." Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Zadie Smith "White Teeth"