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Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

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    Category: Art

    • Relativisim, Revolutionary Fictionalism, Moral Facts and #TheDress

      By: Leigh M. Johnson If you haven't already, you should read yesterday's Stone article in the NYT by Justin McBrayer entitled "Why Our Children Don't Believe There Are Moral Facts." There, McBrayer bemoans the ubiquity of a certain configuration of the difference between "fact" and "opinion" assumed in most pre-college educational instruction (and, not insignificantly, endorsed…

    • Anonymous reviewing is not enough to counter implicit bias, so what can we do to mitigate it?

      This article in Aesthetics for Birds has some interesting statistics on the percentage of papers authored or co-authored by women and minorities in the top print aesthetics journals: Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics. About 20% of articles in these journals are written by women in the period from 2010 onwards.…

    • Really just a wonderful performance, and a bit about teaching

      Georgetown, like many Jesuit schools, requires philosophy of all undergrads – two courses.  Since most of these students are not going to go on in philosophy, some of us spend a fair bit of time reflecting on what best to aim for in such a class. I don't really think the first steps of professional…

    • Waves of Mind-Wandering in Live Performances

      I’m thinking (again) about beeping people during aesthetic experiences. The idea is this. Someone is reading a story, or watching a play, or listening to music. She has been told in advance that a beep will sound at some unexpected time, and when the beep sounds, she is to immediately stop attending to the book,…

    • Why do the inauthentic features of forgeries escape us, whereas it seems so easy to see they were forgeries afterwards?

      I was looking for the source of the following picture (see below), to find out more about it.  The picture seems, to the casual observer, to be an early modern engraving, perhaps from Germany or the Low Countries. It shows a man who looks out of the confines of his world (the edge of the…

    • Deathbed philosophy

      Last night I heard the Vertavo Quartet perform Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C♯ minor, Op. 131 in de Kleine Zaal of de Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. On his deathbed, Schubert had this piece performed. [Schubert was, in fact, no stranger to composing a haunting  C-minor quartet (unfinished).] Whatever Schubert intended with this request, I…