Category: Catarina Dutilh Novaes

  • I’m in San Diego at the moment for the Pacific APA. Naturally, California rhymes with sea and sun, and in the absence of a California-themed Brazilian song worth posting (of course, there’s this silly one by Lulu Santos), I had to think of the classic ‘Wave’, composed by Tom Jobim and perhaps best known in…

  • BMoF's guest of this week is Luciana Souza, a Brazilian singer who is surprisingly little known in Brazil, having been based in the US for many years now. (Indeed, I discovered her recently thanks to the recommendation of a BMoF reader.) And yet, she has been receiving wide recognition for her work, including a number…

  • A few weeks ago I had a post on different ways of counting infinities; the main point was that two of the basic principles that hold for counting finite collections cannot be both transferred over to the case of measuring infinite collections. Now, as a matter of fact I am equally (if not more) interested…

  • The episode of this week in the web-series Dominguinhos+ has an unbelievably beautiful version of ‘Lamento Sertanejo’, one of Dominguinhos’ classics (also famous in the Gilberto Gil version). It is an amazing collaboration between singer Mayra Andrade, mandolinist Hamilton de Holanda, and guitarist Yamandu Costa, two of the most talented musicians currently in activity in Brazil.…

  • Over the weekend I came across this hoax piece of ‘news’, 'reporting' that a boy who had been raised by orangutans has been recaptured so as to live a ‘normal human life’ again in Malaysia. Despite (or perhaps because!) the phoniness of the ‘article’, it did get me thinking: in such a hypothetical scenario, would…

  • Still on time for a BMoF today, and here is a recently released video clip/short film by rapper Criolo (that I'm a bit of a fan is no secret to anyone) of two tracks, 'Duas de Cinco' and 'Cóccix-ência'. Hope ya'll in the mood for rap on Fridays today!

  • (Cross-posted at M-Phi) In his Two New Sciences (1638), Galileo presents a puzzle about infinite collections of numbers that became known as ‘Galileo’s paradox’. Written in the form of a dialogue, the interlocutors in the text observe that there are many more positive integers than there are perfect squares, but that every positive integer is the root…

  • … in Turkey. I suppose no one should be surprised by what Recep Tayyip Erdogan is capable of by now, but this is definitely a new low. Below is a short BBC video narrating the chronology of events,  and here is a piece in the Guardian from the point of view of those fighting back against…

  • This week we had the pleasure of welcoming Jerrold Levinson for a workshop in Groningen. I had never met Jerry in person before, but I had anticipated great conversations on music, given his influential work on the aesthetics of music. Well, as it turns out, it was even better than expected (and would have been…

  • I am currently supervising a student writing a paper on Wittgenstein’s notion of therapy as a metaphilosophical concept. The paper relies centrally on a very useful distinction discussed in N. Rescher’s 1985 book The Strife of Systems (though I do not know whether it was introduced there for the first time), namely the distinction between…