I'll be offering two honors sections next semester: Philosophy of Music (300-level seminar; some familiarity with and, especially, lots of enthusiasm for philosophical analysis required) and an honors section of Art and Philosophy (100-level, but equally rigorous and challenging).
Student blogs, with some new requirements designed to improve inter-student communication and facilitate responsible, substantive blogging, will be one optional component of each seminar. In addition, all prospective honors students should take a close look at Matt Silliman's brief essay from T-12 Online, Volume 16.1 "What Makes Honors Students Honorable," where he offers a set of ideal (since never fully realized) intellectual virtues to which we all ought to aspire.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
(All courses) Final Day to Blog
Wednesday, December 10, is the final day to blog for any of my fall, 2008 seminars. I will be removing all links to student blogs as the semester comes to a close.
(EE, AP-honors, NHN) Final Drafts of Term Papers Due
All final drafts of term papers for my three seminars are due tomorrow, December 10, by 5 PM at the latest in my mailbox (100 Porter). Reminder: I do not accept or grade late papers without a valid excuse as identified in the official MCLA handbook.
(NHN) Faith in Reason
We noted yesterday a reason to question reason's capacity to be self-justifying, hence a reasonable interpretation of the claim that we place our "faith" in reason (see Siegel on this issue for further study). Fallibilism is the usual result. But in the wrong hands, these same ideas often have an anti-intellectual or irrational flavor:
BUSH: Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can -- you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.
BUSH: Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can -- you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
(AP) Piper's Fetishizing of Fetishism
Adrian Piper claims that we errantly fetishize art objects if we see them as unique, their spatio-temporal locations and histories not amounting to a full-fledged "identity, and their putative power to influence us a mere reflection of our own displaced capacities. Human beings, that is, are alone inherently creative, "alive," and non-reproducible.
Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"). But the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)
It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.
Her complaint with fetishism is Marxist in spirit (as he applies the concept to commodities and economic "laws"). But the impulse to fetishize in aesthetics (as in human sexuality and religion), while clearly an epistemological and metaphysical error (the object of our fetish does not in fact possess the properties we ascribe to it), is relatively harmless. We oftentimes willingly submit to exaggerated or false accounts of the nature of art objects in order fully to appreciate their aesthetic dimension. (We "lose" ourselves in a novel, for example, tacitly attributing to its characters and setting more reality and power than they possess.)
It may be that Piper would not count these as legitimate examples of fetishism in art (because we are at least partly aware of our impulse to fetishize). At any rate, the very idea of fetishism seems to lose much of its force when transferred from the life-and-death realm of political economy to the highly subjective world of art.
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Monday, December 01, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)