Newsletter

11.02.2004

Links:

"Shakespeare in Quarto" link

Articles:

"In the end, the problem with rockism isn't that it's wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn't seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.

"Are you really pondering the phony distinction between 'great art' and a 'guilty pleasure' when you're humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely - and fearlessly - pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on "Saturday Night Live" or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you're waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara's ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson's sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks's felonious purr." link

"The traditional theory of the just war covers three main topics—the cause of war, the conduct of war, and the consequences of war. Or, in the Scholastic tags: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. But most attention is given now to the middle term, the conduct of war. That is where clear offenses are most easily identified, though only occasionally reported and even more rarely punished. The two main rules of jus in bello have to do with discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, the latter to be spared as far as possible, and proportionality, so that violence is calibrated to its need for attaining the war's end. The claims of morality here are recognized with difficulty in actual combat, and disputed when recognized. Why should that be?" link

"Atheism is not a freestanding worldview. Polytheist cultures may contain philosophies that assert the indifference of the gods - Epicureanism is an example, and others can be found in ancient India and China - but they do not produce atheists, who emerge only in reaction against monotheism. Atheism is primarily an episode in the history of the decline of Christianity, and the idea that there is anything resembling an atheist tradition beyond that limited context is a category mistake. The same is true of the idea of an atheist morality. No values follow logically from the denial of the Christian God. If atheists today think that unbelief goes with liberal values, it is because they are ignorant of history - or have chosen to forget it." link

"Nobody (that is nobody of good spirit) wishes to inflict his taste on others, although it sometimes happens that conflict is unavoidable. When I lived in the Philippines I used for a while to think that a little mainstream classical music would not be unacceptable in the car: a Mozart piano concerto, for instance, might make a pleasant change from Filipino pop radio. Then I overheard a conversation not meant for my ears: "Pangit ang musika ni James, di ba? Punebre! " (James's music is ugly, isn't it? Funereal!)" link

"In the days before print, books had to be copied out by hand, like medieval manuscripts. If you were a copyist, you wanted to make sure you weren't wasting a few years of your life writing out some piece of trash. You stuck with the tried and true: the Bible, or Aristotle, or Virgil. But a printer could publish anything reasonably quickly. As long as he could sell it, he'd print it.

"Even writing was a corrupt new technology, according to Socrates. First of all, if you used this technology you'd start to forget everything, because you'd just rely on writing things down instead of memorizing them. (How much of what we read do we remember? Five per cent? One per cent?) Writing would produce a bunch of know-it-alls, who thought they understood something because they read it somewhere." link

"It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.

"Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

"News@nature.com tells the story of a find that changes the world of palaeoanthropology, and challenges our perception of what it means to be human." link

"The traditional theory of the just war covers three main topics—the cause of war, the conduct of war, and the consequences of war. Or, in the Scholastic tags: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. But most attention is given now to the middle term, the conduct of war. That is where clear offenses are most easily identified, though only occasionally reported and even more rarely punished. The two main rules of jus in bello have to do with discrimination between combatants and noncombatants, the latter to be spared as far as possible, and proportionality, so that violence is calibrated to its need for attaining the war's end. The claims of morality here are recognized with difficulty in actual combat, and disputed when recognized. Why should that be?" link

"Cutting in line is getting expensive. But is it a moral concern?" link

"If you watch a gorilla, it is very difficult to escape the impression that it is really a human in a hairy costume. Its manipulation of objects, interactions with others and the deep brown pools of its eyes leave a profound impression on the human watcher. But what – if anything – is it thinking? And, how can we tell? These fascinating questions, which straddle philosophy, linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, have become the centre of a whole research field over the last three decades. They provide a comparative and evolutionary counterpoint to the more general studies of consciousness that have become so fashionable. Finding answers to them tests the intelligence and thought of the scientists who devise appropriate experiments as much as those experiments test the intelligence and thought of their primate subjects." link

"The British did not have 'philosophes.' They had 'moral philosophers' a very different breed. Those historians who belittle or dismiss the idea of a British Enlightenment do so because they do not recognize the features of the philosophes in the moral philosophers-and with good reason: the physiognomy is quite different. " link

"John Locke is a prophet for our times, largely ignored in his own land." link

"Can science and reason be used to develop ethical judgments? Many theists claim that without religious foundations, 'anything goes,' and social chaos will ensue. Scientific naturalists believe that secular societies already have developed responsible ethical norms and that science and reason have helped us to solve moral dilemmas. How and in what sense this occurs are vital issues that need to be discussed in contemporary society, for this may very well be the hottest issue of the twenty-first century." link

"Ginsburg's book was the starting point for a far-reaching revision of literary history. Up to that point, we had generally presumed a neat social dichotomy in reading habits: the masses read 'popular' literature (chapbooks, almanacs, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, romances, pulp fiction); only elites read the classics. According to one line of argument, elites defined the classics, which were not objectively 'great,' but a rather arbitrary list that only reflected the prejudices of professors, educational bureaucrats, and Mortimer Adler. If the lower classes occasionally indulged in high culture, they did so only in slavish deference to bourgeois values—rather like Leonard Bast, the clerk in E. M. Forster's Howard's End, who struggles pathetically with Ruskin simply because he has been told that Ruskin is 'the greatest master of English Prose.'

"All that has been overturned by the new history of reading. It turns out that common readers were not pathetic sheep, nor were they reading trash exclusively. The essential point is that the great books enjoyed large and enthusiastic audiences in all social strata." link

"I wonder whether I am afflicted with something more than a "gentle madness," as Nicholas A. Basbanes described it in his 1999 book on the history of book collecting. You see, I spend more on books than I do on food." link

"Brain changes partly explain why self-control improves with age, suggests a new study linking a type of memory to the activation of various brain regions involved in behavior." link

"Ethics are changing in our time of change. There are still values that matter, and they have to do with our autonomy, the integrity of our community, with human security and human flourishing. Most societies have ways of considering those fundamentals. In today’s pluralism, we can scarcely expect unanimous agreement on ethical details. The best we can hope for is the development of a discourse in which our ethical values are explored and developed, honoured and respected, and refined over time into expressions of security and flourishing for us as individuals and the communities in which we live. It would help if schoolchildren could learn that this discourse is vital to them, their society and the world at large. " link

"Why every modern revolution is inspired by a doctor from Somerset." link

"The influence of William Shakespeare on western culture has made him arguably Britain's greatest export. Now it is being claimed that his work resembles the teachings of the Islamic Sufi sect." link