Category: Arts and Culture

Ever wonder what real, working philosophers think about subjects like medical immortality or whether alcoholics should be allowed to breed? Ask Philosophers has assembled a couple dozen professional philosophers to provide commentary on questions from the general public.

There is a paradox surrounding philosophy that AskPhilosophers seeks to address. On the one hand, everyone confronts philosophical issues throughout his or her life. But on the other, very few have the opportunity to learn about philosophy, a subject that is usually taught only at the college level. (Why? There is no good reason for this and plenty of bad ones.) AskPhilosophers aims to bridge this gap by putting the skills and knowledge of trained philosophers at the service of the general public.

“Is thought possible without language? (re: Helen Keller)” … “What, if anything, distinguishes natural from artistic beauty?” The answers aren’t always 100% satisfying (philosophy never is), but they do a great job of bringing clearer focus to the questions themselves.

“Can Non-Being and Being occupy the same space at the same time?” How many hands do you have? Two? Or do you have three? Your left hand, your right hand, and the non-existent third hand that’s attached to your head? Obviously, that last “hand” shouldn’t count. To say that you don’t have a third hand isn’t to say that you have a hand that possesses the particularly stunting property of non-existence.

Especially amazing is the fact that the site has been so successful in getting real philosophers to engage the public so actively/enthusiastically. A wonderful experiment.

Technorati Tags: philosophy

Fascinating conversation between Moira Gunn and philosopher Daniel Dennett at IT Conversations (podcast). Dennett is a renowned determinist, but isn’t talking along those line here. His book “Breaking the Spell” makes the point that religion has been — and is — one of the most important forces (for change, or its opposite) in the world. As such, it deserves to be studied objectively, from the outside, as thoroughly and as rigorously as the banking industry, as politics, as world demographics. “The spell” is what prevents that kind of study from taking place — the tacit belief that religion is somehow in a different category, and that it’s somehow disrespectful or taboo to study religion itself. Religions like to be studied from the inside — using their own scriptures or lore as a framework for study. But they tend to resist study from the outside – a spell that Dennett wants to break.

He also makes some fascinating observations about the biological/genetic triggers for religion, leading to some interesting speculation on its cultural origins. Another synopsis on Dennett at Salon.

Totally tangential: Not even The Archbishop of Canterbury believes that creationism should be taught in schools. SF Chronicle:

I think creationism is, in a sense, a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories,” the Most Rev. Rowan Williams told the Guardian newspaper. … My worry is that creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it.

England does not have an evangelical movement to parallel the one in the U.S.

Landed in Austin, TX today for South by Southwest 2006 — a week of seminars and conversations on web tech, emerging trends, “visionaries,” etc. Expect to be bombarded by Web 2.0 stuff. Did not expect to be bombarded by the downtown Austin / 6th St. scene. Walked out the door of the hotel hoping to scrounge up some dinner and the city opened up wide — tattoo parlors and jazz clubs, cajun restaurants (giant crawfish on the side of The Boiling Pot asking “Dya suck the heads off?”) and fajita stands, nudie revues and head shops and hip magic shows and costumed buskers and music pouring out of every doorway and even a bar with a tropical aquarium spanning an entire 50-foot wall. And it’s muggy, right in the middle of winter (should be 91 degrees Sunday). The pigeon has landed.

Dealing with a bit of a dilemma: A 12-year-old niece is becoming interested in music, and turns to me for suggestions. Excellent! Of course the overwhelming temptation is to send her MP3s, much as friends used to exchange mix tapes. But her parents want to take a hard line on MP3 swapping and copyright matters, set fully legal ground rules from the outset. So what can I do? Send her links to iTMS or other services for low-bitrate 30-second previews? All of this digital flexibility has left the legally conscientious parent worse off than we were 25 years ago. We’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water.

Related: Jamie Kellner, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting was recently quoted as saying:

[Ad skips are] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you’re actually stealing the programming.

In response, LawMeme has posted Top Ten New Copyright Crimes, speculating on just how draconian things could become:

9. Changing radio stations in the car when a commercial comes on.
Future radios will prevent listeners from changing channels when a commercial comes on. The RIAA has not yet taken a position on whether it is permissible to switch channels when the listener doesn’t like the song.

More at the site, with more bizarre Kellner-isms, such as this one on bathroom breaks:

I guess there’s a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom. But if you formalize it and you create a device that skips certain second increments, you’ve got that only for one reason, unless you go to the bathroom for 30 seconds. They’ve done that just to make it easy for someone to skip a commercial.

First foray into Google Video begins with a documentary on Japanse Sushi, with less emphasis on the food than on the customs and etiquette of the sushi-ya. Equal parts educational and comic-surreal. You’ll even learn why some Japanese people’s feet smell of vinegar.

“Maa maa maa maa.” “Oh toh toh toh.”

Thanks baald

Would you send a Christmas card to a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian friend? The thing that strikes me about the movement to boycott stores that promote generic holiday messages rather than specific Christmas greetings is not just that it’s ignorant, but that it’s so willfully mean, so intentionally and obviously anti-American (anti-freedom).

Now the same groups are tweaked that the White House is sending out non-religion-specific holiday cards. I’d like to get a list of addresses for these groups and send them some lovely Kwanzaa cards. These fundamentalist minds are so twisted up in knots, they end up defying everything Christ stood for:

“I think it’s more important to put Christ back into our war planning than into our Christmas cards,” said the [council general secretary of the National Council of Churches.]

Oh yeah, I’m sure Christ would be on the front lines in Iraq. His message always pro-war and anti-inclusive. Cripes.

Update: Looking back on the piece, it appears that the quote above was placed in a weird context, and that the secretary was saying that our war planning is missing Christ’s message. I stand corrected. Thanks Gilbert.

Listening to the IT Conversations podcast of author Paul Graham speaking at OSCON 2005 on “…the reasons why open source is able to produce better software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.” :

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed. [Listen]

Been meaning to test the feature at ITC that lets you embed a timed excerpt of any audio file at the site; check out the Listen link above, which I was able to create in about 10 seconds by timing the excerpt in iTunes and typing the start/stop times into ITC’s “Create Clip/Excerpt” function. Slick.