“In order to contrast functional pluralism with Jackson’s approach, it will be helpful to have a toy example. I’ll use the concept cool, as employed by speakers of English dialect (foreign, I suspect, to most of my readers) called ‘Street Cred’.” [Price, H. (1997). “Naturalism and the Fate of the M-Worlds”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian [...]
Duchamp once gave to his sister as a wedding gift a copy of Euclid’s Elements with the instruction to suspend it from her balcony by a thread.
[Anecdote from Hanjo Berressem, “Serres Reads Pynchon / Pynchon Reads Serres”, Postmodern Culture, Volume 11, Number 3 (May, 2001)]
[The following are from one of the books under consideration: Serres, [...]
After reading about half of Derrida’s Writing and Difference (to be precise, the essays up to and including “Violence and Metaphysics”), I find myself somewhat stranded. The text is dense, deliberately playful, deliberately reflexive and designed to open space for thought rather than close it off (I take one of Derrida’s central concerns to be [...]
As the editors say: “Our people have been sent out and we’ve scraped up this film from off the streets … the syrupy residue of your urban night secrets are now contained in plastic vials marked THROB. Our data thus far indicates you are much braver alone, and at night.” With those words Hubris Magazine [...]
[An increasing frequency of quotes and remarks regarding language to be taken by my readers that I am making some sort of progress towards writing a thesis, though at present my thoughts are, like Witggenstein says in his intro to Philosophical Investigations, going criss-cross in every direction, though unlike Wittgenstein, I have little hope they [...]
I’ve been reading Rorty. In particular his Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists, his Analytic Philosophy and Transformative Philosophy and his A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. I agree with almost everything he says, but I think he’s mistaken to suppose that the rejection of analytic philosophy implies a rejection of aiming philosophy towards science. While [...]
Can you think of something bigger than the biggest thing describable, and if you think so, have I not already described it here? How can something refer to nothing? Who will win the World Cup? These and other questions answered, or ignored, herein.
”...to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts [...]
Orientation 1
Sometimes you think that you see a man in a corner of your office. He looks at you with clear eyes. You have not commented about this to anyone else in your organisation. The strangeness with which you imbue a stranger has less to do with the way they act than [...]
An idea (from Andersen, Peter Bøgh. 1996. Morphodynamic Models of Communication. In B. Holmqvist, P. Bøgh Andersen, H. Klein, R. Posner (eds): Signs of Work, 151-217. 1996) is to construct a program that recursively looks up dictionary definitions. Eventually, it is theorised, semantic primitives will emerge. You could do it with Python and WordNet. To-do: [...]
“We want to enclose the universe in the work of art. Individual objects do not exist any more.”
(Gino Severini, “The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism—Futurist Manifesto 1913”, in Umbro Apollonio (Ed.) Futurist Manifestos, Thames and Hudson, London, p. 118)
Yesterday I bought the Futurist Manifestos and subsequently have decided to start a (virtual) Futurist exhibition. First up [...]