Author Archive for homer

Call to Defend the Humanities

Published on November 5, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

skorton_medium

From Inside Higher Ed:

Arguing that the humanities are facing a crisis of funding and attention, Cornell University’s president, David Skorton, used his “state of the university” address Friday to say that he planned to start a national campaign on behalf of the humanities.

Much of his talk was about plans at Cornell to hire more than 100 humanists at various career stages over the next decade, but in answer to a question, he said he plans to start a national campaign on the issue of the humanities generally — and he discussed this goal in an interview Sunday.

“I have been disappointed not to see sufficient national dialogue” on the humanities, he said. “I don’t hear a national conversation about funding for the humanities.” As a result, Skorton said he would focus on humanities issues in major public addresses like Friday’s on campus and in others off campus, and that he would be working to involve leaders of other universities in doing the same.

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George Orwell’s days: From strawberry-picking in Hertfordshire to rat-fixations in Jura – the final diaries

Published on January 18, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933

Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933

From D. J. Taylor in The Times Online:

Diaries brings together the eleven individual journals that George Orwell compiled between 1931 and 1949. The final entry, written in September 1949, describes the daily routines of University College Hospital, where he was to die of advanced tuberculosis early in 1950. All were published in the monumental twenty-volume Complete Works (1998), but now appear consecutively for the first time. There is certainly a twelfth diary, and possibly even a thirteenth, among the items taken from a Barcelona hotel room in June 1937 by Soviet agents and now gathering dust somewhere in theFor more…For more… NKVD archive in Moscow. In his introduction, Peter Davison reveals that he once met a man – Miklos Kun, grandson of the Hungarian Communist leader Béla Kun – who had tracked down Orwell’s NKVD file, but was unable to fillet it before the archive shut its doors to the public.

Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries? And what do they tell us about him? Most writers’ diaries are self-conscious affairs, where the reader ends up with a sneaking feeling that the real audience is only a remote posterity. Orwell’s are notably unvarnished, often no more than a mundane domestic record, and yet this doesn’t make them personally revealing. There is, for example, almost nothing in them about Orwell’s literary techniques. Neither is there very much in the way of confidential remarks. When he notes in 1941, out of nowhere, that he is “thinking always of my island in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess, nor even see”, there is a sudden glimpse of all kinds of things not often associated with Orwell – frustrated yearnings, sequestered retreats, the deepest of romantic chasms.

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Only Reflect

Published on January 18, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

emfFrom Edmund White in the New York Times:

Aspiring fiction writers have been reading E. M. Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel” since it was first published in 1927. I can remember devouring it in 1960 or soon after; here was one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, the author of “A Passage to India,” divulging the secrets of the trade — or rather, expressing strong but always courteous opinions about the rival merits and methods of the important novelists of the past.

Here we first learned of “flat” (quickly sketched in) versus “round” (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both. Here we were told that Henry James’s decision in “The Ambassadors” to make his two chief male characters reverse positions by the end of the novel was a bad idea, a shoehorning of human vagaries into the rigors of unbending “pattern,” whereas Proust’s far better principle of composition was subject to a more fluid and spontaneous sense of “rhythm.” Forster gives as an example of rhythm Proust’s constant but never systematic or insistent return to the theme of the “little phrase,” a melody that the fictional composer Vinteuil serves up in various forms and that the characters hear at strategic moments. Forster writes of the melody, “There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.”

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern. In “Concerning E. M. Forster,” Kermode sinks probes into Forster’s book about fiction (the first chapter is called “Aspects of Aspects”) and manages along the way to explore aesthetic questions, Forster’s life and Forster’s links to other writers, like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.

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Is Logic Universal?

Published on April 6, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The journal Logica Universalis has issued a Call for Papers for a special issue dedicated to the question “Is logic universal?”

Included in the Call is this:

Many questions are connected to this issue:
1. Do all human beings have the same capacity for reasoning?
Do people of different gender, ethnic, cultural and linguistics backgrounds
reason in the same way?
2. Does reasoning evolve?
Did human beings  reason in the same way two centuries ago?
In the future will human beings reason in the same way?
Did computers change our way to reason?
Is a mathematical proof independent of time and culture ?
3. Do we reason in different ways depending on the situation?
Do we use the same logic for everyday life, physics, economy?
4. Do the different systems of logic reflect the diversity of reasonings?
5. Is there any absolute true ways of reasoning ?

Any contribution dedicated to one aspects of the question "Is logic
universal?" is welcome.
Submit your paper to
universal.logic@ufc.br
before  August 31st 2009

Cfp: “John Dewey’s 150th Birthday Celebration,” Center for Inquiry, Amherst, NY, USA, October 22-24, 2009

Published on March 3, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

An International Conference on Dewey’s Impact on America and the World. Papers should address some aspect of Dewey’s work and its influence.

Invited speakers include: Nadine Strossen, current President of the American Civil Liberties Union; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies; Ron Giere, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota.

Reading time should be between 20-25 minutes. Please only submit papers for blind review. Papers should be sent via email in .pdf or .doc format. Please submit papers to: jshook@centerforinquiry.net

Submitted papers due: September 1st, 2009.

The above announcement was copied from one of several Internet sources turned up in a Google search. An announcement of the event can be found on the Research page of the Center for Inquiry’s web site. It is likely that additional information will be found there as the conference approaches