Archive for the 'News' Category

From Jennifer B. McDonald in the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

 This book review would be so much easier to write were we to play by John D’Agata’s rules. So let’s try it. (1) This is not a book review; it’s an essay. (2) I’m not a critic; I’m an artist. (3) Nothing I say can be used against me by the subjects of this essay, nor may anyone hold me to account re facts, truth or any contract I have supposedly entered into with you, the reader. There are to be no objections. There are to be no letters of complaint. For you are about to have — are you ready? — a “genuine experience with art.”

Such a declaration is liberating to an author, as McDonald then says. But an author unfettered by facts or one free from the distinction fact-fiction is someone to watch closely. When reading a work by an author who adjusts facts to whim or “artistic” judgment a reader would do well to keep one hand on his mental wallet and a sharp eye out for philosophical pickpockets.

For the full review…

From Samuel McNerney at Scientific American…

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17^th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding. More…

Essay from Elisabeth Camp at nonsite.org, photo by R Carruthers and credits to Apic/©APIC…

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We make incessant and insistent narrative sense of the world around us and of our place in it—so much so that some scholars have suggested “homo narrans” as a more appropriate identifying description for our species than “homo sapiens”.1  Indeed, a long-standing tradition holds that our very self-identities have an essentially narrative shape: that who each of us is is determined by the stories of our lives, and that in some sense we create our selves by crafting those stories.  In this essay, I focus on an especially compelling case of narrative self-construction: Wordsworth’s Prelude.  I argue that we do need rich, substantive selves of the sort delivered by narratives like The Prelude, both in order to evaluate our past actions and to guide future ones.  However, the very feature which makes Wordsworth’s poem so rhetorically powerful as an autobiography—his invocation of a robust teleological structure, which is imposed on him from infancy by Nature—also prevents us from embracing it as a model for our own self-understanding, because it conflicts sharply with modern views about ontology.  Contemporary advocates of a narrative conception of the self, such as Jerome Bruner, Alasdair MacIntyre and Marya Schectman, drop The Prelude’s objectionable ontological assumptions.  But rather than placing the narrative conception of self on a firm metaphysical foundation, this actually intensifies the threat of fictionalism: the risk that the selves we fashion through stories are mere self-deluding illusions. I conclude by gesturing toward the characters within stories as an alternative literary model which avoids many of these problems. More…

Marilynne Robinson in The Nation…

Recently a friend sent me a composite photograph of the planet Mercury. Even as a composite, grossly disfigured to accommodate our strategies of perception, it had about it the great calm and sufficiency the ancients attributed to the spheres. The innumerable scars of eons of local cataclysm were only proof of its indomitability. Someone has named the more visible of these scars. The largest, a gigantic bloom of relative brightness, is Debussy. Machaut, Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff have their craters, as do Rembrandt, Matisse and Derain. And there is a fosse, a trench, called Pantheon, which I take to be a shrine to the unknown, or in any case the unnamed, cultural gods. I like the eccentricity of the choices, which suggests that personal preferences are reflected in them. There is an astronomer somewhere who loves Machaut and Derain. So a record of his or her quietest human pleasures is inscribed, not on the planet, of course, but on its image. More detail has been added to our universe, to the map of what we know in the very human ways we can know it.

The thought occurred to me that if the name of everyone on earth who is remembered for any kind of distinction were assigned to a crater or a mountain or a seeming rivulet somewhere in the visible universe, the astronomers would soon be out of names. The universe expands, in terms of the horizons of our awareness, in terms of its own phenomenal life, and again and most dramatically in terms of the horizons of plausible speculation. More…

From Nicholas Lezard at The Guardian…

In three years it will be the 250th anniversary of the publication of this incendiary work. I hope suitable festivities are being planned. I cannot think of any political work this old which survives modern scrutiny so well – not so much because it contains essential truths, but because it is still such fun to read. Dangerous fun, that is: it’s like being in the presence of a particularly enraged alternative comedian, an Enlightenment Bill Hicks, perhaps.
Readers opening the first edition and reading the first entry – on Abraham – would have raised an eyebrow at this: “The fact is that the seed of Ishmael has been infinitely more favoured by God than the seed of Jacob. Both races have in turn produced thieves; but the Arab thieves have been prodigiously superior to the Jewish thieves.” Any reader consoling him- or herself at the time with the thought that this is just antisemitism of a particularly broad kind is not reading properly: this is a declaration, as it were, that nothing in the following pages is going to be treated as sacred. Everything is about to get a good kicking, and irony will be piled upon irony. More…