Posted by: lettrist on: April 11, 2009
I am new to WordPress. But already I like the tag feature that allows you to see all the other WordPress blogs tagged with the same things as yours. I like seeing who else writes about ‘anarchism’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘Lyotard’, ‘John Stuart Mill’, and whatever else I am interested in.
One thing I noticed is that there [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 7, 2009
In an essay he wrote for the Nation Magazine, Philosophical Convictions, Richard Rorty said that, “Every anti-foundationalist movement within philosophy produces a spate of books by nonphilosophers denouncing ‘the treason of the intellectuals’”. Offended by what foundationalists (and anti-foundationalists) consider “undoubtedly the most degenerated, most artificial, and most eclectic phase in history,” (a quote from [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: July 19, 2008
“The content of a medium is always another medium.”
- Marshall McLuhan
I want to talk about a dance show I was at last night in Seattle featuring breakbeat pioneer Lorin Ashton, also known as “Bassnectar“.
No other music genre perhaps besides hip hop has the level of genrefication as does EDM (electronic dance music). “Glitch melodics”, “big [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: June 30, 2008
History is empty without philosophy, and philosophy is blind without history.
This is the conventional wisdom passed down to us from professional social scientist Imre Lakatos, though the quip has its origins with Immanuel Kant. If you pick up a book like The History of Philosophy and Social Science by Scott Gordon, you are treated [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: April 16, 2008
One of my friends was looking over my entries and the links on my blog roll and she said we were all too aloof and dry. She does not see a Dionysian-Apollonian synthesis with all the wordy things we’re doing in hyperblog land, this blog included. Maybe she’s right; after all, she’s a free-spirited intelligent [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: February 11, 2008
Baudrillard’s Bastard tagged me in the following exercise:
1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).2. Open the book to page 123.3. Find the fifth sentence.4. Post the next three sentences.5. Tag five people.
The nearest book to me is Zizek’s Lacan – The Silent Partners and the fifth sentence on p. 123 [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: January 30, 2008
If we look at this chart by Ben-Ami Scharfstein which compares all the important philosophers of the West and compares them in terms of how suicidal they were, we see that Kant above all the rest is immensely suicidal. He’s a hypochondriac; he’s fearful of inherited illness; he’s depressive; he never married and he’s the [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: November 28, 2007
We live in the Information Age, it is said, and yet information is not free.
Globalization has increased information and information networks. We are more aware of what is happening around the world.
There is now a sea of information.
Yet we are aware of this information only through specific organizations and aggregations of that information.
We rely on [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: October 10, 2007
Aquinas said moral language is meaningless if it does not exist.
William James gave Aquinas’ argument a pragmatic twist. He divided beliefs into live options and dead options. James criticized both kinds of religionist philosophers (atheist and theist) for being obsessed with dead options–issues that made no practical difference. James was an agnostic about God and [...]
Posted by: lettrist on: September 27, 2007
Almost the entire second half of the twentieth century continental philosophy is Heideggerian. Perhaps the other half is Wittgensteinian. I’d love for my generalizations to be correct, but they are probably good as far as generalizations go.
In general it’s because Heidegger is so original and calls into question nearly all of traditional philosophy before him. [...]
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