Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
bbc for the love of money - Google Search
bbc for the love of money - Google Search
Watch this series at some point
Watch this series at some point
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Haaretz - Israel News - Search Results
Haaretz - Israel News - Search Results
Israeli/Hungarian desserts
Israeli/Hungarian desserts
Friday, December 25, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist - The Sidney Awards - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - The Sidney Awards - NYTimes.com
best thoughtful magazine articles of the year
best thoughtful magazine articles of the year
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Use Internet, not cable
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/personaltech/10basics.html?em=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1260641319-sZqqB39czKXfH/2PMjbMsw
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Chicago a capella O Lux beatissima
http://www.chicagoacappella.org/recordings/christmas-a-cappella.htm
More on Rio's gangs
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/10/police-raid-rio-favela.html
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Any Human Heart - William Boyd
Any Human Heart - William Boyd
Review of reviews; really useful website
Review of reviews; really useful website
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Advice for Philosophers trapped in elevator
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/nyregion/10elevator.html
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Case of the Missing Candlesticks: Unquiet Thoughts : The New Yorker
The Case of the Missing Candlesticks: Unquiet Thoughts : The New Yorker
Alex Ross on the infamous Tosca production
Alex Ross on the infamous Tosca production
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Trial And Error: Penne Strascicate
Trial And Error: Penne Strascicate
Tito made, as well as pizzacchorie (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/311mrex.html) and pasta alla norma (http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/pasta-alla-norma/)
Tito made, as well as pizzacchorie (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/dining/311mrex.html) and pasta alla norma (http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/pasta-alla-norma/)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
First Person Plural - The Atlantic (November 2008)
First Person Plural - The Atlantic (November 2008)
Paul Bloom happiness, pleasure
Paul Bloom happiness, pleasure
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The New Yorker Digital Edition : Dec 18, 2006
The New Yorker Digital Edition : Dec 18, 2006
Tad Friend Memoir of his mother
Tad Friend Memoir of his mother
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
http://assets.cambridge.org/97805216/20918/sample/9780521620918ws.pdf
Maria Frasca Spada Space and the Self in Hume's Treatise
Maria Frasca Spada Space and the Self in Hume's Treatise
Saturday, October 3, 2009
7003453-Gilbert-Ryle-The-Concept-of-Mind.pdf (application/pdf Object)
7003453-Gilbert-Ryle-The-Concept-of-Mind.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Electronic Text of The Concept of Mind
Electronic Text of The Concept of Mind
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Life in tune - Times Literary Supplement
Life in tune - Times Literary Supplement
Fodor on Williams on Opera
Fodor on Williams on Opera
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
glover_2003.pdf (application/pdf Object)
glover_2003.pdf (application/pdf Object)
Glover's Tanner lectures on humanism in psychiatry
Glover's Tanner lectures on humanism in psychiatry
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Paris eatingguide
http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/global-table-nonstop-eating-in-paris/?ex=1263355200&en=8587141931163ed5&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=TM-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M106-ROS-0709-L1&WT.mc_ev=click
Friday, July 17, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Friday, June 12, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
ON BEING CERTAIN: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not - Robert A. Burton
ON BEING CERTAIN: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not - Robert A. Burton
Get students to read when they study Descartes
Get students to read when they study Descartes
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor - Let Doctors Bid for Medicare Business - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Contributor - Let Doctors Bid for Medicare Business - NYTimes.com
Medicare provision as reverse dutch book auction
Medicare provision as reverse dutch book auction
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Hell hath no fury like a middleman scorned
Hell hath no fury like a middleman scorned
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Hell hath no fury like the middleman scorned
Hell hath no fury like the middleman scorned
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Op-Ed Columnist - Options Are Overrated - NYTimes.com
Hell hath no fury like the middleman scorned.
Watch it, banks and helath insurance companies
Hell hath no fury like the middleman scorned.
Watch it, banks and helath insurance companies
Monday, June 8, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Craigleigh Gardens Historical Plaque
Craigleigh Gardens Historical Plaque
google Cgriagleigh Gardens for lots of hits.
google Cgriagleigh Gardens for lots of hits.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Mr. Smith’s 3-Card Monty Problem - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com
Mr. Smith’s 3-Card Monty Problem - TierneyLab Blog - NYTimes.com
and links to the Monty Hall problem
and links to the Monty Hall problem
Monday, May 4, 2009
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? - The New York Times
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? - The New York Times
Are the Atkins recommendations good, and the medical establishment view false?
Are the Atkins recommendations good, and the medical establishment view false?
Friday, May 1, 2009
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Art, Darwin, Dutton
Art in Darwin's terms, TLS Mar 20.2009
Denis Dutton's book, The Art Instinct, talks adaption, natural selection, and painting
Roger Kimball
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {
color:#06c;
}
In the second part of the Critique of Judgement, Kant declared it “quite certain” that mankind would never be able to plumb, let alone explain, the mechanics of life. “It is”, he wrote, “absurd for men to make any such attempt or to hope that another Newton will arise in the future, who shall make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered. We must absolutely deny this insight to men.” Today, there are many observers who believe Kant was too modest. Advances in genetics, they believe, present the possibility that what Newton did for the physical world will shortly be done for the world of organic nature. Not only will there be a Newton of a blade of grass: the sequencing of the human genome assures that there will also be a Newton of human nature.
Whether this confidence is misplaced remains to be seen. Perhaps the sheer complexity of nature, including human nature, has ordained that the progress of knowledge is never-ending. If so, then while we know more today than we did yesterday, part of what we know is the ever-broadening expanse of what lies beyond our ken. Be that as it may, advances in our understanding of the process of evolution have underwritten ambitious new intellectual sorties into every aspect of our social life. There are now neo-Darwinian reflections about everything from altruism to Zoroastrianism, illuminating or obfuscating in proportion to the probity and sophistication of the observer. Denis Dutton’s book The Art Instinct is a lively addition to this library of disabusement.
Disabusement? Explaining art in the stringent naturalistic terms required by Darwinian evolution – natural selection is a most exigent taskmaster – is perforce a coming-down-to-earth for aesthetics, a discipline that has been wont to look upward in hushed tones whenever words like “art” or “beauty” are uttered. But it is part of Dutton’s goal in this book to take a thoroughly naturalistic approach to the phenomena of art and aesthetic delectation without sacrificing art’s native prerogatives. He brings both a scientist’s sobriety and a connoisseur’s enthusiasm to his subject. If the two do not always cohabit without friction, Dutton is none the less careful to make sure that each gets its innings.
This is a not insignificant rhetorical feat. Superficially, at least, Darwinian explanations share something with Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean explanations. They are systematically cynical about appearances, instances of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. How often have you heard it said that really, at bottom, all human relations are a matter of (take your pick) economic exploitation, unconscious libidinal impulses, or the Will to Power? Or, if you are a Darwinian, that they are all coefficients of natural and sexual selection?
Dutton, who teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is the founder and presiding spirit of the popular website Arts & Letters Daily, acknowledges that the whole idea of explaining art in Darwinian terms will strike many of us as “an oxymoron”. Art denominates a region of human freedom, instinct a realm of animal necessity. But, he reasons, if evolution endowed Homo sapiens sapiens with acute colour vision, a taste for sweets and an upright gait, why not also a penchant for certain sorts of aesthetic expression and pleasure? Man is clearly an art-producing and art-enjoying animal. Why?
Dutton’s answer to that question is the classic Darwinian answer: down through the ages, art has been adaptive, i.e., it has helped mankind to survive and reproduce. Like language, Dutton argues, art hones “imaginative and intellectual capacities that had a clear survival value in prehistory”. What Dutton calls the art instinct is “selected for”: like opposable thumbs or the maternal instinct, it helps increase an animal’s chance of survival and reproduction.
It is worth pausing to note that not all disciples of Darwin agree with Dutton about this. Adaptation, as Dutton puts it, is “the gold standard for evolutionary explanation”. But Stephen Jay Gould, for example, argued that the arts were useless embellishments, not adaptations but mere by-products (“spandrels” he called them) of our big brains. One of the reasons to find Gould’s contention unsatisfactory is that it encourages us to regard something of compelling human interest as epiphenomenal. It is not so much reductive as dismissive, in a way similar to E. O. Wilson’s comment that “an organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA”. Wilson is a great scientist (and one of Dutton’s heroes), but that “only” sticks in the craw.
Dutton endeavours to avoid that species of existential deflation even as he sets about elaborating his core idea that art and aesthetic experience are part of humanity’s Darwinian toolkit. Why, for example, is a certain type of landscape picture so popular? Studies have shown that landscapes with a bit of water, open spaces in the middle distance, some low-branching trees and other greenery, and an animal or two, beat all-comers in the popularity stakes. Such scenes decorate calendars and greeting cards the world over. Why?
My own reply would probably start with a variation on the Kingsley Amis Principle of Aesthetic Preference: nice things are nicer than nasty ones. But a stock Darwinian response returns to mankind’s prehistory in the African savannah, “the habitat”, Dutton reminds us, that “meat-eating hominids evolved for”. Consider those trees I just mentioned. According to the savannah hypothesis, people prefer low-branching ones to other types because “a climbable tree was a device to escape predators in the Pleistocene”. “In the Pleistocene” is a phrase that recurs frequently in The Art Instinct. It has the same grammatical form as “in the nineteenth century”. But whereas we can populate the latter with all sorts of interesting facts, our knowledge about the former is exiguous, to say the least. If you are going to say that a majority of people the world over like certain sorts of landscape painting because 100,000 years ago clever people found that the appurtenances of such landscapes helped them survive and reproduce (whereas the ones who preferred something else perished young), your inference is – to put it mildly – highly speculative.
This was something that the great German evolutionary biologist August Weismann acknowledged. Limpets living among breakers on a rocky shore acquired thick shells. Is that a Darwinian adaptation? Maybe. But, as Weismann asks, what degree of thickness was enough? “We can say nothing more than that we infer from the present state of the shell that it must have varied . . . and that these differences must have had selection value – no proof, therefore, but an assumption . . . . We are reasoning in a circle, not giving proofs, and no one who does not wish to believe in the selection value of the initial stages can be forced to do so”. In the end, I am tempted to respond to the idea that art is “adaptive” in the Darwinian sense with the motto that the British travel writer Alexander Kinglake wanted inscribed on the lintels of churches in England: “Interesting if true”. Part of my hesitation flows from the observation that if art sometimes furthers the Darwinian desiderata of survival and reproduction, it often operates quite otherwise. The two great engines of Darwinian evolution are natural selection and sexual selection, “an animal’s capacity”, in Dutton’s gloss, “to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce”. Dutton has many provocative things to say about all this: “sexual selection”, he writes, “explains some of the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality, including the most gaudy, profligate, and ‘show-off’ characteristics of artistic expression”. I wonder what Oscar Wilde, for example, would have to say about the relation between flamboyance and the effort to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce? In a typical passage, Dutton writes that “the enjoyment of fiction shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation”. Except, that is, when it suggests the exact opposite.
Dutton is most convincing when he is least programmatic. It is one thing to set out to “explain” the arts as Darwinian adaptations. That sets a very (impossibly?) high cognitive standard. It also raises the question whether the explanation that results is not also an explaining away. Dutton sometimes writes as if he is offering some such account of the arts. Often he is more relaxed. I like it when he says that the “art instinct” is not a single thing but “a complicated ensemble of impulses” involving responses to “the natural environment, to life’s likely threats and opportunities, the sheer appeal of colours and sounds, social status, intellectual puzzles, extreme technical difficulty, erotic interests, and even costliness”. Quite right: but haven’t we then wandered pretty far away from the idea of art having “survival value” as a Darwinian adaptation?
Dutton ranges widely and entertainingly over the arts – painting, music, literature, dance and theatre – and he frequently pauses to engage with the tradition of aesthetic inquiry from Aristotle and Hume to Monroe C. Beardsley and Arthur Danto. One of the most refreshing things about The Art Instinct – and something that sets it apart from a great deal of recent speculation about art – is that it focuses on the centre of the artistic enterprise, not the periphery. In the end, Dutton notes, we care about art because it provides “some of the most profound, emotionally moving experiences available to human beings”. But at least since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp stunned the world by exhibiting an ordinary urinal as a work of art, this realm of experience has been off the official menu of critical inquiry. For decades, a guiding question in the art world has been “Is it art?”. This might have been an interesting question in 1917, but it has long since become the sterile province of epistemological bafflement.
Dutton wants us to regard art not as a dispensable ornament but as an irreducible expression of human nature. He opposes the popular academic parlour game of treating art as a sort of shill in some political narrative or “cause”, and is also careful to segregate art from religious aspiration, partly, I suspect, because he regards the latter with impatience, at best. But when it comes to the relation between art and religion, I wonder whether Dutton hasn’t left some deep filiations unexploited. Granted, art and religion describe different realms of endeavour and experience. But there are good grounds – including good Darwinian grounds – for regarding them as mutually supportive enterprises. The interpenetration of art and religion seems especially prominent in humanity’s past (a leitmotif of David Lewis-Williams’s The Mind in the Cave, 2002). It is telling, for example, that “aesthetics” is an eighteenth-century coinage, a product of the Enlightenment when the arts, like many other human activities, emancipated themselves from their explicit service ad maiorem dei gloriam. The careers of art and religion have long since diverged. But it is curious how the craving for transcendence continues to haunt art. “In the absence of a belief in God”, Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The religious impulse has turned out to be far heartier than many observers had predicted. Perhaps this has a root in mankind’s prehistory. But, as with art, to appreciate its contemporary significance we need not only to look back to what we were, but also to look forward to what we would become.
Denis DuttonTHE ART INSTINCT Beauty, pleasure and human evolution224pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $25).978 0 19 953942 0 Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.
Denis Dutton's book, The Art Instinct, talks adaption, natural selection, and painting
Roger Kimball
div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {
color:#06c;
}
In the second part of the Critique of Judgement, Kant declared it “quite certain” that mankind would never be able to plumb, let alone explain, the mechanics of life. “It is”, he wrote, “absurd for men to make any such attempt or to hope that another Newton will arise in the future, who shall make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no design has ordered. We must absolutely deny this insight to men.” Today, there are many observers who believe Kant was too modest. Advances in genetics, they believe, present the possibility that what Newton did for the physical world will shortly be done for the world of organic nature. Not only will there be a Newton of a blade of grass: the sequencing of the human genome assures that there will also be a Newton of human nature.
Whether this confidence is misplaced remains to be seen. Perhaps the sheer complexity of nature, including human nature, has ordained that the progress of knowledge is never-ending. If so, then while we know more today than we did yesterday, part of what we know is the ever-broadening expanse of what lies beyond our ken. Be that as it may, advances in our understanding of the process of evolution have underwritten ambitious new intellectual sorties into every aspect of our social life. There are now neo-Darwinian reflections about everything from altruism to Zoroastrianism, illuminating or obfuscating in proportion to the probity and sophistication of the observer. Denis Dutton’s book The Art Instinct is a lively addition to this library of disabusement.
Disabusement? Explaining art in the stringent naturalistic terms required by Darwinian evolution – natural selection is a most exigent taskmaster – is perforce a coming-down-to-earth for aesthetics, a discipline that has been wont to look upward in hushed tones whenever words like “art” or “beauty” are uttered. But it is part of Dutton’s goal in this book to take a thoroughly naturalistic approach to the phenomena of art and aesthetic delectation without sacrificing art’s native prerogatives. He brings both a scientist’s sobriety and a connoisseur’s enthusiasm to his subject. If the two do not always cohabit without friction, Dutton is none the less careful to make sure that each gets its innings.
This is a not insignificant rhetorical feat. Superficially, at least, Darwinian explanations share something with Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean explanations. They are systematically cynical about appearances, instances of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. How often have you heard it said that really, at bottom, all human relations are a matter of (take your pick) economic exploitation, unconscious libidinal impulses, or the Will to Power? Or, if you are a Darwinian, that they are all coefficients of natural and sexual selection?
Dutton, who teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and is the founder and presiding spirit of the popular website Arts & Letters Daily, acknowledges that the whole idea of explaining art in Darwinian terms will strike many of us as “an oxymoron”. Art denominates a region of human freedom, instinct a realm of animal necessity. But, he reasons, if evolution endowed Homo sapiens sapiens with acute colour vision, a taste for sweets and an upright gait, why not also a penchant for certain sorts of aesthetic expression and pleasure? Man is clearly an art-producing and art-enjoying animal. Why?
Dutton’s answer to that question is the classic Darwinian answer: down through the ages, art has been adaptive, i.e., it has helped mankind to survive and reproduce. Like language, Dutton argues, art hones “imaginative and intellectual capacities that had a clear survival value in prehistory”. What Dutton calls the art instinct is “selected for”: like opposable thumbs or the maternal instinct, it helps increase an animal’s chance of survival and reproduction.
It is worth pausing to note that not all disciples of Darwin agree with Dutton about this. Adaptation, as Dutton puts it, is “the gold standard for evolutionary explanation”. But Stephen Jay Gould, for example, argued that the arts were useless embellishments, not adaptations but mere by-products (“spandrels” he called them) of our big brains. One of the reasons to find Gould’s contention unsatisfactory is that it encourages us to regard something of compelling human interest as epiphenomenal. It is not so much reductive as dismissive, in a way similar to E. O. Wilson’s comment that “an organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA”. Wilson is a great scientist (and one of Dutton’s heroes), but that “only” sticks in the craw.
Dutton endeavours to avoid that species of existential deflation even as he sets about elaborating his core idea that art and aesthetic experience are part of humanity’s Darwinian toolkit. Why, for example, is a certain type of landscape picture so popular? Studies have shown that landscapes with a bit of water, open spaces in the middle distance, some low-branching trees and other greenery, and an animal or two, beat all-comers in the popularity stakes. Such scenes decorate calendars and greeting cards the world over. Why?
My own reply would probably start with a variation on the Kingsley Amis Principle of Aesthetic Preference: nice things are nicer than nasty ones. But a stock Darwinian response returns to mankind’s prehistory in the African savannah, “the habitat”, Dutton reminds us, that “meat-eating hominids evolved for”. Consider those trees I just mentioned. According to the savannah hypothesis, people prefer low-branching ones to other types because “a climbable tree was a device to escape predators in the Pleistocene”. “In the Pleistocene” is a phrase that recurs frequently in The Art Instinct. It has the same grammatical form as “in the nineteenth century”. But whereas we can populate the latter with all sorts of interesting facts, our knowledge about the former is exiguous, to say the least. If you are going to say that a majority of people the world over like certain sorts of landscape painting because 100,000 years ago clever people found that the appurtenances of such landscapes helped them survive and reproduce (whereas the ones who preferred something else perished young), your inference is – to put it mildly – highly speculative.
This was something that the great German evolutionary biologist August Weismann acknowledged. Limpets living among breakers on a rocky shore acquired thick shells. Is that a Darwinian adaptation? Maybe. But, as Weismann asks, what degree of thickness was enough? “We can say nothing more than that we infer from the present state of the shell that it must have varied . . . and that these differences must have had selection value – no proof, therefore, but an assumption . . . . We are reasoning in a circle, not giving proofs, and no one who does not wish to believe in the selection value of the initial stages can be forced to do so”. In the end, I am tempted to respond to the idea that art is “adaptive” in the Darwinian sense with the motto that the British travel writer Alexander Kinglake wanted inscribed on the lintels of churches in England: “Interesting if true”. Part of my hesitation flows from the observation that if art sometimes furthers the Darwinian desiderata of survival and reproduction, it often operates quite otherwise. The two great engines of Darwinian evolution are natural selection and sexual selection, “an animal’s capacity”, in Dutton’s gloss, “to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce”. Dutton has many provocative things to say about all this: “sexual selection”, he writes, “explains some of the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality, including the most gaudy, profligate, and ‘show-off’ characteristics of artistic expression”. I wonder what Oscar Wilde, for example, would have to say about the relation between flamboyance and the effort to generate interest in the opposite sex in order to reproduce? In a typical passage, Dutton writes that “the enjoyment of fiction shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation”. Except, that is, when it suggests the exact opposite.
Dutton is most convincing when he is least programmatic. It is one thing to set out to “explain” the arts as Darwinian adaptations. That sets a very (impossibly?) high cognitive standard. It also raises the question whether the explanation that results is not also an explaining away. Dutton sometimes writes as if he is offering some such account of the arts. Often he is more relaxed. I like it when he says that the “art instinct” is not a single thing but “a complicated ensemble of impulses” involving responses to “the natural environment, to life’s likely threats and opportunities, the sheer appeal of colours and sounds, social status, intellectual puzzles, extreme technical difficulty, erotic interests, and even costliness”. Quite right: but haven’t we then wandered pretty far away from the idea of art having “survival value” as a Darwinian adaptation?
Dutton ranges widely and entertainingly over the arts – painting, music, literature, dance and theatre – and he frequently pauses to engage with the tradition of aesthetic inquiry from Aristotle and Hume to Monroe C. Beardsley and Arthur Danto. One of the most refreshing things about The Art Instinct – and something that sets it apart from a great deal of recent speculation about art – is that it focuses on the centre of the artistic enterprise, not the periphery. In the end, Dutton notes, we care about art because it provides “some of the most profound, emotionally moving experiences available to human beings”. But at least since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp stunned the world by exhibiting an ordinary urinal as a work of art, this realm of experience has been off the official menu of critical inquiry. For decades, a guiding question in the art world has been “Is it art?”. This might have been an interesting question in 1917, but it has long since become the sterile province of epistemological bafflement.
Dutton wants us to regard art not as a dispensable ornament but as an irreducible expression of human nature. He opposes the popular academic parlour game of treating art as a sort of shill in some political narrative or “cause”, and is also careful to segregate art from religious aspiration, partly, I suspect, because he regards the latter with impatience, at best. But when it comes to the relation between art and religion, I wonder whether Dutton hasn’t left some deep filiations unexploited. Granted, art and religion describe different realms of endeavour and experience. But there are good grounds – including good Darwinian grounds – for regarding them as mutually supportive enterprises. The interpenetration of art and religion seems especially prominent in humanity’s past (a leitmotif of David Lewis-Williams’s The Mind in the Cave, 2002). It is telling, for example, that “aesthetics” is an eighteenth-century coinage, a product of the Enlightenment when the arts, like many other human activities, emancipated themselves from their explicit service ad maiorem dei gloriam. The careers of art and religion have long since diverged. But it is curious how the craving for transcendence continues to haunt art. “In the absence of a belief in God”, Wallace Stevens wrote, “poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” The religious impulse has turned out to be far heartier than many observers had predicted. Perhaps this has a root in mankind’s prehistory. But, as with art, to appreciate its contemporary significance we need not only to look back to what we were, but also to look forward to what we would become.
Denis DuttonTHE ART INSTINCT Beauty, pleasure and human evolution224pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $25).978 0 19 953942 0 Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies
The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies
download philosophy employability guide
download philosophy employability guide
Monday, March 9, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Your Money - Not All Certificates of Deposit Are Plain Vanilla — or Safe - NYTimes.com
Your Money - Not All Certificates of Deposit Are Plain Vanilla — or Safe - NYTimes.com
Also index-linked CD's, CD's in foreign currency etc.
Also index-linked CD's, CD's in foreign currency etc.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
Day Out - Path of the Sacred and the Mundane - NYTimes.com
Day Out - Path of the Sacred and the Mundane - NYTimes.com
Important American historical sights along one stretch of road.
Important American historical sights along one stretch of road.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
THE MINIMALIST; You Use It Every Day. But Can You Make It Cook? - New York Times
THE MINIMALIST; You Use It Every Day. But Can You Make It Cook? - New York Times
Great recipes, including chocolate steamed pudding, for the microwave.
Great recipes, including chocolate steamed pudding, for the microwave.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Blood Sugar Control Linked to Memory Decline, Study Says - NYTimes.com
Blood Sugar Control Linked to Memory Decline, Study Says - NYTimes.com: "nytimes.com/health
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH"
MOST POPULAR - HEALTH"
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