Posts by giovanni tiso
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
I had less use for offerings that endlessly cited Foucault and Gramsci,
Shit, if I was allowed to only ever cite two people, those would be my two. Have you been through my drawers again?
Speaking of Easton, for whom I have a great deal of respect, I remember being less than impressed by him once when he poo-pooed in passing in one of his columns the fact that somebody had been funded to study the history of the orgasm. What struck me is that he passed judgment on it without feeling that he had a need to elaborate, as if it was self-evidently ridiculous (think hip hop tour). But it seems equally uncontroversial to me that the orgasm would of course have a history, and of course it would be interesting, and of course such a study could have many valuable offshoots and implications.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
But the public defenders of science in New Zealand are Paul Callaghan and Peter Gluckman, ie scientists.
Do we have any public philosophers, the way we have public historians, economist and even political scientists?
We don't, because we don't believe in their value. And we are wrong.
Incidentally, when I wrote about the truther conference in Wellington a couple of years ago, I got quite a lot of supportive mail and links, and much of it by scientists who recognised the value of a humanities approach to the issue, and that you cannot easily disprove those 'theories' - in fact they are almost impossible to disprove on scientific grounds alone, as our own Matthew Dentith could tell you.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Neil Morrison,
such as Feyerabend?
Such as Lyotard, who understood ahead of his time what is now one of our main challenges - how to counteract the arguments of deniers and truthers. Which happens to be a matter of life or death on a planetary scale. The idea that you win that argument by convincing everyone to listen to science is just wrong - you need to teach critical thinking. And that's the domain of the humanities, not of your science teacher.
research scientists (cough) etc.
Yes. Research scientists. People Who Do Only Good.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Russell Brown,
FWIW, I seem to recall quite a bit of anguished defence of science lately, with the Ken Ring thing and all.
The irony there, is that you actually need philosophers to defend science. Like I always say, it's not a grounding in science itself that journalists need to cover the stuff - since they can't be expected to acquire the specialised knowledge of each field - but rather training in recognising and evaluating the relative merits of rational arguments. On which count I found this article by Kerre Woodham spectacularly off the mark.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
If you ask professionals or scientists what society gains from their training then they just laugh, because the answer is so obvious.
Because they think the answer is so obvious. There, fixed it for you.
art-historians, philosophers etc generally don't, for reasons I don't really understand.
Yes, that is painfully clear.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Can I put in a pre-emptive WOTY nomination?
I would be obliged. I'm still kicking myself for not nominating Michael Lhaws last year - now everyone uses it! I'm so dumb I could cry.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to recordari,
And what Danielle said.
To which I would add: if nobody was trained to be, say, a historian, it's not very clear who would get to write the books that you could read in your spare time and be as good as somebody who's had to study the stuff. Is Danyl suggesting historical research be carried out by amateurs?
So yeah, there are layers and layers of bollocks under the superficial stratum. It's like a bollocks millefeuille.
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Oh, ay, speaking of Proust:
"If I write all this in defence of Flaubert, whom I do not much like, if I feel myself so deprived at not writing about many others whom I prefer, it is because I have the impression that we no longer know how to read."
Marcel Proust writing in the Nouvelle Revue Française, January 1920. (Via.)
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Rob Stowell,
While Gopnik's piece is good, I keep going back to Twilight of the books (which I keep linking to, sorry) because for me it casts a longer shadow
It is a very useful summation, thank you for that. I have strong reservations about Wolf's book, but none that can be easily dropped into the conversation. However I think that you might enjoy this essay on twitter, war coverage and the playstation effect, which is also about deep reading in a way. But I think separating reading from other information-processing activities is becoming less and less useful. It's not books versus films or the Internet versus poetry versus videogames versus television. Everything is increasingly being compressed and packaged together.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to BenWilson,
I expect the same sentiment was expressed many times in the epoch between humans learning to speak, and learning to write.
Peter the Hermit in 1,200 AD may be the oldest recorded instance. It's also almost the earliest recorded instance of written speech.
Airdrop Borges will want to co-opt Proust and the Squid.
Let's shoehorn a long book of great delight into this conversation: Kant and the Platypus.