Saturday, August 18, 2007

Notes and Links

* Two versions of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" (both far better than that Kanye West nonsense): Daft Punk's original and the Carleton Singing Knights' a capella version.

Work it harder, make it better,
Do it faster, makes us stronger ,
More than ever hour after
[H]Our Work Is Never Over


The ambiguity of the sound "(h)our" is exquisite; it's like postmodernism on a good day. And indeed, if we wanted to make analogies that are probably stretched a bit too far, postmodernists are often trying to do in philosophy (very often badly, due to the academic taint) what Daft Punk sometimes does very well in music.

* Speaking of Daft Punk, Technologic has its strengths, too.

* John Heard discusses Maximilian Kolbe, who had his feast day recently.

* Ann Bartow has a post on pornography and politics worth reading at "Feminist Law Professors".

* Paul Robinson has an interesting quotation up by Dooyeweerd on Encyclopedia understood as "a philosophic science which indicates the place of the special sciences in the totality of human knowledge". It's noteworthy that Encyclopedia in fact used to be taught as an extremely important part of philosophy, at least in some places; Kant taught nine or ten semesters of Philosophical Encyclopedia, for instance. In essence they were unifying survey courses, although apparently much more systematic and architectonic in format than we usually are comfortable with in survey courses. What we call encyclopedias, of course, are a degenerate form of what encyclopedists originally tried to do, which was to provide a framework to facilitate an understanding of how every bit of knowledge was related to the rest.

* Chris has an interesting post on some research about folk meta-ethics.

* Susan Hurley recently died. You can get a sample of some of her work in this book symposium on Consciousness in Action. Some notices in the philosophical blogosphere on her death are here, here, and here.