Dave Maier spent many years as a radio DJ, but after even public radio turned hostile to esoteric music, he left to study philosophy at Columbia. Now, after earning a Ph. D. in the subject, he spends far too much time reading and not nearly enough time writing. He blogs, or has blogged, at duckrabbit.blogspot.com, where at least there is some good stuff in the archives. Email: duck1887 [at] hotmail.com
by Dave Maier Last month, a couple of commenters on my post on Dennett's plea for “respect for truth” asked what pragmatists I like, and for a general elaboration of my pragmatism. I had to think about the best way to respond, and this is what I have finally come up with. Sorry for the…
by Dave Maier As you all know, not that long ago Steven Pinker wrote a piece defending “scientism” as a general approach to intellectual matters, including those usually thought to be beyond the scope of science (e.g. the humanities). Leon Wieseltier responded, restating the standard view that the humanities are indeed beyond the scope of…
by Dave Maier In his recent book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett relates that he likes to put to his fellow philosophers the following dilemma: which of the following would you rather accomplish? (A) You solve the major philosophical problem of your choice so conclusively that there is nothing left to…
by Dave Maier It's very difficult to write a good introduction to philosophy. Put in too much technical detail and it reads like a textbook, irrelevant to all but sophomores; but leave too much out and it's just a self-help book. Luc Ferry is a French philosopher whose recent essay in this genre, A Brief…
by Dave Maier When I was a grad student, I once made an off-color remark, or the equivalent, to a female colleague (I'll call her Jessica). It was in the library, in front of the circulation desk. We had been talking shop, and when I said that I had written something relevant to our discussion,…
by Dave Maier In a previous post I considered and rejected the idea that music and noise (= non-musical sound art) are entirely incompatible – that noise is the very negation of musical meaning. This left open the question of how these things might co-exist – or, turning the question around, how composers might make…
by Dave Maier In my recent post on Nietzsche I referred to Platonism as “the ancient enemy,” and criticized certain kinds of naturalism for not overcoming it, or for even, ultimately, amounting to it themselves. In this post I consider the sense in which a robust anti-Platonism is a philosophical imperative for our post-medieval era.…
by Dave Maier Belief, as Aristotle might say, is said in many ways. This would be okay, except it can lead to some annoying, and I think avoidable, muddles. Here I try to pick a way through the minefield. Let's jump right in. When I say (1) I believe/don't believe in Bigfoot. I express my…
by Dave Maier An earlier post of mine in this space divides readings of Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge into three kinds: a) relativist rejection of truth and knowledge; b) empiricist/naturalist restriction of Nietzsche's criticism to specifically transcendent truth and knowledge of same, leaving empirical knowledge untouched, if tentative; and c) my preferred option,…
by Dave Maier My grad school colleague M.B. once told me about an exchange he had had with one of our professors. His area was personal identity, and his dissertation advanced a view about same which our professor found counter-intuitive – or at least worried about whether most people would do so. His response, he…
by Dave Maier Joanna Demers – Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford University Press, 2010) When I tried, in 1981, to interest my undergraduate music professors in progressive electronic music, they didn't get it: anything with notes was “harmonically simple” (“it hess to do with analeetical levelss”, explained one prof),…
by Dave Maier Carlin Romano is at it again. On the last occasion, he was eulogizing Richard Rorty; and here he is doing it again, among other things, in a new book, reviewed last week by Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times. As Gottlieb quotes him, Romano tells us that the sophist Isocrates “should…
by Dave Maier In my previous posts on the subject, I have assumed, or anyway not worried about, a basic knowledge of what spacemusic is, and simply presented sets of classic or recent vintage. But that was negligent of me, as for most people this material remains an entirely closed book. Maybe they've seen a…
by Dave Maier I am a big fan of Japanese cinema, and in the past year I've seen some really great stuff. These are neither the most famous nor the most obscure films out there, just some I saw and liked. I generally try to avoid spoilers, plus my memory of a couple of these…
by Dave Maier There has been some interesting recent discussion, both here and elsewhere, about what philosophy is and should be. Here are two shiny pennies from my own purse. In the introduction to his recent anthology The Future for Philosophy, Brian Leiter laments that “[p]hilosophy, perhaps more than any other discipline, has been plagued…
by Dave Maier Noise music – if that's even what you want to call it – is pretty hard to defend in polite company. Most of the guys who make it are demonstrably weird if not downright insane, and of course it sounds like the cat got its tail caught in a blender. Who wants…
by Dave Maier As you know, it is customary at this time of year for connoisseurs of various types of artistic productions to assemble a list of the most noteworthy releases of the preceding twelvemonth. Unfortunately such a task is only possible for those of us who have been industriously keeping up all year, a…
by Dave Maier A couple of weeks back here at 3QD, Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse told us about a certain contentious use of the term “pluralism” in philosophy, which tries to identify a particular conception of philosophical method with the institutional virtues of toleration, openmindedness, and cute little bunnies. In their opinion,…
by Dave Maier All art is “conceptual” in the sense that it has a cognitive aspect: if it engages our senses but not our minds, it is mere eye or ear candy (not that there's anything wrong with same, but it's not “art” in the relevant sense). A work of art is usually called “conceptual…
by Dave Maier A most interesting book I've been reading lately is The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (comix art by Josh Neufeld). Gladstone's main point so far seems to be that while the (news) media have an obligation to be “objective” in the sense that what they tell us must be true…