An amusing quotation from William J. Bernstein’s Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History. Gutenberg (1395–1468) had invented an efficient way to mass produce moveable type, leading to larger quantities and lower costs for printed materials. Before Gutenberg, the Benedictines made good money from hand-copying materials and were able to exert some control over
Benedictine monks versus Gutenberg’s printing press Read More »
Lecture Six: Do claims to knowledge and morality merely mask power? Foucault argues that sex rhetoric has “a tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power.” And Derrida asserts that “the revolution against reason can be made only within it.” Themes: Power as substrate. Structuralism and Post-structuralism. Dekonstruction. Postmodernism. Alexis
Por que a arte se tornou feia? My essay on “Why Art became Ugly” translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Ronaldo Bassit and Matheus Pacini. Here are the original article in English (PDF) or online with links to the images discussed. Also: translations into German [pdf], Spanish, and Korean [pdf]. Also: My related lecture in Buenos
“Why Art became Ugly” in Portuguese and other translations Read More »
An intriguing remark by the musician Shostakovich about life under Stalin, and why so many mediocrities rose to cultural prominence under the Soviets: “Fiction triumphed because a man has no significance in a totalitarian state. The only thing that matters is the inexorable movement of the state mechanism. A mechanism needs only cogs. Stalin used
The ‘genius’ cog in the system — Shostakovich comment Read More »
Lecture Five: Science and technology have accomplished wonders since the Enlightenment. But, as Karl Popper asks, how do we “distinguish between science and pseudo–science“? Thomas Kuhn suggests that scientists are less-than-objective and more “like the typical character of Orwell’s 1984.” Themes: Logical Positivism and Analytic philosophy’s aspirations and travails. Scientific method. Science and pseudo-science. Falsifiability.
Lecture Eight: Entrepreneurial Education From Montessori to the Future Themes: Our entrepreneurial age. Montessori. The new Socratics. Learning as play. Core issues: Agency. Freedom. Work as creative play. Social win-win. AI and Robotics as challenge and as opportunity. Entrepreneurism as one’s comparative advantage. Concluding claim: Education as philosophy in practice. Text: Maria Montessori, The Montessori
In Western nations, there is a clear connection between philosophy and totalitarian politics. Hegel’s philosophy, for example, took a “left” turn in Marx’s thinking — which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin drew upon — and it took a “right” turn in Treitschke’s and Nietzsche’s thinking — which Goebbels, Hitler, and the National Socialists drew upon, as
German philosophy in pre-World-War-II Japan Read More »
A watershed event in American business history was the Homestead Riot of 1892. At the Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh, union leaders and workers rejected wage cuts proposed by owner Andrew Carnegie and plant manager Henry Frick. Negotiations failed, a strike began, the plant was closed, workers armed themselves, the Pinkertons were called in, and
Two nineteenth-century riots Read More »