The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040325020613/http://www.denisdutton.com:80/

Welcome to this personal website. It is intended to keep my students at the University of Canterbury posted with readings relevant to their courses. I’ll also be developing links to my own published scholarly writing and journalism.

Happy reading.

Recent Highlights

The importance of maintaining equality before the law is the topic of my most recent column in the Press and the New Zealand Herald.


Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray, was the subject of a long review in the New Criterion. Murray’s book is a splendid achievement, so full of facts and hypotheses that critics have had a field day poking holes in it. While I poke a few, there is much to admire in this provocative work.


The Washington Post also ran this review of Jenifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History.


You may have seen this photo in a black and white version:

It used to appear in blow-up form in the Margaret Mead Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was also reproduced in an abysmal book called Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives, by Marianna Torgovnick. Thanks to help from friends at the Museum of Natural History and across Central Park at the Metropolitan Museum, I am able to present the original color version of the photo. For an updated account of the controversy surrounding it, click here.


The article on “Authenticity in Art” in Jerry Levinson’s Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics is now available here. This article discusses authenticity in music and in indigenous art, and places autheticity in the context of audience response.


“Forgery and Plagiarism,” an entry for The Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, has finally made it to this site. You can read it here.


Charles Rosen’s new book, Piano Notes, is more than a wide-ranging account of piano artistry: is is also a meditation of the fate of modernism in music. Here’s my review.


Courses

Philosophy 140 / Art Theory 101.

Wednesday 24 March. For next week’s lecture, read Books Six, Seven, and Eight of the Republic. We may want to check out secondary sources, available in the Library, on the Divided Line and the Theory of Forms.

Philosophy 445.

You can begin by reading the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics article on evolutionary aesthetics. It can be found here.

Well be discussing Jonathan Gottschalls article on women in literature this week and next.

Background on sexual selection can be found in my review of Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind. Miller’s website has many useful links.

A reminder that Leda Cosmides and John Tooby have written a fine introduction to Evolutionary Psychology.

 
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