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:
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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.
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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.
We’ll
be discussing Jonathan Gottschall’s
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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