On Abstraction: a Kantian take on Abstract Expressionism and Impressionism, and the Possibility of Abstract Music

What I seek is a different understanding of avant-garde music that will in turn amount to new sonic presentations. Taking as inspiration post-war visual art driven by abstraction, I hope to apply my thoughts on the abstraction in their methods to music. It began with a visit to the Musee d’art Comtemprain de Montreal this […]

Review of Nolan’s Interstellar: on utility, time and plan A (spoilers ahead)

Interstellar is an excellent movie, and having now seen it twice, I can say that it is currently my favorite Sci-fi space travel movie, though by no means my favorite Nolan film. The “favorite Sci-fi space film” distinction is actually not that flattering as I am not a big fan of the genre, I’m more […]

On Time Travel (for my 100th entry & 1 year anniversary on wordpress)

Having just gotten a notification from wordpress that I registered my blog a year ago today (though it looks like my first entry was published on the 12th) and seeing as I’m at 99 published entries, now seems a novel time to publish entry number 100, and to share some thoughts on time travel, as […]

On Coffee, Parmenides and Anaxagoras: was the “first cause” coffee?

I’m quite particular when it comes to coffee; friends have lovingly, let’s say, referred to it as “snobbish” behavior. My ideal cup is a premium French roast brewed in a single serving stovetop espresso maker, taken black. No other method than this yields the superb balance of smoky cedar and pine wood chips, dark chocolate […]

Arctic Monkeys’ AM and Soren Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary (on nihilism and rock n’ roll)

About a week ago I finally picked up the latest record by the Arctic Monkeys, AM, (I still only buy CDs) and I have been completely transfixed by it, for a while in a way that I could not understand, as the music is not as uniquely and compellingly challenging as their other recent efforts […]

Morality in Reservoir Dogs

I revisited one of my favorite films recently, the fiendishly repugnant, Reservoir Dogs, after a chance hearing of “Little Green Bag” in a commercial, the musical number that, over the opening credits, takes the audience from the pre-burglary breakfast to the post-burglary bloodbath. In reading some reviews and papers on the film, I noticed that […]

The Is/Ought Gap pt. II: On Its Implications for Reductionism and Intuitionism

I’ve very much enjoyed the excellent discussions that have been occurring in the comments section of my recent post on the Is/ought gap. All of the commentators have been provocative and informative, but Larry posted some fantastically critical remarks of two positions I was advancing in that post, (I) that the is/ought thesis has no […]

Cogito Ergo Su(m/n)day Review in the NY Times: Graziano’s Eliminativism

The New York Times Sunday review features a short article by Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton, arguing for eliminativism. The gist of the piece is that subjective experiences are flawed approximations of data given by external stimuli structured by the mechanistic physical system that is the brain, such that it can be said that […]

The Is/Ought Gap: It’s real but doesn’t pose a problem for “scientific moralists”

In the past two weeks I’ve stumbled upon blog entries that argued for a “scientific morality”, and in doing so challenged the “is/ought thesis”, which seems to be a rite of passage to be a naturalist these days. Unfortunately, the writers misunderstand the “is/ought” thesis, and so their arguments against it fail (but both entries […]

Review of Mark Timmons’ Morality Without Foundations pt III (of III): on Timmons’ Contextualist Epistemology

Timmons then turns to matters of moral epistemology, arguing for a contextualist epistemology that borrows from foundationalist and coherentist views to develop an account of how regular persons can have justified moral beliefs – a criterion that he says the other epistemological views don’t take seriously enough. Timmons notes, before getting things going, that he […]