Electric Agora (archive)

Month: July 2017

  • Thoughts on Inspiration

    by Lillie Sauer What is inspiration? I’ve never really questioned it until recently. It’s usually portrayed as the illumination of a mental light bulb or some similarly sudden “Aha!” moment. Maybe sometimes it is a lot like that for some people. Still, there are those of us who don’t often feel like we have the […]

  • Stupidity in Television (and Popular Arts)

    by E. John Winner In the discussion following a recent essay by David Ottlinger, concerning the evolution of aesthetics in television, I commented that television as a medium has no aesthetic.  That is all I wished to say on that matter.  But I also said in passing that television viewers were rather doomed to discuss […]

  • Concepts, Existence and Social Reality

    by Mark English Different kinds of implicit or explicit claims about what exists are best understood, as I see it, in a piecemeal way, by looking at how words are used both in the context of specific disciplines and in ordinary communication. In various pieces published on this site, Daniel Kaufman has elaborated a somewhat […]

  • Representations, Reasons, and Actions

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ More and more it seems to me that the way in which philosophy has gone the most wrong is in trying to assimilate human action with the motions of bodies, as understood in the natural sciences.  This effort has made a mess of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of […]

  • No Contest

    by Dwayne Holmes Whatever I thought about Muhammad Ali, as a boxer, it all changed when I saw When We Were Kings. (1) For those who haven’t seen it, the movie documents a fight between Ali and George Foreman, which took place in Africa. It was a match I’d heard about, one that I knew […]

  • Selves and Social Ontology

    by Daniel A. Kaufman The ongoing philosophical (and to a good extent, the scientific) discussion of selves is in very poor shape, much like the discussion concerning minds and for much the same reason. We talk as if selves are things, and of course, they are, but the sense of ‘thing’ that most seem to […]

  • A Few Observations on Autism, Language, and the Brain

    by Mark English Areas of the brain used in mathematics have been identified. These areas, which are associated with our sense of number and with spacial reasoning, are used not only for basic arithmetic and to process our ordinary perceptions and intuitions about shape and form and space but also, it now appears, for advanced […]