Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Susan Sontag

  • Remarks on Religion

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ____ By now, most readers know that I am an atheist, as I do not believe in the existence of God or anything supernatural. Readers also likely know that I am Jewish by lineage and culturally and that I think God is useless both as an explanation and as a moral…

  • Interpretation and the “Investigative” Concept of Criticism

    by Daniel A. Kaufman **In light of my recent Course Notes on Danto’s theory of interpretation, I thought readers might be interested in my own critique of his theory.  The following paper originally appeared in Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 3-12, March 2012** §1 My subject is the popular view in (mainly Analytic) philosophy…

  • Course Notes – Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave,” from On Photography (1977)

    by Daniel A. Kaufman http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Winter17/173/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/document-2.pdf Half of my upper-division course in Aesthetics is devoted to criticism, but given the impossibility of doing any justice to the history of the subject in such a short time, I focus on two major critics from the last century: Clement Greenberg and Susan Sontag.  In the case of Greenberg,…

  • Guns, Hardcore, Carnitas and Camp

    by Daniel A. Kaufman One of the best articles I’ve read on America’s gun problem.  Particularly effective is the video which shows what happens when ordinary people, who have been given some gun training of the sort being proposed for school teachers in some districts, are confronted by an active shooter. https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america = = =…