Articles #Philosophy of art

I am aware, of course, that minority and, especially, indigenous people have been terribly oppressed and that it is incumbent on me to take as much care as I can to treat them with respect and consideration. However, I do not believe that I treat anyone with respect and consideration if I do not challenge them when they hold beliefs that I believe to be false. On the contrary, that is to treat people disrespectfully. I do not treat people with disrespect when I engage them in debate as equals. I do disrespect them when I defer to them even when I disagree. That is like treating them as children. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews James Young.

Adorno’s concerns about the development of a commercial “culture industry” led him to think that the Black elements of jazz and popular music are there because they’ve been appropriated or co-opted by the industry for marketing purposes. The seemingly-important musical difference between, say, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk are really no more significant than the introduction of colored sparkles into a commercial powdered detergent in order to be able to market it as new and improved. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Theodore Gracyk.

Philosophy is not an empirical subject and does not address empirical questions (or at least, when it does, it makes a mistake). It also is not a purely formal subject, in that it does not involve exclusively and explicitly rule-governed reasoning from a set of axioms to some number of derived statements or theorems. Intuitions, speculations, common sense, and ordinary language play a significant role and rightly so. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Daniel A. Kaufman