Blog Schmog
I think Hellraiser 2022 is one of those movies that gets better the more you reflect on it. While watching it, I found the initial pace a little slow, and in its earlier part it resembled the two better noirish straight-to-video films in the franchise. But it transcended those insofar as the director was trying […]
Lovecraft’s fiction is relevant to the philosophy of race, but not because it is straightforwardly racist in the way of some of his private letters. See an earlier post I wrote about this. Mike Ardoline has interesting things to say about the relation between Lovecraft and Afro-Pessimism related to my earlier post. Michelle Houellebecq and […]
One of the many things that remains mystifying to me about music is just how much tasty riffs can either add to or detract from a song. This is I think of particular interest because when you read books about songwriting, even ones such as the doorstop Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles, the focus is on […]
“He wasn’t writing any more, that is, he was writing, but his poems were very bad. That’s because he was happy.” – Gilbert Sorrentino
Lots of nice stuff here, including: a spiel for my book Garcian Meditations, some cool analytic/continental crossover material, a half-joking suggestion that logical positivism and phenomenology were really the same thing,* a defense of the positive hoopla surrounding speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy, a presentation of some of the innovations of Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman, […]
I hate to point out that I find some aspects of Robert Brandom’s philosophy to be morally rebarbative for two reasons. First, I don’t think it follows from this that he’s a bad person. I’ve never met him, but have had the pleasure to meet many of his students and I have every reason to […]
By Jon Cogburn In the spirit of Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion"* I want to begin by talking about a couple of adults, who we'll call Sam1 and Sam2. As with most unfortunate fictional actors in philosophical gedankenexperiments the world over, we shall prescribe a horrific end to both. Let Sam1 be […]
By Jon Cogburn One of Joseph Goebbels' most impressive propaganda victories involved paradoxically using widespread revulsion at the earlier stages of the Holocaust as a motor for the later stages of the Holocaust. Here's the problem. You saw a little kid screaming as his mother was being beaten bloody by a brownshirt in the town […]
By Jon Cogburn As far as I can tell, my dogs Charlie (chihuahua mix) and Leonard (wiener dog) experience the most amount of pleasure each day in the thirty or so minutes before dinner (some combination of treats, what we're eating, and dog food). From a theological perspective, I would say that behavior manifests what […]
By Jon Cogburn In his autobiographical Experience Martin Amis recounts a kind of occurrence that I wish we had an agreed upon name for (henceforth "Amis infraction"), an experience where someone does something to you based on false beliefs, but where their reaction would still be ethically unwarranted even if the relevant beliefs were true. […]