Blog Schmog
By Jon Cogburn The main gimmick in Ian McEwan's newest novel Nutshell is that the narrator is a fetus who has learned about the world from his mother's penchant for falling asleep to talk radio. If the book were written by an American author the point of the gimmick would be to humorously illustrate the manner in which the epistemic […]
By Jon Cogburn Readers of David Lodge's Changing Places will remember the game 'Humiliation', where players list the most important literary work that they haven't read, the winner being the one most humiliated by the admission. In the novel the least pleasant antagonist is destroyed by the game. His major flaw is that he […]
By Jon Cogburn Yet another for Ian Crystal (1966-2012) It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this. – Bertrand Russell continental philosophers master the american flâneur pose weary sophistication too tight clothesslight surprised vocal overtonesof Oscar Wilde were […]
By Jon Cogburn A few years ago NPR interviewed Dalton Conley on the occasion of the publication of his book Honkey, which is about growing up white in a predominantly African American housing project in New York City. Strangely, even though I grew up mostly in the American South, I could resonate with some of […]
By Jon Cogburn I forget in which book of Primo Levi's that he recounts learning Russian from the soldiers that liberated him from Auschwitz. Weirdly, the surviving prisoners were brought by train back into Russia and then at the end of the war had to find their way back to their home countries. If I […]
By Jon Cogburn The internet was invented for basically two things: (1) sharing pictures/videos of cute animals, and (2) kvetching. I understand and celebrate this, and as a result feel a little bit guilty about using it to engage in meta-kvetching. If we kvetch too much about other people's kvetching, we are thus subverting the […]
By Jon Cogburn I know why lawyers are unhappy. You have to be pretty smart to get through law school and then the job is mostly unrelenting drudgery sometimes percolated with backstabbing your colleagues on the way to the top. I know why neurosurgeons are unhappy. Human beings are not built for medical school and […]
By Jon Cogburn In his wonderful textbook, Philosophies of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and canonical book on the aesthetics of horror, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart, one finds Noël Carroll over and over again making an argument that goes like this. Preliminary – Present in the most charitable possible manner a putative […]
By Jon Cogburn In AN EARLIER POST I generalized Evans' original argument against ontic vagueness to suggest a counterargument to those onticists who would respond to Evans by defending vague objects without vague identity. Here I want to do something similar, but aimed at semanticists who argue that vagueness lies in our representations of objects, […]
By Jon Cogburn In this post on Harman on Žižek on Bryant I mentioned some of my work on in my forthcoming EUP book on Tristan Garcia. I've put some of this into a draft of a paper I'll be giving at the Southwest Undergraduate Philosophy Conference this Saturday. Anyhow, the paper is HERE at academia […]