This week in radio

Over the past 6-7 days, I’ve found that there has been a quite spectacular selection of radio programmes available for podcast, here are the highlights

1. In Our Time, BBC: The Logical Positivists.

In Our Time is always a staple favourite for its broad yet expertly chosen topics.Melvyn Bragg always expresses some reservations on air when doing a programme about philosophy, especially when it comes to the more technical, inaccessible and unfriendly issues. This issue was one of the best in the whole programme. The Logical positivists were one of the most important movements in philosophy, particularly in how they have shaped the contemporary landscape of philosophy. Barry Stocker and Mary Carwright were the expert commentators, particularly notable ones at that.

Something that Bragg insinuated but did not explicate very much was the fact that the three experts come from very different camps and perspectives. The Logical Positivists can be a divisive issue in philosophy. It is continental philosophy par excellence, and yet, the Vienna (and earlier Berliner philosophers for that matter) are ignored the most by ‘european tradition’ ( as opposed to the anglo-american analytic) philosophy. The Logical Positivists do not talk much about normative philosophy in the way that applied ethicists or contemporary social thinkers do, but have a somewhat nuanced relationship with value theory (viz, the trajectory of Error Theory or Emotivism).

Even my own interest in 18thC philosophy puts me in a postion where I must stand in relation to the the Vienna philosophers: am I to accept their critique of Kant, for instance? What was rightly noted in the programme is that this is not a very simple question: the vienna philosophers were not an intellectually homogeneous group; as they composed of members from different disciplines and focii. Schlick was one of the first philosophers who actually understood the modern physics of Einstein with much rigor. Neurath was a sociologist who had aspirations for the social status the academy as part of a social ideal of academics of all stripes working together, a notion which, though perhaps desired and desirable, is so very far from the truth.

A lot of Scholarship is dedicted towas the early history and origins of analytic philosophy. I’ve found it particularly interesting in the increase of interest that links Carnap to Kant (Friedman, Chigwell). The vienna philosophers were living in both wonderful and horrific times. Einstein was a mature physicist and the icon of the generation, but also, Austria and Modern Germany were under the Nationalist-Socialist reign.

Their further reading looks particularly nice

2. BBC Analysis: Thought Experiments

Various studies have demonstrated that by slightly different appraisals or wordings of questions concerning moral considerations,we exhibit different reactions or responses. Theres a moral significance to these studies, particularly concerning issues like whether we attribute intention to actions, responsibility,or how our actions line up with our propositional beliefs.

A lot more needs to be said of this issue. The standpoint of the anti- x-phi’s goes something like this (and I suppose this would be my view): so we have these studies that give us insights that go against our normal moral theories and insights. That’s fine, what else can you tell us? Interesting it may be, although the armchair-burning gesturing is quite purposefully and unnecessarily polemical. As if to say all philosophy except theirs is ‘armchair theory’. While philosophy does not normally rely on empirical measues, it is far from being pie in the sky idea-mongering, the sort of associations had with those having pot-fuelled thoughts on the world. That said, the current generation of philosophy often has an eye towards work that has instant gratification or generating departments which are “paper-mills”. The old focus of exegesis, comprehensiveness and the labours of criticism are not as strong as they used to be. The studies, in terms of social science methodology are quite interesting nontheless.

3. The Spirit of Grunge (BBC Radio 4)

This program marks 15 years (I think) of when Kurt Cobain had killed himself. This was a survey of Grunge and in particular, its place in mainstream UK youth culture. In the UK’s pop music history, the late 80s began to grow tired of the new wave optimism and hit factories which hardly met the aspirations and pessimism of Thatherite 1980s. The emerence of acid hose and fusion groups like the Stone Roses exploded and disappeared from the scene just as quickly. Along comes grunge.

Grunge, according to the journalists of the programme, captured something in the social consciousness. It’s lo-fi and authentic roots could no longer be sustained as the genuine grunge movement became a victim of its own success, most signficantly marked by Cobain’s death. I think it was really nicely captured when one of the commentators described it thus: the outsider music genre becomes popular. The jocks begin to listen music that the bullied nerds and loners had made, and in that respect, the genre could no longer be viable.

Some other subthemes include: inauthentic grunge and authentic grunge: Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Smashing Pumpkins should hardly be considered to be grunge: Pearl Jam was a rock and roll band which had a twist, Smashing Pumpkins had more prog-elements to it. Also noted was how hugely unlikely Cobain’s success was: a boy from a broken family, living at one point in a trailer park in an area of great poverty and substance abuse. Popularity normally has a clean and friendly face and it was unlikely to be his.  The tragedy of grunge was in how the alternative becomes mainstream and commercial.

This narrative often is to be had: music which starts out as par of the fringe, polemical, challenging and ideologically opposed to the mainstream becomes homogenised and neutralised. ‘Nirvana’ is no longer a symbol of grunge, but a shirt in HMV that costs £13.99. It’s for that reason that I think its uncool to say that one likes Nirvana.

The potted history of UK music follows grunge with a reaction against it: britpop, locally made, self-indulgent, singer-artist archtypal and less ideological. Oasis is noted as a band which embraces its own success, with songs purposefully trying to be anthems, trying to be legendary, trying to appease for the masses.

Michael

unPC commercials

Dime Bar Nutter

I’ve been looking for this video for a while. I was thinking a while back how unPC it was. This advert has surely aged.

Sinistre*

The Decline of Western Civilisation II

(I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while.)

In the past few months, I mangaged to see a documentary by Penelope Spheeris. Apparently, this volume (II) is part of a larger corpus of works. The first film, The Decline of Western Civilsation concerns the punk rock movement around the end of the 1970s while the third part is about a more gritty gutter punks. I’ve yet to see these two. Part II of this film series concerns the glam and heavy metal music scene in Los Angeles, California.

There are some very clear themes in this work. Firstly is the misogny of the musicians and the overt objectification of women. Another feature is this ‘bohemian’ complex had by many of the musicians, of how they are very much striving for a reputation and gain merit by virtue of their musical achievement. However there is a questional nature to their claims; many bands and individuals were interviewed and each represented different phases in their career. There were the old guard of heavy metal; Motorhead’s Lemmy and Ozzy Osbourne (during a time when he was kicked out of Black Sabbath and successful in his own eponymously titled band), represented the more experienced and wisened rock idol. Ozzy and Lemmy were aware of the damage that alcohol and narcotics can do, while they were agnostic at best about the groupies; they were quite clear that there is a tragedy to success.

There were a great number of metal failures in this documentary as well. Many of the bands interviewed were either signed, unsigned or in a position which is surprisingly common: signed to a label, yet poor. This documentary was an exploration of the youth culture of the time. I though this perspective was particularly enlightening. The youths who sustained the heavy metal scene were sometimes also the members of small-time bands. Heavy metal possesses a hierarchy which may be likened to some crass contractarian state of nature. The powerful, and successful bigwigs are those who are idolised and siphoned. Women throw themselves freely to the big stars of the time, while those (males) lower on the food chain fight and struggle to compete for popularity, success, and sexual delight.

Club owners are overtly perverse. The less a girl wears, the more likely they will get in, one of the owners say. A distinct element stated early on in the film is that the heavy metal fan is powerless socially. Normally they are high school dropouts and with little employment prospects. Facing the Reganite conservatism of the time and the PMC; youth culture has no longer become a matter of deviance. Acceptable forms of ‘parental rejection’ are granted as the original baby boomers (the first generation who had a ‘youth culture’) have set the rules for social conformity. It is a partial irony that those original teenagers were the later arbiters of conformity.

There is a secret pathos to the interviews of the characters. We see alcoholic and ultimately doomed heavy metal musicians. Those who strive for success and a deified status akin to the likes of Dio or Ozzy are doomed to fail and are oblivious to said failure. It is, I think, clear to the audience watching the documentary, that this ‘vanguard’ of heavy metal is really a bloated failure. Heavy metal seems not to be a genre and ideology with clear goals or determinate ideas. The reception of this documentary led to an eventual change of attitude towards the late 1980s’. Hard rock and glam metal fell away of popularity, or slowly sidelined as the tassels and building blocks of future pop and AOR rock music towards the 1990s. Challenging guitar-heavy music moved away from NWOBHM heavy metal in a variety of directions. The bloated and popular scene of glam and mainstream heavy metal were divided. Some bands who were always underground, found new forms of expression. The disgust at the self-indulgence and percieved ‘femininity’ of glam metal led to a desire for more ‘authentic’ forms of music. Enter Generation X….

One redeeming feature of the documentary was the appearance of Megadeth at the end. Megadeth, while part of this scene which was largely indulgent, had the seeds of change. Some artists, particularly Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer; stayed true (initially) to their underground routes and formed a unique style of heavy metal in the 80s that reclaimed the authentic aspirations of heavy metal: challenging, gritty, dark, technical, political and relevant. The discourse of the mainstream and bloated indulgence seems always to be not far away in musical scenes. A similar story can be told in the origins of Black and Death Metal; another reactionary movement (in part) to the glam scene.

Sinistre

Lexical faux pas

People use exclamations too much. It is more a signification of the superflous and a tendency of hyperbolising one’s vocabulary than term of exception.

Also included in these character of phrases are: the over use of ‘literally’ or ‘random’ to mean ‘unexpected’

Antisophie

A prospect: philosophical theology

For a long time, a certain tradition had become synomymous or allied to metaphysics; similar to how say logic is related to metaphysics today, philosophical theology was once allied with metaphysics.

(Christian) Theology is sometimes divided into components comprising an overall system. A rationally worked out worldview, if it is to be considered a worldview at all, must encompass accounts of all aspects of the world in which we inhabit. Some people still these days entetain the notion of a systematic theology, although often some of the studies in theology consist in specific components. I’m no expert in theology by a long shot, but so far as I recall about theology; there are the following components that comprise systematic theology:

1. Morality and ethics, Value Theory
2. Metaphysics (or ‘Philosophical theology’)
3. Politics (a notable example of this would be Liberation theology)
4. Reactions to contemporary movements: political and social theory, gender theory, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity studies
5. Christology (the conception of Jesus – the sole figure in the Christian faith, issues such as ‘was Christ a man or God?’, is God in three parts?)
6. Sotierology (concerning ‘grace’ and salvation)
7. Eschatology (concerning the end of days)
8. Exegesis

There are other aspects which come about but aren’t worth mentioning (like angelogy).

Lately, from the perspective from theology, philosopher-theologians have seen the appeal of analytic philosophy being spliced into their philosophical system. The motivations for this are:

a. Mainstream theology is being hjacked by ‘fringe’ and ‘fashionable’ and short-lived movements. Feminism was a major interest about 2-3 decades ago but since has faded; Black and Asian theology is something which has begun to recieve attention; postmodernism and theology has also been considered. Theology, in a struggle to maintain relevance and establishing some kind of ‘cutting edge’, is failing to establish the kind of clarity and logical rigour had by the likes of Aquinas, or Barth.
b. Theology has been hijacked by continental theology which has led to a confused and needlessly polemical discipline dividing into an intellectual excercise. THere seems to be a serious division between apologetics (by the evangelicals) and theology (by the liberal, intellectual side of Christendom).
c. IT has been demonstrated by the work of people like Alston, Van Inwagen and Swinburne, that the tools of recent philosophy can be employed in the defence and clarification of their notion of God. In other words, theology can be returned to philosophy, rather than living on the outskirts of the humanities and social sciences (continental philosophy for short).

How am I  to consider what kind of agenda philosophical theology would entertain? I am not sure, but I am going to start on the Summa Theologica some time soon.

Sinistre*

De pas sur la neige (Debussy)

This piece is chilling, bleak, modernist, yet ‘classically dissonant’. I thought I’d share this gem today. The name of this piece is ‘footprints in the snow’ and the performer is David Troya.

Antisophie

The day just passed

The day that has just passed has a number of markers about it:

1. It has been the European and Local council elections all around the UK; voting is something both boring yet fundamental in liberal democracies.
2. The news has been overshadowed by talk of the incumbent cabinet ministers. I personally think it is very unfortunate that a whole political party, including tis campaigners and tireless public servants (some of which are actually doing a good job), must be tarred by the expenses row and the poor overall reputation of the cabinet at large, but that is the cost of being part of a party in politics.
3. It has been 20 years since the Tiannenmen Square revolt. The world has become a different place since 1989. Of all the things happening; we are distracted from the more important of issues. Although that said; concentrating on an intermediate issue is partially dealing with a long term one.

Sinistre

Language as homogeneous

It is often derided that slang or ‘invented’ words are not of equal or similar status as ‘proper’ words, or words which have been established in the english language. Sometimes we may see that these vocabularies emerge and form their own languages in the form of pattois systems. The mass media is negative to the proliferation to the english language in the sense that ambiguity is not acknowledged.

Greek names such as Peisistratos have multiple translations that may be acceptable. Even modern phrases and nouns, when media exposure was lax on them, had a whole set of referring terms, rather than a single one. It is sometimes in the interest of politeness to use more accurate terms: ‘coloureds’ is thankfully a long-outdated noun. I also noticed the differing spellings of the english ‘Al-Qaeda’. Often cities can be renamed or our naming customs change. Peking is now Bejing and Bombay is now Mumbai. In terms of food, however, we still refer to ‘bombay mix’ and ‘peking duck’, and it looks like such rituals are unlikely to change. It seems queer to me when I see that it was even until the 1990s that the term ‘moslem’ was still acceptable but now ‘muslim’ is our standard noun. I won’t even start on the term of ‘Mohammedan’ here…

I wonder how far an ‘established’ english is being put forward; especially now as ‘British English’ stands as a distinct form of english from ‘American English’; but even more interesting is the notion of ‘International English’; as English is seemingly the universal second language. Is the mass media as negative to the rules of english as MS word?

Antisophie

Why a chair of poetry has little to do with poetry

The recent events and ripples had passed me, excepting a couple of ‘polemical’ responses by AC Grayling and feminist blogs. The issue is this: in the election of the Oxford university chair of poetry;  a significant position in the institution of poetry (if such a thing actually means anything), an allegation of unfair play has been made in that the elected holder of the chair Ruth Padel (also known as a descendent of Charles Darwin) was involved with informing the university authorities that one of the other candidates for election has had a shady past with sexually harassing his former students.

The allegation seems to have made any holder of the chair to be untenable unless they are completely unrelated to the incident; either dissolve the chair or arrange an election at a different time. It is, it seems, a very thorny issue. Two issues really come to mind here:

1. It is a disturbingly widespread phenomenon that academics abuse their position with regard to sexual harassment and coercion. This is true for all academic subjects, including philosophy.

2. What role does poetry have in our lives today? Exactly how is poetry a relevant medium? I find this somewhat difficult to answer, as the great exemplars are hard to find. I’ve not really found many hard hitting hip-hop artists and I’ve generally understood poetry as an activity historical more than literary (though one is not to deny the latter). Although more of that is my own lack of familiarity with the medium and my own ignorance!

Sinistre

Staleness in contemporary philosophy

I’ve noticed a lot of the ‘popularisers’ of philosophy. I have been a bit warmer to Julian Baggini and his work with the BBC and journalism; I find myself more insightfully interested by Mark Vernon and his very ecclectic reading; for instance, he, in some articles refers to Buddhism, and in others, the vehicle-externalist literature in the literature of the most recent decade in philosophy of psychology.

An opposing trend include the ‘formalisers’ of philosophy. The real icon of formal philosophy is Vincent Hendricks; I was once at a seminar of his, he’s a very funny man, not to mention very smart. In a recent volume, it has been commented that the problem with traditional analytic philosophy is its lack of formality. In some respects this might seem a very alien and bizarre claim, for what else is overly formal but analytic philosophy?

The allegation is not without merit. Philosophers (especially myself), rely on very basic logic and are not really mathematically educated. It is not so much in ‘assumptions’ that make traditional analytic philosophy flawed, but in its limited range of tools:

1. Classical logic
2. A few forms of Modal Logic
3. ‘Basic theories of probability’
4. An elementary apprehension of set theory
5. Little or no knowledge of computer science, particularly, the practical insights that are utilised by computer scientists by theories of language and modal logic

If philosophy is to be more fruitful, it seems that it needs to grow up a bit more and remember the ‘polymath’ origins of the subject. There is also a trend to argue that philosophy of science is becoming ahistorical and too much attention is paid towards ‘general’ philosophy of science to the deteriment of areas like: philosophy of technology; philosophical issues of engineering; philosophical ruminations on current scientific theories; philosophical research that advances research in actual science.

It is a very popular view that philosophy of science is related to science in the way that football commentators are related to football; they watch and try to understand, but not play. The onus is on good philosophy to advance the interests of both.

Sinistre*