Author: Kenneth Taylor

I’m sitting in my study at home listening and thought I would get this blog back on track. Right now, a repeat episode of Philosophy Talk s about to air, even as I type. The episode is Philosophy and Film, with noted critic, David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. I thought that maybe a good way to get the show started would be to do a little bit of live blogging.

I’m in the airport at Tucson. I’m listening online to our episode on “Why Music Matters” which we recorded in front of live audience at a locale in San Francisco. David Harrington, of the world famous Kronos Quartet is our guest. Since my flight is about to board, I won’t have time to listen at length. And I’ve been too wrapped up in the conference to blog about the topic. But I thought it might be fun just to open up an entry to comments from listeners about the show and the topic.

Let’s distinguish two things here: (a) being racist, sexist, or homophobic; (b) being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic. I take it that you can be labeled racist either correctly or incorrectly. But I also take it that you can fail to be labeled racist even though you are one. Now if it’s unfashionable to express certain views and if the cost of expressing such views is that you get labeled a racist, then if people care enough about what they are labeled, several things can happen.

I start out thinking that flirting probably has a sort of “Gricean” structure. By that I mean a couple of things. First, it seems to me that you flirt with someone by intending to flirt with them. It’s one thing to cause sexual arousal in another person by a look or a walk or a word or your tone of voice or the tilt of your head. But unless you intend to cause arousal by that means, it doesn’t seem right to my ear to say that you are flirting with them.

I have to admit that most of my own summer reading, will not be reading for pure philosophcal pleasure. That’s because I really MUST finish a book I’ve been working on for several years now that is WAY past due and get started on the next one, about which I have been thinking, speaking and teaching but not writing for the past several years. So most of my reading wil be directly related to those two tasks. Still, I have thoughts both about what I would like to read myself this summer, if I were to be able to for pure philosophical pleasure and about what I might recommend to others to read who were looking for interesting philosophical reads.

The preamble to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”

Nobody wants to die.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Some people do commit suicide in…

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don’t share that view. But there’s no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime—a book that he later basically repudiated—he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy.

In one way, it seems obvious that the court system — especially judicial review of the acts of the legislative and executive branches of government — is, in one way, a bulwark of our constitutional democracy. That was a point made clearly and forcefully by a past Dean of the Stanford Law School, athleen Sullivan, who was our guest on Capitol Hill when we did a show on Separation of Powers.

Many smart, reflective scientifically literate people obviously still do believe in god. Thankfully (or unthankfully, depending on your perspective) religious belief is not merely the province of anti-scientific, anti-modern fundamentalists who take every word, comma and period in some sacred text — like the Bible or the Koran — to be the sole and authoritative truth about just about everything.

What distinguishes music from non-music? The world is replete with sound — both man made sounds and the sounds of nature. Many of these sounds are quite beautiful — the cries of various animals, the sound of the ocean, the whistling wind, the human voice, the majestic boom of the space shuttle as it rockets into space. But only a few of the sounds with which the world is replete count as music. Is there anything deep to say about what distinguishes music from non-music?

It’s really been quite an experience, first trying to get the show on the radio, then trying to shape the show into a distinctive art form, and then trying to grow the show. When we started out, John and I really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into or what was possible and what was impossible. I really didn’t realize what a conservative, risk-averse medium public radio was. Plus I didn’t realize how hard it is to make good radio. Nor did I realize how difficult it could be to combine the virtues of radio with the virtues of philosophy.

Here are what I take to be some deep truths about philosophy. First philosophy currently is, has always been, and probably will always be a fragmented discipline. There is really no one thing that philosophers do and not much that unifies the mulipliticity of different things that philosophers do. Philosophy is what people who call themselves philosophers do. And people who call themselves philosophers do all sorts of things.