There was a time philosophy was thought a lofty pursuit – a calling that tried to explain the world. But “despite important developments in recent decades in philosophical accounts of thought and meaning, law and ethics, and knowledge and consciousness, the enterprise of philosophy is no longer taken very seriously nor accorded any special status in the broader culture.” Why? “Too often these days we reduce philosophy to confession and intimacy to kitsch precisely because we live without a sense of the democratic res publica.
Category: ideas
A New Way To Pay For School
So school is too expensive for most students to pay for without help. And student loans are becoming more difficult to get and harder to afford. So MP3.com founder Michael Robertson came up with a new idea to loan students money. Instead of paying set interest rates, students approved by Robertson’s program agree to “pay less than 1 percent of her future income for 15 years after graduation to cover the new loan.”
This Just In – History Continues
Francis Fukuyama wonders if history has restarted again, after famously having declared an end of history. “The ‘end of history’ hypothesis was about the process of modernisation. Progressive intellectuals around the world spent much of the last century and a half believing that historical progress would result in an evolution of modern societies toward socialism. The process of modernisation was, moreover, a universal one that would sooner or later drag all societies in its train. Understood in this fashion, September 11 represents a real challenge.”
A New Way To Share Creative Work
Copyright protects the rights of authors. But what if authors don’t want their rights protected? Some just want to give their work away, to let others build on their ideas. But that’s actually more difficult than you think. Just getting the rights to use work can be daunting. A new set of licenses created by the Creative Commons group “enables authors to communicate to users of their content how those consumers may use the content without requiring the user to contact the author each and every time.”
Can Architecture Overcome Its Ideology?
“What does it mean to say that an architect, considered in his capacity as an architect, espouses an ideology? Think about it: Did Brunelleschi have an ideology? Did Alberti? Did Stanford White? They certainly had opinions about what made good architecture: they embraced some things and disparaged others. But having an opinion is not the same thing as espousing an architectural ideology.” But with Modernism, we’re dealing with a different animal…
Those Flying Saucers Of 15th Century Art
So you think UFO’s are an invention of the 20th Century? How then to explain these pictures of Unidentified Flying Objects found in European paintings of the 15th Century?
Polling For Art
As times get tougher for artists, the pressure to try to create work more people will want to see increases. That’s why artists Komar & Melamid’s work in ferreting out what people most want in a painting has been way ahead of its time. It’s art-by-poll, and the artists have taken the trouble to find out what people in 14 countries most want (and don’t want) to see in their artwork. Here’s a gallery…
The Problem Of Thinking Too Much…
For most of us, the problem would seem to be not thinking enough. But it can go the other way. According to one scholar, “overthinking” can sometimes be worse than not thinking at all. “The real difficulty is knowing when to stop thinking and go with your gut”…
The Difference Between ‘Neo’ And ‘New’
Here in the 21st century, we’re so retro that we don’t even need to look ahead. Or maybe it’s that we’re so global that we’re about to come full circle and become separatist. No, wait: we’re so full of self-conscious irony that we’ve forgotten how to be serious. Well, whatever we are, Philip Marchand finds it all deeply unsatisfying.
Testing, Testing…
Time was you couldn’t get into college without doing well on the standardized tests. Now you almost can’t get out of grade school without excelling at them. Education reform in the US has meant a battery of new standardized testing, and the stakes are high for both schools and students. “Unsurprisingly, test-prep companies see the law, and especially its provision for federal tutoring vouchers, as a vast new opportunity. ‘The market for test preparation is on fire’.”