Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyzes which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. ¶ The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyzes of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century.
Paul Valéry, Aesthetics, “The Conquest of Ubiquity, ” translated by Ralph Manheim, (Pantheon Books: 1964), p. 225.
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Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into
our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so
we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and
disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
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Years ago I began conceiving of these two pictures as analogous to the difference between a game of foosball and football. In honor of the 2026 World Cup, for your consideration, "Foosball or Football".
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Thomas Reid argues for the importance of the philosophy of mind, recognizes the obstacles to knowing the mind's inner workings, sketches its history, including Hume and Berkeley. Reid argues against skepticism and for common sense in matters of the mind. "It is a bold philosophy that rejects, without ceremony, principles which irresistibly govern the belief and the conduct of all mankind in the common concerns of life; and to which the philosopher himself must yield, after he imagines he hath confuted them."
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He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses. ... If philosophy contradicts herself, befools her votaries, and deprives them of every object worthy to be pursued or enjoyed, let her be sent back to the infernal regions from which she must have had her original.
At a popular level, “AI” is the marketing label du jour for virtually every innovation in software, hardware, and technology that is up for sale or open to investment. Though the term is in ubiquitous use with vague semantic content, surely a more technical definition is on hand. Consider the literal definition of artificial: something made or produced by humans rather than occurring naturally. Everything about generative artificial intelligence is human in origin. Intelligence can also be difficult to define adequately. One fundamental definition is the ability to differentiate between this and that. Surely we can clarify this ubiquitous term.
With the emergence of generative software like Suno to generate music for texts and lyrics, I’ve become taken with songwriting. Ideas for stories and essays that have never seen the light of day have now found expression. Because I tend to obsess over every word, the more limited word count makes songs more attainable; and, without the need for links and formatting, editing on the bus and train is easier while commuting. Finally, it’s just fun to listen to all the iterations Suno’s algorithms spit out on the way to the final version. So, thanks to a couple millennia of music makers that provided the training data; and, thanks to the developers who formulated the math to derive new songs from that deep sonic well. This song, “Run Into Reality”, is inspired by Dallas Willard’s potent observation that “reality is what you run into when you’re wrong”. The philosophical and pop cultural references are legion, so notes are appended.
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What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
The creator would indeed have been a bungling artist, had he intended man for a social animal, without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man; because there is no rule without exceptions: but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule. Some men are born without the organs of sight, or of hearing, or without hands. Yet it would be wrong to say that man is born without these faculties: and sight, hearing and hands may with truth enter into the general definition of Man.
Richard Rorty, "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism", The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 10 (Oct., 1983), pp. 583-589. Reprinted in Postmodernism: A Reader, edited by Thomas Docherty.
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This Jewish and Christian element in our tradition is gratefully invoked by free-loading atheists like myself ... The existence of human rights, in the sense in which it is at issue in this meta-ethical debate, has as much or as little relevance to our treatment of such a child as the question of the existence of God.