Wednesday, February 10, 2010

“Philosophy talk show promotes deep thinking - San Francisco Chronicle” plus 3 more

“Philosophy talk show promotes deep thinking - San Francisco Chronicle” plus 3 more

Philosophy talk show promotes deep thinking - San Francisco Chronicle

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 08:56 AM PST

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They weren't there for live music or a rare performance. They were there to talk philosophy, specifically, to explore the subjects: "What Is a Wife?" and "Faces, Feelings and Lies."

The live audience at the Marsh Theater in San Francisco was part of a nationally syndicated weekly public radio show called "Philosophy Talk." Hosted by Stanford philosophy Professors John Perry and Ken Taylor, the show opens with the statement, "Radio that questions everything except your intelligence" and closes with, "Thank you for listening, and thank you for thinking."

"I drove from Palo Alto to be here today because I love the concept of encouraging people to think, and to think about controversial questions," said Sandra O'Neal, sitting in the darkened theater.

Aired in a handful of states and on nearly 50 radio stations, the show began six years ago and recently celebrated its 200th episode. Topics of discussion have included: what is art, how relevant is Jesus, what are words worth, can science explain consciousness, and where does morality come from?

"We think that you can philosophize about just about anything, and that people can be drawn in to reflect on society," said co-host Taylor, who was first captivated by philosophy in college, when he read David Hume's take on causation. "I feel strongly that our culture is debased because there is not enough deep reflection."

Perry, who has been teaching philosophy since 1974 and was drawn to the field in college when he read Plato's "Republic," said, "Philosophy is good for people. With our show, we try to ask whether an argument is good and a position cogent. And we try to do it with humor."

A look at wives

During the show's first segment, looking at the changing nature of a "wife," Marilyn Yalom, author of "A History of the Wife," joined Perry and Taylor onstage.

Topics of discussion included: How has the notion of a wife changed, and why become a wife? Is there still a subculture that believes a woman's place is in the home? How will gay marriages affect the term wife?

"Maybe we will get to a point where wife is not tied to gender," mused Perry. "Maybe there will be male wives and female husbands."

Taylor noted, "For thousands of years, husbands were dominant and wives were material property. Today, a contemporary wife is a husband's equal. Still, in many cultures, marriage is still about inequality and oppression."

Yalom said, "Wife is something of a controversial word. Has the ideal marriage taken hold? I've looked at the past 2,500 years and there has been enormous change. I see men carrying babies in frontal packs. Having said that, it's hard to get away from old rules. A lot of it has to do with whoever has the greater earning power."

The second episode looked at the concept, practice and detection of lies. Paul Ekman, a noted Bay Area psychologist who has pioneered the field of lie detection through the reading of gestures and expressions, joined the hosts. The discussion ranged from how to apply lie detection to airport security to how anyone can learn lie detection in an hour. Ekman also discussed how to control one's emotions to evade lie detection.

After the event, Perry and Taylor, who have worked together long enough that they come across as a well-timed comedy duo, said the show has steadily gained in popularity. Their Web site draws about 70,000 unique visitors per month, and past shows are downloadable.

"I had the idea for this show about 20 years ago," Perry said. "I asked a couple of people and it didn't happen. When Ken came to Stanford, he was very excited about it. He's not just a dreamer but a doer. I'm a dreamer and I occasionally do."

Success comes slowly

Taylor says, "We made an hourlong pilot around 2001 without having any idea what we were doing. The question on the pilot was, 'Would you want to live forever?' We shopped it around and finally one producer, Ben Manilla, who is our producer now, listened to it and invited us to lunch. The first thing he said was, 'Don't play this pilot for anyone, ever again.' "

With financial support from Stanford, the professors continued to pursue their dream. They were rejected by radio stations everywhere.

"We heard from a lot of producers that philosophy was not something people were interested in, and that we were derivative, like we were the car talk guys of philosophy," said Taylor. Finally, though, the producers at KALW in San Francisco took a listen and liked what they heard.

Taylor and Perry try to do 32 fresh episodes a year, with about a third of those before a live audience. A recent live show, held at a cathedral in Oregon and focusing on the subject of desire and its effects on the planet, drew 800 people the first night and 600 people the second night.

"There is an audience of people - sometimes huge, sometimes small - who hunger for something that invites them to reflect," said Taylor.

Perry, who remembers obsessing over questions about the existence of God and the role of free will even as a high school student, said, "The show has done better than we feared, but not as good as we hoped. But slowly and steadily we are making progress. The examined life is a good thing."

Philosophy Talk: A nationally syndicated public radio show co-hosted by Stanford Professors Ken Taylor and John Perry. 10 a.m. Sundays on KALW, 91.7 FM. The episodes "What Is a Wife?" and "Faces, Feelings and Lies," recorded at the Marsh, will air April 4. philosophytalk.org.

E-mail Julian Guthrie at jguthrie@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Jane's Design Philosophy - Salon

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 07:37 AM PST

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First, I bring nothing to this blog in the way of design.  No pictures, no colors.  I come from the world of advertising and it taught me to listen to my clients and address their needs.  What I do is not about me or my artwork, design...whatever.  It's about my client.

I LISTEN and OBSERVE their needs.  Lots of questions about what they like to do.  How they want to live.  I look at my client(s) to assess their colors (the colors they look good in) and ask where they like to vacation, what are their favorite colors...I take the pallette for their home from these.  This is not about my artwork, this is their home and their dream.  Most have great difficulty describing what would please them.  I feel it is my JOB to ferrett the info out of them.

All of this is to express my views on following or creating "TRENDS".  Be it color, furniture, clothing, I have left them behind.  My inspiration is the people who live in the house.  With all that we can find on the internet, we can find most anything we want in most any color.  Wear what you look good in?  Likewise, live in what enhances you.

Don't let anyone tell you you have to have something you don't like to complete a look.  That is coming from a lazy designer.

I've explored design on many levels and for a variety of venues and I've come to believe design, especially for the person and the home is and should be PERSONAL!  The only thing I put in my design of myself are my talents.  Very few people can redecorate to follow the ever changing trends.  Most people only redecorate to any large degree once or twice in their lifetimes. 

 We all see things we admire as we walk through life and changing a pillow or a picture isn't exactly interior design, and barely redecorating.

I decorate/design for anyone who wants to improve their surroundings.  It's refreshing to the mind and soul.  There is always a way to get a new look.  Trends are fleeting, solid furniture and you're favorite colors are a great way to start.

Jane 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Of Philosophy in ‘Bioshock 2’: Some Words from the Devs - Popmatters.com

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 05:00 AM PST

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On February 5th, 2010, some of the development team responsible for Bioshock 2 took part in a conference call with the gaming press.  Questions were asked in a moderated forum to a group that included creative director Jordan Thomas, lead designer Zak McClendon, and lead environment artist Hogarth de la Plante.

Most of my own interests in taking part in the forum regarded how the philosophical concerns and ethical choices that made the first Bioshock so compelling might or might not be continued to be explored in the sequel.  Interestingly, while the first game grappled with the notion of how creating a society on the libertarian and individualistic principles of Ayn Rand's objectivism might look in the aftermath of its dissolution, the second game seems to change direction with an eye to considering utopianism of another sort, that of the utilitarianism of collectivist thinkers like John Stuart Mill.

While I would have liked the opportunity to follow up on responses concerning Mill and "the intellectual progeny of Richard Dawkins," what follows is my transcription of the questions and responses from the call that seemed to focus on the devs thinking about philosophical inspiration, ethics, and how Rapture would continue to serve as an environment to explore big social and political questions and additionally some more fundamental social concerns about basic family organization and family dynamics.

Moderator: How does the sequel expand on the original Bioshock story?

Jordan: The focus here is on choice.  In that the player is defined by the moment in which he is granted free will this time around, very much in contrast to the original.  Unlike other Big Daddies, Delta is not enslaved to the city and is able to make a number of ethical decisions, which shape the outcome of the plot in a way that wasn't possible in the original.  Andrew Ryan is now dead and in his place and in that power vacuum, Dr. Sofia Lamb has come to be in control.  She is a very different thinker, based on John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and she is unwilling to allow any individual to compromise her plan.

Moderator: So, will players ever know the true origins of Delta in Bioshock 2 or does it solely rely on the point after he is awakened?

Jordan: Suffice it to say that the story is mystery driven.  One of the central questions that people always ask is "Who am I?"  We're certainly mindful of that, although I would say that because the central conflict of the story is sort of a family triangle in many ways, there is more to offer than just that question in terms of the mystery that unfolds towards the end.

Moderator: Are we going to see any returning characters from Bioshock, and if so, can you say who will be back?

Hogarth: Definitely Tennenbaum is a character that you actually see in Bioshock 2 who was also in Bioshock, but I think that on a more abstract level that Rapture is basically Ryan's legacy, the crumbling, sad legacy of Andrew Ryan.  You'll see Andrew Ryan's messages and Andrew Ryan's ideals around the game.  So, he's still part of the game as a character.  As a lot of people said, Rapture was kind of a character on its own, but I think that's more about Ryan than anything else. You'll see Tennenbaum as an actual person, but Ryan is still a part of Bioshock 2.

Moderator: Does Andrew Ryan's objectivist philosophy still hold weight on Rapture, or has the passage of time and Sofia Lamb erased his legacy?

Jordan: Sofia Lamb has certainly made her attempt to blot him out although there's a level early on called Ryan Amusements where you see the philosophy of Andrew Ryan from a child's eye view.  It is very much a propaganda, an indoctrination park, and so, you absolutely get a lot of the fire and brimstone that you got from Ryan but from the point of view of one of Rapture's native children.

Moderator: Will the moral choices in Bioshcok 2 require the player to make the unpleasant choices that the first one offered but never actually required?

Jordan: It would undermine the value of a moral choice to force one or the other path. The father relationship with the Little Sisters although twisted, in that both people involved in the pair have been subjected to this gruesome conditioning, is still kind of primal and sad and, in some ways, kind of uplifting, depending on how you treat the Little Sisters.  So, you are still called upon to make those choices, but you're not forced to mistreat them.  In fact, what you do with that trust is part of how the choices effect the ending.

Moderator: Have you made the choice of whether to harvest the Little Sisters any harder this time around? In the first game, we didn't feel that you lost out on enough by saving them to make it a difficult choice. You could become just as powerful regardless of whether you saved or harvested them.

Zak: That's been something that has been a common criticism of the first game, and we tried to make those choices around the Little Sisters a little more gray.  It is both harder to be good and more rewarding to be really, truly evil.  If you just straight up save the Little Sisters and never engage in the adopting of them, you are going to be starving for Adam for most of the game.  On the other hand, if you are as terrible a person as you possibly can be, and you go around and you adopt and you partner up with the Little Sisters and then you harvest them later, you are going to be really, really flush.  But there's a middle ground, and if you are the kind of player who really wants to work for it and gathers Adam from bodies and save Little Sisters, you can keep pace with the selfish player who harvests them outright. But you are going to be doing a whole lot more work for it.  So, as those battles get more difficult as the game goes on, it's a lot more alluring to just cash in a Little Sister immediately by harvesting her and get that reward rather than doing the long hard work of gathering from bodies.  What we're hoping is that that gameplay choice is more reflective of the choices that go on in your head when you're trying to make complex moral choices.

Moderator: The philosophy of individualism was obviously a huge part of the first title.  With the sequel seemingly going in a completely opposite direction, how early on in development was a theme determined and what were the decisive factors to take that approach?

Jordan: Shortly after deciding that the father-daughter bond would be central to the story, came the obvious question of: what would make for a meaningful antagonist for that?  So, somebody to subvert the traditional definition of family through heavily altruistic filters for the common good, above the individual loyalties, sort of naturally followed, and that's how Sofia Lamb was born.  As previously mentioned, she is based on several altruistic thinkers and also on the kind of intellectual progeny of Richard Dawkins.

Moderator: What was the thought process behind telling the story of the fallen Rapture in multiplayer, and why tell this story as a part of Bioshock 2 instead of giving us a fully fleshed out prequel?

Jordan: I'll start with the prequel thing.  In many ways, we feel like an honest prequel to Bioshock in a single player kind of milieu would be a very, very different game.  It would sacrifice a lot of what made Bioshock 1 work.  If it was at all honest about simulating a live city, then the chaos that makes for the ecology that powers Bioshock would not be possible.  Without saying that there will never be a game that takes place earlier in Rapture, we certainly felt that that wouldn't speak directly to the values of the first game.  As far as the multiplayer version goes, the year between 1959 and 1960 is the civil war, when utopia became distopia, and I actually feel very strongly that translating those events into multiplayer mechanics is extremely apt, the sort of dogpile of self interest could not be more laissez faire, and so, the notion that you get to compete for Adam during that time period without losing narrative integration into the world of Bioshock was actually very compelling for me.

Moderator: The world of Bioshock has been heavily influenced by Ayn Rand.  Do any other authors stand out as clear influences in Bioshock 2?

Jordan: There's the obvious influence of Orwell.  Utopian in general and particularly distopian fiction almost always comes through an Orwellian filter just because the dangers of an all consuming state are best articulated by that kind of stuff.  That being said, a lot of the other influences are non-fiction, again, Dawkins and the evolutionary psychologists that follow him, the works of Marx, Mill, and, for example, more modern philosophers, like David Pearce, who is still alive and would like to eradicate suffering from the planet.  So, it's kind of a blend of fiction and non-fiction.

Moderator: Are video games an acceptable way to explore literature? 

I find that the term literature kind of corrupts when applied to video games.  I think that there are many game developers that have read philosophy or are fairly versed in the classics but that don't wear that quite so much on their sleeves.  Starting reading philosophy does not necessarily make you or your work particularly deep on its own.  I do think that there is a demand for mature themes and that follows naturally into the demand for mature influences and that opens us up into being a bit more pointy headed, particularly in the optional content, where players who are interested in engaging critically with the game on an intellectual level can do so.  I wouldn't say that games are the ideal way to experience literature.  I think literature has done that quite well.  That being said, games offer the opportunity to ask interesting questions and allow the player to answer them in a way that transcends previous mediums.

—G. Christopher Williams

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A Loving Levinas on War - Forward

Posted: 10 Feb 2010 02:04 PM PST

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A Loving Levinas on War

The French Jewish Philosopher's Moving 'Notebooks in Captivity'

By Benjamin Ivry

The Obi-Wan Kenobi of 20th-century Jewish philosophy, Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, has grown in fame and stature since his death in 1995. Acclaimed for his philosophy of the "other," which recognizes morality — and behavior toward others — as the basis for any philosophical thought, Levinas offers a decisive break with his onetime teacher Martin Heidegger's comparatively individualist obsession with "being."

In the murderous schoolyard of 20th-century politics, Levinas's focus on playing well with others seems all the more crucial in retrospect. Moreover, as opposed to Heidegger's notorious wartime embrace of Nazism, Levinas wrote of Judaism, and the Talmud in particular, as central subjects in the main stream of world philosophy.

This spring, a flood of admiring new books on Levinas will appear: "Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption" from Columbia University Press; "Other Others: Levinas, Literature, Transcultural Studies" from SUNY Press; "Levinasian Meditations" from Duquesne University Press; and "A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas's Philosophy of Judaism" from Stanford University Press. Yet none is as startlingly, indeed stunningly, revelatory as a new book from Grasset-IMEC Publishers in France containing Levinas's previously unpublished "Notebooks in Captivity" ("Carnets de captivité") the first volume of a planned series of his complete writings.

The notebooks were written mostly during the Second World War (some uncollected postwar jottings and essays are also included). Levinas, a French citizen since 1930, had served in the army, and after the Nazi victory he became a prisoner of war in various French camps and finally, from 1942 to 1945, at Stalag XI-B at Fallingbostel, Germany, near Bergen-Belsen. During the rest of his long life, Levinas published relatively little about his wartime experiences, acknowledging that his suffering was minuscule compared to the vast historical tragedy of the Shoah. Levinas was well aware that his own survival was because of his status as a military prisoner of war, "miraculously protected by a uniform," unlike the millions of Jewish civilians killed in concentration camps.

Still, Levinas was assigned to one of the all-Jewish commandos, doing hard labor for long hours under brutal conditions. He mostly worked in harshly treated forestry brigades, whereas the relatively fortunate non-Jewish prisoners of war at Fallingbostel were even permitted to put on shows for recreation. Despite the evident hardships of his situation, Levinas did have access to the POW library donated by the International Red Cross in Geneva and his wide-ranging reading, from Ariosto to Proust, is reflected in these notebooks. Fascinatingly, the notebooks reveal for the first time that Levinas long planned to write novels, even though these would remain unfinished, surviving in the form of outlines and fragmentary drafts. One, titled "Sad Opulence" (Triste Opulence) and later retitled "Eros," tells the story of an army interpreter who becomes a prisoner of war. A second novel, "The Lady From Wepler's" ("La Dame de Chez Wepler"), also set in wartime, is about a protagonist's obsession with a prostitute glimpsed, but never approached, because of the "chasm which separates respect from sexuality."

Artful metaphors and similes abound in these plans for novels, including in "Eros," the repeated description of a group of prisoners squeezed into the back of a truck, riding past a house where German women live. The prisoners gape at a pair of stockings hung out a window to dry, and at a woman sitting next to the window, brushing her hair. Struck by the "quasi-obscene nature of this action," Levinas notes that even the hairbrush retained "nothing of [its] chaste essence as a utensil." Alert in prison to sensuality and even sexuality, despite malnutrition and fatigue, Levinas notes: "Sexual love — the only one which may be fulfilled, in which caresses may culminate. Other loves (even filial or paternal) are impotent. Impotent because inexpressible, incapable of being fulfilled."

Along with sexuality, humor is on occasion also surprisingly present in Levinas's life as a prisoner, as he notes in an episode that later would appear in his book "Difficult Freedom," about a dog named Bobby who showed affection for Jewish prisoners. Levinas ironically dubbed the pooch the "last Kantian in Nazi Germany," referring to the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" of respecting individual rights of human beings. By contrast, Levinas notes, Germans at the camp saw Jewish prisoners as "quasi-human, a group of apes."

Even more telling, Levinas's notes reveal how, "stationed in segregated barracks and commandos… the Jewish prisoner suddenly rediscovers his Jewish identity." Indeed, as he celebrates Rosh Hashanah with his (previously assimilated and unobservant) fellow Jewish ex-soldiers, Levinas notes: "A few years ago, these prayers would be interpreted as offering derisory hope. Nice little old outmoded things; now it is all interpreted as reality. The Last Judgment has become reality. Good becomes good again and evil, evil, and quite shatteringly so." As Levinas writes in a moving 1945 essay, also included in the new Grasset/IMEC volume, Jewish prisoners of war found that "humiliation" reminded them of the "Biblical aspect of being chosen people."

This recognition of renewed Jewish identity spurred Levinas to ponder philosophical concepts of time and social responsibility, which he would address soon after the war, in "Existence and Existents" and "Time and the Other." Celebrating Jewish holidays in the camps was doubtless made especially poignant by the absence of his wife, Raïssa, and daughter, Simone, who survived the war in hiding, while all of Levinas's relatives in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis.

Family matters also haunted the destiny of these deeply humane texts, the publication of which was long delayed by legal actions from Simone, who is opposed on principle to the publication of her father's unfinished work. Levinas's son, Michaël, a noted pianist and composer born in 1949, made the final decision to have them published anyway, as his father's literary executor. As Michaël Levinas told the French weekly "Le Nouvel Observateur": "A few steps away from a concentration camp, a Jewish man continues to believe in transmission by the written word. So I felt obliged [to publish them]." Posterity can only be glad.

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

Excerpts from Emmanuel Levinas's nine small wartime notebooks:

The boxer is garbed when he is naked.

Appearance of prisoners in Germany. Monastic or moral life. Even old men have something innocent and pure about them.

In the room with the little dormer window, men like clouds which hide the sun.

In Tolstoy the main thing is not truth about human nature but the emotion of someone who suddenly discovers all of life's falseness, lying, complacency.

Winter sun, like a dead man's kiss.

The only human perfection — beauty. Like a miraculous branch on a rotten tree trunk. The only miracle.

Tree — the most arrogant vertical of living nature. Its majesty — vertical majesty.



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