Since I wrote my brief broadside against Steven Pinker’s monumentally misguided New Republic essay “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians,” a slew of additional responses have come to my attention. Rhetorically, my reply was a proslepsis (among its many names), a technique by which one talks about something while pretending […]
The Politics in Poetry: Vendler vs. Dove
. Poetry is relevant! I kid poetry. Poetry is always relevant. What do you think The Iliad was doing if it wasn’t writing the history of the victors? The inept and cowardly Paris stole Helen from Menelaus – sure. I wonder how the Trojans might have told that story. It has also long been facile […]
Art on the Brain
. Welcome brainiac, hail mensch. From Alva Noë, “Art and the Limits of Neuroscience“: What we do know is that a healthy brain is necessary for normal mental life, and indeed, for any life at all. But of course much else is necessary for mental life. We need roughly normal bodies and a roughly normal environment. […]
Artful Humanity
Denis Dutton’s new book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, argues that art is not a social construct, but hardwired through evolutionary development into human being. Which is what I’ve always argued. He just wrote the book. AJA