There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:
This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.
I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:
Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:
Slam ice, dynamic.
A bad loch: Cold abaci.
Many decimals....
Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:
An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.
AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:
There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.
And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:
Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.
Alongside the three transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we might set the three taboos: politics, religion and sex. This goes back a long way; the Royal Navy prohibited discussion of politics, religion or women at the officers mess going back to early in the 19th century. I'm not sure of the current etiquette in this area. Here at the Music Salon we avoid politics with the single exception of when politics threatens to invade the world of music and the fine arts. But I would like to just put a toe onto the dangerous waters of religion.
I recently had a discussion with two colleagues about religion. I'm afraid I rather heatedly pronounced that in my view this whole climate crisis was nothing but an ideological scam and it was "insane" for Germany, for example, to deindustrialize its economy trying to achieve net zero carbon dioxide. I will mercifully spare you the details. One of my colleagues, both of whom are very committed Christians, retorted that in her view it was equally insane not to accept Jesus Christ into one's life. Woo-hoo, that energized the discussion!
At one point, I made the slightly excessive claim that religion was nothing but a "category error" a technical term in philosophy taken from The Concept of Mind, a work of analytic philosophy by Gilbert Ryle. It is a category error to extend the idea of a personal deity to the universe. Well, maybe, maybe not. My real point was that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply beyond our ken.
But the truth is that my colleagues and I really are coming from two different traditions. When I am not engaged in an intellectual discussion, I have profound respect for my Christian and Jewish colleagues based on the view that anyone pursuing virtue is to be admired as it is not so easy in this world. I respect the traditions and literature of both those religions and have done a fair amount of reading of both.
I wanted to respond in a more thoughtful manner to the discussion so I got copies of the slim volume published by Hackett of the Five Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo). I accompanied this by a brief note saying that I both respected and was acquainted with the sources of their beliefs, but wasn't sure that they had much knowledge of the sources of my beliefs.
UPDATE: For some inexplicable reason, I forgot to mention that I gave these copies to my two colleagues--but I guess that was obvious.
It is my understanding that Western Civilization really derives fundamentally from two places: Jerusalem and Athens. For some reason, my early experiences with Christianity were not too inspiring, but over the years I became more and more attracted to Ancient Greece. Judaism gave us monotheism and a profound sense of moral duty while Christianity added the virtues of mercy, love and administration (borrowed from Rome). Sure, that's a grotesque simplification, but bear with me! Athens, on the other hand gave us cosmology, geometry, ethical reasoning, logic, history, aesthetics, comedy, tragedy, democracy, political science and a bunch of other things.
I chose Plato because his dialogues are a wonderful entry to the thought of Ancient Greece and Aristotle is just too difficult.
One of the great things about YouTube is that you can educate yourself--for free--in just about any area of life. Though I would stay away from the "guitar in ten easy lessons" clips. I have learned a great deal in the area of philosophy on YouTube, so here are some people I follow in philosophy. No particular order. First up is Jeffrey Kaplan a super bright and crisp thinker that has an elegant and clear presentation and teaches philosophy in the US. Can you figure out how he manages to write backwards so fluently? He has lectures on a myriad of subjects including why physicalism is not possible. Here is his intro to philosophy:
Next up is Victor Gijsbers who teaches philosophy in the Netherlands. I found his introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus to be very helpful when I was first trying to get into it.
And finally, Woan Ni, a philosophy student at the Sorbonne who has some of the most delightful philosophy videos. Here is one on Wittgenstein.
I'm introducing this post with a famous example from Wittgenstein of the difference between seeing and seeing-as that has some interesting applications in music. When you look at the above picture you see a simple line-drawing. But you can see it as two different animals, a rabbit or a duck. There is a difference between seeing and seeing-as.
There are musical applications because we can both hear and hear as. Take theory class for example: the professor might play two chords and ask "which one do you hear as the tonic?" And what about this progression? Composers can, with context, make it obvious what chord is the tonic and what the dominant. But they can also make it ambiguous and in the case of a modulation from one key to another, we may only hear something as a tonic in retrospect.
Music adds the interesting element of temporal context to the hearing-as aspect. Wittgenstein uses that term "aspect" to describe, say, the two different interpretations of the drawing. In one aspect it is a duck and the other a rabbit. In popular music sometimes there is an ambiguity between tonic and dominant--or is it sub-dominant? If your usual context is Classical style, then a pop song might sound like it is ending on the wrong chord.
But the hearing-as issue extends far beyond simple harmonic function. For example, a passage may be played and heard as introductory when near the beginning of a piece, like this from the Bach Chaconne.
But might have a quite different expressive effect when heard several minutes later in the piece where its function now is to recall the opening and prepare for a modulation to the parallel major:
This example is close to the duck/rabbit one as the two passages are, at first, identical. But we can expand the concept quite a bit. The Chaconne is a splendid example of organic unity in music. The whole piece, roughly fifteen minutes in length, is based almost entirely on this eight measure theme:
Click to enlarge
A chaconne, at this point in music history, usually consists of a set of variations over a short harmonic progression, often in the form of a repeating bass line. Due to the length of this piece, while there are many instances of the same bass line, Bach often departs from it. The basic harmonic progression persists, however. But each variation brings out difference nuances or aspects of the theme. For example, the example above is the whole of the eight measure theme. Notice that it starts on the second beat and ends on the first. The progression is i, iv, V6/5, I, VI, iv, i6/4, V6, i with a slightly different and more conclusive cadence in the second half.
When we hear it at the beginning it has an introductory feel but with two what we might call sub-texts: there is just a hint of the French overture (especially if you add some ornaments as I do) and a hint of the sarabande, which emphasizes the second beat, as this theme does. That French overture feel continues with a couple of variations emphasizing a dotted-note figure:
But there are lots of sub-texts or aspects in play. For example, a bit later Bach alludes to a typical element in fugue texture by inserting a multi-voice stretto, most unusual in a piece for solo violin:
I am using examples from my transcription for guitar, but apart from some added bass notes it is identical with the violin original. Later on there are allusions to dance:
And in this passage I hear an extreme expression that has the feeling of a lament, communicated through chromaticism and texture:
Then, modulating to D major, this passage sounds to me like a deeply meditative chorale:
Bach uses variation form and technique to reveal different possible aspects of the basic harmonic progression, ones referencing different musical styles and genres as well as different kinds of emotional expression. I'll stop here, because I am still learning the piece and haven't thought about later sections.
What I do when I play the piece is look beyond the notes to see the different aspects that they reveal. In that sense I am interpreting the piece according to different aspects. Of course, someone else could see entirely different aspects.
Here is a performance of the piece by Jean Rondeau on harpsichord:
Philosophy is one of the items listed on the Music Salon masthead and, though we often approach it via aesthetics, a shared concern, as in this post: Aesthetic Facts and Opinions, we also talk about philosophy tout simple. I was going to put up some links, but really there are so many philosophy posts that I could spend half the morning picking and choosing and I really need to get to practicing Bach!
So what I would like to do instead is offer brief comments on different philosophers and what you might gain from reading their works. And at the end I will link to a couple of philosophers on YouTube that might be worth your time. But first, why bother with philosophy? The popular opinion is that it is largely a waste of time--your time would be better spent with self-help books or in the gym. True, a lot of philosophy is of only marginal value to everyday life, but as soon as you stumble across that word "value" you might find yourself asking, what is of value in life? And that is a philosophical question. Sure, you could just go with Conan:
But the ability to examine ideas critically might prove quite useful. For example, in that post I link to above I quote an article in the New York Times by a philosophy professor who points out a problem with the public school curriculum:
The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious. For example, at the outset of the school year, my son brought home a list of student rights and responsibilities. Had he already read the lesson on fact vs. opinion, he might have noted that the supposed rights of other students were based on no more than opinions. According to the school’s curriculum, it certainly wasn’t true that his classmates deserved to be treated a particular way — that would make it a fact. Similarly, it wasn’t really true that he had any responsibilities — that would be to make a value claim a truth.
Yes, it is perfectly obvious that for a lot of people their moral principles are facts but yours are just opinions! Once you realize this, it becomes easier to stand up for yourself. So let's dive in and take a critical look at famous philosophers:
Socrates is one of the most important inventors of the philosophical method often called the "Socratic method" which involves asking questions. This makes people uncomfortable so the people of Athens condemned him to death for corrupting the young.
Plato, his student, continued the work writing a bunch of dialogues of Socrates in conversation. I recommend the first one, the Euthyphro which poses the interesting dilemma, do the gods condemn murder because it is wrong or is it wrong because they condemn it?
Aristotle, student of Plato, was the teacher of Alexander the Great and basically laid the foundation of things like logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, psychology, ethics, botany, and a few other things. Plato is easy to read, but Aristotle is emphatically not--like many really great thinkers he is a very awkward writer. But the book to read is the Nicomachean Ethics a guide to moral conduct for many for centuries.
There is rather a large gap as the Romans were not big on philosophy, but things improved when Western Europe discovered the ancient Greeks. St. Thomas Aquinas created a synthesis of Aristotle with theology that still remains the foundation of Catholic theology. The most accessible text is the section on the five ways to prove the existence of God from the Summa Theologica.
I think I will stop there as philosophy gets more and more gnarly (not to mention lengthy) from here on so I will save that for future posts. But this should give you an intriguing start.
Those YouTube philosophers? One of the best is Jeffrey Kaplan; here is his take on Aristotle:
The reference is, of course, to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. As a lifelong student I was musing the other day that if I had the opportunity to spend some time on a university campus what I would like to do most of all is attend a graduate seminar on Wittgenstein. But then I realized that you don't have to do that any more--you just have to go to YouTube. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of clips on Wittgenstein including audiobooks of the Tractatus, explanations and introductions to Wittgenstein, taped university lectures, clips on individual topics and so on. In other words, for free (or at most the cost of ordering a couple of books from Amazon) you can give yourself as thorough a course in Wittgenstein as you wish. The only thing you won't have is a credential. The ramification of this is that pretty much the only thing that universities offer these days for their exorbitant fees are credentials, frills like gyms and lounges, and cafeteria food.
Just for fun, here is a very new clip by a commentator rather different from most:
I often don't agree with Ted Gioia and many of his interests I don't share, but he is very often a compelling writer and he sure is a prolific one. His latest, Why I Ran Away from Philosophy Because of Sam Bankman-Fried, is well worth reading.
Where do I even begin in telling this?
It’s not easy. That’s why I’ve never given a full account of my years as a philosophy student at Oxford—despite some readers requesting this. I don’t talk about it because the story is complicated.
But Sam Bankman-Fried gives me the excuse—or even the necessity—of digging into this gnarly matter. That’s because the crypto scammer was deeply involved in a philosophical movement that originated at Oxford. It draws on the same tenets I was taught in those distant days.
My teachers didn’t run crypto exchanges, and (to my knowledge) never embezzled anything more valuable than a bottle of port from the common room. Even so, there’s a direct connection between them and Mr. Bankman-Fried.
They were erudite and devoted teachers, but I was disillusioned by what they taught. It eventually chased me away from philosophy, specifically analytic philosophy of the Anglo-American variety.
I had no idea that their worldview would come back to life as a popular movement promoted by the biggest scam artist of the digital age. But I’m not really surprised—because it’s a dangerous worldview with potential to do damage on the largest scale.
I won't quote any more, you should read the whole thing. As Ted says in the essay, the problem goes back a long ways to English philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham who developed a variety of moral philosophy called utilitarianism. As Ted says, this has proven to be an extremely dangerous philosophy because it offers a plausible rationalization for us to do horrible things today in the belief that the long-term result will be good for large, anonymous groups of people--but of course the claim is that it will result in the maximum happiness and well-being for everyone. As it is all about consequences, another name for this philosophy is consequentialism. And we can't blame it only on Oxford as a very prominent advocate is Peter Singer, who is at Princeton. Blogger The New Neo has written some brilliant posts on him: Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part I.
So it is really just a bit unfair that Ted blames this unfortunate philosophy on Oxford as it has been underlying all sorts of desperately wrong policies in many places: I might mention Canada's enthusiastic instituting of euthanasia to rid itself of all sorts of inconvenient citizens: the elderly, the incurable or even just the depressed. And indeed, the best critic of this was the Oxford-educated G. E. M. Anscombe who in 1958 published the brilliant essay Modern Moral Philosophy which criticized both current moral theories, that of the British utilitarians and that of Immanuel Kant. This resulted in the reestablishing of a third class of moral theory called "virtue ethics" and there is an excellent volume published, ironically, by Oxford called Virtue Ethics that contains the paper by Anscombe plus many others following her lead. Virtue ethics goes all the way back to Aristotle and the idea that, in the absence of God as moral law-giver, the only proper foundation for ethics is the idea of virtue.
I also encountered philosophy at university, in my case the University of Victoria where I had an introductory class with a brilliant young professor that has influenced my life to this day. I followed this with a course in the philosophy of history and another one on the philosophy of mind. After this last one, a 400 level course taught by the chair of the department, I seriously considered switching from music to philosophy. What decided me was two things: the fear that I might just not be capable of it, and second, that the attraction of playing music for audiences was just so strong that I couldn't imagine forgoing it. The professor in the last course, which was very much in the Anglo-American analytical tradition, said that I did appreciate several distinctions. At the time I thought that this was a discouraging evaluation, but in retrospect, it may have been a compliment!
Looking back now, at all the trials and tribulations and frustrations of my career as a concert soloist, I think, well, maybe pursuing philosophy might not have been so bad after all...
Nowadays, if anyone asks, I tell them I am an Aristotelian.
Philosophy and music don't cross paths too often, but there is one famous example, Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss:
These days I think that this is a very practical and compelling philosophical issue. Philosophers call this area "epistemology" --how we come to know what we know. Here is the definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge” or “understanding” or “acquaintance”, while “logos” can be translated as “account” or “argument” or “reason”. Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of epistemology itself. Although the term “epistemology” is no more than a couple of centuries old, the field of epistemology is at least as old as any in philosophy.[1] In different parts of its extensive history, different facets of epistemology have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower.
But the problem in the current world situation is rather different and even more urgent. Little hints of it come through in terms like "fake news," ideology and propaganda. For the ancient Greeks the problem was distinguishing knowledge from mere opinion and from sense perception and appearance. For us, swamped by a tidal wave of data, opinion, "news" and a host of other streams, the problem is rather finding what is not only true, but also useful and appropriate.
Let me illustrate from my own experience, which is always a good place to start. When I was in my teens and wandering, looking for some sort of career and life guidance, the problem was what was the real story of who I was and what I could hope to accomplish? Unfortunately, that knowledge was not only difficult to obtain, I wasn't even aware that it might exist!
Oddly enough, I got a bit of a taste of a solution many years later when I had to take a required seminar in my musicology doctoral program. The course was called "research methods" and frankly, we all need some version of it. The other solution might be a course called "potential and possibilities." That one should probably come first. What I needed to know when I was young, was what possible paths there were for me and I'm not distorting the situation when I say I really had absolutely no idea. I liked music a lot and had played in a band so I ended up pursuing that path. But honestly, I never even considered any others because they seemed not to be feasible--in fact I was pretty much totally ignorant of them! If I had simply asked, what are the potential possibilities in my life, then I might have started doing the research.
Ever since my experience as a graduate student I tend to approach things in a different way. I was asked to give a pre-concert talk on Chopin a few years ago and since I knew almost nothing about him I created a graduate seminar for myself that involved reading a biography and a collection of scholarly papers, The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, as well as listening to a box of his complete works and studying some scores. It took me a couple of months, but I was then prepared to do a little talk on Chopin. This is pretty much what I do whenever I run into a significant gap in my knowledge and understanding.
The main problem for us nowadays is developing a fairly sensitive, what in less enlightened times we would have called a "bullshit meter." This is something that should go off when you read most items in the mainstream media, on television news and, yes, on the Internet, even blogs. Frankly, it is pretty easy to tell when you are being manipulated and propagandized, at least I think so. Here is one of my solutions: decades ago I found that there were a host of articles about health and health dangers so I went to my local bookstore (this was pre-Internet) and started searching the shelves for a skeptical review of the health literature. I did find a suitable book and after reading it, proceeded to discount most of what I read about health issues.
In many cases a simple recourse to cui bono is helpful: who benefits from getting you to believe this information? It is usually perfectly obvious which is why all political statements are particularly suspect. But the solutions, even in our hyper-politicized times, are usually obvious once you get a certain habit of mind. In whatever field the issue arises, look for alternative sources: substack, scholarly treatments (in some areas even this has become corrupted so you may need to seek out older sources), or even simply delving into your own personal experience. The evidence of your own eyes is pretty compelling. Or ears in the case of music. That is usually why I accompany any musical discussion with some clips of the pieces in question. Hey, have a listen for yourself.
I want to preface this discussion by saying it is kind of an addendum to a post from five years ago when I took up the issue of objective aesthetic value at some length. That post is called Philosophy and Aesthetics and I recommend you read it first.
It has always seemed to be harder to talk about music than simply to play or listen to it. That shouldn't be surprising because once you get past, "wow" and "yetch," what in ethics is called the "boo-hoorah" theory, what can you say? Well, a lot, it turns out. I mention ethics because I have noticed, in investigating aesthetics, that it shares some interesting resonances with ethics or moral philosophy. They have both, at different times, resorted to a theory of subjectivism or relativism. Some have said that ethical values are nothing more than your personal opinion about right and wrong, They have no objective existence. Bertrand Russell criticized this by observing that "I cannot necessarily construct an argument to the contrary, but I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" And I refuse to believe that the only difference between good music and bad music is that I prefer one to the other. Speaking of categorizing music in this way, Duke Ellington is reported to have said that "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
But let me back up quite a ways and take a different approach to this. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was likely the most important philosopher of the 20th century. One of the things he is most known for is the "private language argument." This was discussed in his Philosophical Investigations. This work is divided into numbered paragraphs and the second part of #243 reads:
But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences--his feelings, moods, and so on--for his own use?--Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language?--But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know--to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.
There has been a remarkable amount of discussion over this and the following passages and the reason is that there are wide ranging implications for epistemology. Some of them are linguistic: a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. Because: language, by its very nature, is both public and communal. The existence of the rules governing the use of language and making communication possible depends on agreement in human behaviour, such as uniformity in normal human reaction.
To take a simple example, itching is a typical human experience that we would say is a private sensation, not shared with others. But we have a word for it because we do actually share the experience of having an itch. Both you and I seem to have similar itching experiences that we describe in similar ways. We are both acquainted with the sensation. Similarly, though we experience a C major chord and dotted rhythms subjectively, they are not just private phenomena because we can point to them, notate them, and play them in the objective physical world. With some specific exceptions, music is not a private language that refers to what only the composer or performer can know, but it is a public manifestation that, even though it may be experienced in a variety of ways, is still an objective event.
Going back to the language issue, one reason this is so important is that we want to talk about music. We say something like "It was quite a shock for me to get to college and hear a jazz professor say that Duke Ellington was the best composer of the twentieth century. Not the best jazz composer, the best composer, period." This is from a comment by Ethan Hein. When I asked what this opinion was based on he responded: "It was based on his belief that jazz was the condition to which all other music aspires. That belief is a highly subjective one, but no more or less subjective than any other hierarchy of value one might choose to have." Ok, so all hierarchies of value are wholly subjective, just like all opinions about good and bad in morality. As Ethan says in another comment: "Musical quality is always dependent on a subjective value system."
What is the problem with that? Well, first off, Ethan or his professor can say "Duke Ellington is the greatest composer of the 20th century" and I could respond, "no, Dmitri Shostakovich is the greatest composer of the 20th century." But if all we are exchanging is hoorahs, if, in other words, these are nothing but subjective utterances, then the conversation is over as from here on it will just be sterile exchanges of the "so's yo momma" variety. In other words, unless we can talk about things that we actually can refer to objectively, things that are not a private language, we can't even have a conversation.
But I very much think we can have a conversation. First however, we have to know what we are talking about. Foggy generalities won't get us very far, we need specifics. Music is a wonderful way to explore our own feelings and moods, but an overwhelming quality of good music is that it appeals to a wide range of people--or maybe just very deeply to a small group of people! But good music is NOT a private language. Though it may explore very intimate feelings.
Yes, we can have a conversation, but only if you give up the idea that your completely subjective perceptions are absolute truth.
Every now and then I get inspired to do a post that is, how shall I put this, "out there." Way out there. It's all part of the magical charm of The Music Salon that sometimes we not only go off the rails a bit, we actually forge our own rails.
I was reading a Wall Street Journal story about the recent short-squeeze frenzy on Wall Street where a group of small retail investors actually shook the hedge fund world to its foundations leading the most unlikely pair, far-left Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AND far-right Senator Ted Cruz to make similar supportive tweets for the little guys. What is this, Alice in Wonderland? Not only that, but the WSJ titled its story GameStop, Bitcoin and QAnon: How the Wisdom of Crowds Became the Anarchy of the Mob which is way too prolix for the sober Journal.
In this case, their method was buying shares and options of GameStop in order to squeeze short sellers who were betting the stock would drop. The result was a buying frenzy that lofted the stock’s value into the stratosphere, well beyond any price at which it reflected a plausible future for the fundamentals of GameStop’s business.
Let me try and explain that a bit. You can make money in various ways in the stock market. Leaving aside the complicated situation with options, you can either buy a stock with good prospects, watch it go up, and then sell it at a higher price, or you can sell a stock (that you have borrowed from a brokerage) that you think has poor prospects (like GameStop), watch it go down and "cover your short" by buying shares at the lower price so as to return them to your brokerage. In both cases you pocket the difference. Using call or put options is a way of leveraging your profit--or loss, of course.
Now the situation with GameStop and a few other small companies or companies on the rocks like AMC, the cinema chain, is that some hedge funds had shorted the stocks so thoroughly that the stocks were as much as 140% short! This means that there were more shares sold short than actually existed. There really ought to be a regulation against this. But the consequence was that the hedge funds that were short the stock were uniquely vulnerable because if the stock started climbing steeply, they would have to cover their short at a higher price, i.e. lose money. You can only borrow shares to short temporarily (I'm ignoring margin rules here, which vary). Somebody noticed and shared it with a whole bunch of small investors over the internet who started furiously buying the stock. It doesn't take much to send a stock like GameStop soaring: today it is up 400% at this writing.
On a personal note, I once saw a stock that really was an absolute no-brainer: during the carnage of the Internet Bubble in 2000 shares in Salon, the media company, actually dropped to as low as they could go: one penny a share. I looked at this and thought, geez, buy those shares and if it goes to two cents tomorrow, you have a 100% profit! So I thought about buying a few hundred thousand shares. Alas, way back then, buying large quantities of shares involved very high trading costs, so I gave up the idea. But now, Robinhood and even big guys like Charles Schwab have NO TRADING FEES. And this definitely contributes to the frenzy.
It also reminds me of the Plato's Allegory of the Cave where people cannot see the world as such, but only shadows on the wall of their cave. It is an image that seems ever more relevant today. The Internet in all its glory is still just digital wisps, like shadows on the wall of a cave. We only glimpse reality at a distance. The only reality that we are really sure of is that of our immediate surroundings. And these days for most people, those immediate surroundings are our own homes that we occasionally venture out of. So we spend all of our time in our own little caves, looking at shadows on the wall over our iPads, laptops or computer screens.
It is as if we are inside a giant machine that is feeding information to us. What if, one day, The Machine Stops?
And now for our musical connection. The link above is to the Wikipedia article on the prophetic short story by E. M. Forster written in 1909. About the same time, Schoenberg was undergoing a crisis in his life and out of it came one of the first atonal compositions, his String Quartet No. 2, here performed by Ann Moss and the Hausmann Quartet:
UPDATE: I should perhaps mention what is so risky about shorting stocks. I have done it myself in the past, but only on rare occasions. If you buy a stock in the ordinary way, which is known as being "long" a stock, the most you can lose is the value of the stock. If you buy 100 shares of a $5 stock, the most you can lose is $500 if it goes to zero. BUT, it is different with a short position. Say you short a hundred shares of a $5 stock and a bunch of crazy guys on the internet bid that stock up to, oh, $200 a share? If you have to cover your short, i.e. buy shares to return them to your broker, then you are going to be out, not $500 but 195 X 100 or $19,500. Theoretically, there is no limit to how much you can lose on a short! Which is why some big hedge funds just lost billions of dollars.
The number of important, or influential or memorable teachers we have in life is probably quite limited. In fact, I have this sinking feeling that there are quite a number of people that may have never had a significant teacher. Other than their parents, for better or worse. Mine must have been ok, because as I recall, I arrived in Grade 1 already able to read. But that aside, here is a short list of teachers that made an impact on my life.
In Grade 10 I had a class with the school principal, whose name I forget. The class was social studies or something. But it was important for two reasons: first, I remember him sitting on his desk, trying to give us some life advice which boiled down to: "Don't be mediocre!" The second reason was that he taught us the origins of the First World War so brilliantly, laying out all the over-lapping alliances and mutual defence pacts and so on, that when he said, "and then Archduke Ferdinand was assasinated" I nearly gasped because he had set it up so we could grasp the consequences. Some excellent teaching and that is rarer than you would think.
The next outstanding teacher was the newly-minted PhD hire who taught Philosophy 100 in my first year at university. I doubt if I had ever previously encountered someone with a really trained mind. I won't mention his name, but that was his first year teaching and he did a brilliant job. He continued to teach at that same university for a few decades. The class was very small for a first year course, only 20-25 students. He would assign some reading and then in the next class we would argue about it. Since he was the best arguer, he won all the arguments! That was what got me hooked on philosophy, something that guides me to this day. I recall that I got A- minus on every essay assignment. I also recall that one day he said that only God got A+, so I guess that was pretty good. This was before the ubiquitous grade inflation.
I had a couple of good teachers at McGill when I was there, both in theory, oddly enough. One taught form functional analysis and I learned that I could never use any of those forms! Another taught fugue, the most advanced counterpoint course at McGill and, again, oddly, the only counterpoint class I have ever taken. I tested out of the other undergraduate counterpoint classes by doing a little studying on my own. What I really remember about the fugue class was a couple of things. The first, at the very first class the instructor said, "lots of people have written fugues in one form or another over the last few hundred years, but the only composer we are going to look at is Bach." There really is no other form, nor composer, of which/whom that could be said. We spent quite a bit of time struggling to solve the problems of invertible counterpoint. Briefly, when intervals invert some dissonant ones become consonant and vice versa. If you use only thirds and sixths you will be ok. We were doing invertible counterpoint with two voices, of course, the minimum. Then one day we got to the Art of Fugue and it was explained to us that Bach wrote entire four-voice fugues, all four voices of which could be inverted!!! I nearly fell off my chair. I can't think of any other composer who even attempted that, by the way. They are called "mirror" fugues.
Finally my last memorable teacher was not my teacher, but my colleague, the extremely fine violinist Paul Kling, who was famous, in Vienna, from when he was nine years old. We met when I was in my thirties and he was in his sixties. I remember the first time we read anything together, a Giuliani sonata for violin and guitar, afterward he casually asked about certain specific measures and phrases where I had gone astray. We shared a number of concerts and in one he decided to play the Bach Chaconne. As I was making up the program I asked him how long his performance would take. His answer: "Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds." And I didn't doubt it for a minute. Paul once said to me that every great violinist of the century was either a Russian Jew from the Caucasus, or studied with one.
I don't have a recording of his of the Chaconne, but here is a violinist with a similar approach, Jascha Heifetz.
Let's have another one. Here are two right side up fugues followed by their inversions:
This won't be philosophy exactly, but that seemed the closest tag. I am nearing the end of Malcolm MacDonald's book on Schoenberg and he sums up like this:
Schoenberg, then, was essentially a religious composer. I mean that in the widest sense ... Almost all Schoenberg's vocal works deal in some fashion with the relation of the individual to the inner and outer worlds..to the spirit and to the collective, to humanity at large and, beyond that, to the yet larger, eternal world of religious conviction and speculation ... Schoenberg would have placed far more importance on this aspect of his work, than on his intellectual achievements as a constructor of systems. In his music he sought to reassert the traditional romantic and religious values of European civilization. In this sense he was a conservative composer.
But because such a reassertion was not just aesthetic but ethical in intention, it inevitably involved an attack on the bogus traditionalism and intellectual inertia of the decaying society in which he found himself; and in this sense his approach was a critical, even revolutionary one.
That is certainly not how I understood Schoenberg for most of my life in music. I think the turning point for me was a couple of years ago when I was in Madrid for a couple of weeks and the opera then being performed at the Teatro Real was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Seeing that wonderful production and being in the theatre full of 2,000 or so people enjoying that music made a fundamental change for me not only in how I saw Schoenberg, but how I saw music.
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A number of years ago my half-brother-in-law (long story) told me that everyone should have a hobby and a job, but you should switch them every few years. He was an interesting fellow. Not only did he work for IBM for many years, in his spare time he built and flew his own ultralight helicopter. I seem to have several jobs and hobbies, but I'm not always sure which is which! For example, I spend a lot of time creating posts for this blog, but since it pays nothing, it is obviously not a job. I spend much less time managing my investments, which do pay. In connection with that, I just ran across an absolutely fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal about the most successful investor in history--and I would bet you have never heard of him. Over the last thirty years he has averaged 66% a year! He runs a fund with very high fees: 5% of the principal and 20% of the profits every year. But even after that, the average annual return is 39%. Good lord, that means that you double your money every 21 and a half months. You may have heard of George Soros, Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch. Well, this fellow beats all of them. His name: Jim Simons. How did he do it? Big data quantitative analysis going back to the 1700s. I don't know if his fund is open to new investors or what the minimum is, the name of the fund is Medallion so you could look it up. But I can suggest a quite simple and effective investing strategy: just buy an exchange traded fund that tracks the Standard and Poor's 500 index. That's it. If you are older, put part of your investment into a bond fund. That really is it. And it beats 90% of the active money managers out there. Not Jim Simons, of course!
UPDATE: Just for fun I checked out the Medallion Fund and, you are going to enjoy this, investment is by invitation only! In other words, the only people who can invest in the fund are invited to do so. Never heard of that before, but hey, there is lots of stuff I don't know.
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Here is another uncommon truth: the problem with a lot of public policy is simply that it is one-size-fits-all, top-down, dreary proceduralism run by faceless bureaucrats. Even if the policy is really well designed your life is still being at least partly run by those faceless bureaucrats who probably have a much better pension plan than you do because, hey, they are in charge. I have a kind of instinctive revulsion to this sort of thing. It partly comes from my father who had a bit of an obsession about authority, but it is partly from my own experience. I once had a job on the other side of the fence where I was collecting educational statistics and bullying high school principals if they did not deliver the numbers in the approved form. Sure, that was fun, but it is no fun being on the receiving end. How could you possibly want to have your health care delivered by a government agency? Sure, it's "free" if you live in Canada where they have a single-payer socialized system. But is it free? The average family pays about $4,000 a year in taxes to pay for the system and that figure is from years ago. And as I mentioned a while back, the minimum wait for an MRI in British Columbia is 41 days. And the maximum you might have to wait is 244 days. Here, in a private system, I got an appointment the next day and the cost was $150. No faceless bureaucrats involved. Now where I live there is a problem with cartel violence and the lack of a lot of government "services" but whereas there might be a 0.1% chance of me being the victim of cartel violence, if I lived in Canada there would be a 100% chance of my life being at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats and suffering my financial health being drained away by absurd taxes.
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You want another example? Here is a classic one. With all the best intentions, a "common core" curriculum with standardized testing was designed by experts to improve public education in the US. The results?
For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.
Common Core is a set of national instruction and testing mandates implemented starting in 2010 without approval from nearly any legislative body and over waves of bipartisan citizen protests. President Obama, his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and myriad other self-described education reformers promised Common Core would do exactly the opposite of what has happened: improve U.S. student achievement. As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is a perfect example of "one-size-fits-all, top-down, dreary proceduralism run by faceless bureaucrats." Education is when a student goes to a teacher to learn stuff and the teacher responds to the student's needs. A fixed, standardized curriculum is precisely the opposite, about as useful as pushing on a string. I once had a new guitar student ask me what I was going to teach him. It was as if he were interviewing me for the job! I hadn't heard him play yet so I said "I have absolutely no idea what I am going to teach you or if I am going to teach you anything at all." He was really nonplussed by this so I explained. "I teach the student, not some abstract curriculum. I will listen to you play and from that I will derive an idea of what you know and don't know and need to know. That's where I will start." That's education. Everything else is posturing and job-creation for education bureaucrats.
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That's my rant for the day, so let's have some music. Here is the Suite for Piano, op. 25 by Schoenberg. This is his idea of neo-classicism!
This is one of those posts that I am stumped to find a tag for. I went with philosophy but for no particular good reason. I started reading this article in aeon, Splitting the Universe, and it got me thinking about the role of contrarians generally. Here is how it starts:
One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story is one of many fascinating tales that add up to the astonishing history of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental physical theory we know of.
What fascinates me about this is how it resonates with a lot of my observations over the years. I came from very humble roots, basically farmers and homesteaders on the Canadian prairie, but I have worked within a number of institutions including government ministries, universities, colleges, conservatories and private business. What I have noticed over the years is that all institutions tend to be founded by people who are most interested in ideas and goals, but over time they are nearly all taken over by people who are most interested in their careers and the growth of the institution itself. Sometimes this is expressed in the form of a law. A related observation is that the behaviour of most organizations can best be explained if they are thought to be controlled by a cabal of their enemies.
What all this, and the aeon article, capture, is the fundamental contradiction between the discovery of ideas and principles and how they tend to be applied in the world. They are typically, perhaps exclusively, discovered by contrarian individuals who don't think in the usual channels. Then, when the ideas are found to be valuable, they are developed through institutions that are, inevitably, taken over by careerists and opportunists. It is just the way of the world. What is most irksome is that the mediocrities running the institutions are smug and arrogant while the people who actually discover things are humble and often forgotten. Hence the story of Hugh Everett.
There are a few contrarians in the field of musicology: one is Joseph Kramer, though you might not think of him as a contrarian. Another is Richard Taruskin who tends to write the occasional polemic, so he is more likely to be thought of as a contrarian. These days, a contrarian in musicology is someone who, ironically, does not view everything in terms of identity politics. In tomorrow's miscellanea I will have an interesting example of Taruskin's contrarian thinking.
Our envoi is a harbinger of that. This is Christopher Hogwood conducting and directing from the keyboard the first movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 by Bach:
I vaguely recall from taking undergraduate classes in philosophy decades ago that there was a book on personal identity by, I think, P. F. Strawson. Don't remember a single thing it said, though. Now, of course, we are inundated with identity, identifying, ID, identity theft, and Id, no, wait, that's something different.
I just ran across this in an article in the New York Times on plus-size dining:
For people who identify as large, plus-size or fat, dining out can be a social and physical minefield. Chairs with arms or impossibly small seats leave marks and bruises. Meals are spent in pain, or filled with worry that a flimsy chair might collapse.
Not wanting to pick on anyone, I'm a little plus-size myself from liking food a bit too much, but this grammar is just a bit odd, isn't it? Why would you say "identify as" instead of just "are?" I don't "identify" as being a bit overweight, I just am a bit overweight. From an Aristotelian point of view, I am substantially a man and my weight is accidental (meaning an adjunct quality, not essential) and it is true, I could lose that extra weight--and intend to! Starting next week!
The substance theory of Aristotle underlies his entire philosophy. Substance theory is the belief that substances are the ultimate things in the universe. The universe at rock bottom is not made up of elementary particles but substances. This is completely different from our modern view of the world. Aristotle defends this position in his books Categories and Metaphysics. His defense is long and detailed. Without an understanding of Aristotles logic, such a defense cannot even be understood today. Aristotle divides the world into two categories: substances and accidents- substances are the most fundamental.
A substance is a dog, a rock, a planet, a particle and a computer. An accident is something like being white, standing up, kicking that ball or being hit by Tom. It is somewhat helpful to think of substances as nouns and accidents as every other part of language. Nouns are about people, places or things. Substances are people, and things (places just refer to things). Accidents refer to features of substances. They are always the subject and object of the sentence. This gives a good indication of what substances and accidents are.
When I think of "identity" I think of something rather inherent to who or what I am. I underwent a significant transition a few years ago, one that I realized on my way to a concert. As I arrived at the door, wearing a nice sports jacket, a friend said, "I didn't realize you were playing in the concert tonight!" I had to reply I wasn't. Why was I dressed up? Ah, well the reason was that I had written a piece that was being premiered in the concert and so I might have to stand up at some point and bow.
This was for me a change in ontological status: I was no longer a performer but now a composer. My basic being in the world was not as someone who played music written by others, but one who wrote music for others to play. Of course I might write a piece with a guitar part that I might play myself, but that wouldn't return me to the ontological status of performer.
Let me give another example. In the great series of historical novels by Patrick O'Brian about the Royal Navy there is an instance where Captain Jack Aubrey, who plays the violin for personal entertainment, explains why he cannot be seen carrying the violin case in public. It always has to be carried by a servant or ordinary seaman. If he, an officer and gentleman were seen carrying a violin case someone might say in jest something like "give us a tune then, guvnor!" In which case, Aubrey might have to fight a duel or something just to preserve his honor. 18th century social practices were complicated! In any case, his ontological status as officer and gentleman prevented him from carrying his own violin around. Ah, those were the days!
I think I want to opt for this weird switch in terminology because if "identify as" is swapping in for "is" and "are" then I prefer to not have that sort of "identity." I'm ok with "ontological status" though because almost no-one will understand what it means. Philosophy is useful after all!
Let's have a tune, then. Here is the extraordinary Hilary Hahn with a little Presto by Bach:
No idea what tags to use for this one! I was thinking about composition and about something that has bothered me for many years that I had trouble clarifying in my mind. Part of the idea comes from something a musicologist said in a doctoral seminar years ago. The seminar was on DuFay and we had been talking about some of the details of his employment by the church and the professor said, "as musicologists we are interested in the details." Another class on another occasion, theory this time, and the professor averred that theory was something like composition in reverse: what we were trying to do was "reverse-engineer" a piece of music to see how it was put together so that you could use what you discovered to write a piece of your own. On a fairly basic level, that has some truth to it, but on another level it is impossible. Imagine you are trying to reverse-engineer a sonata movement by Haydn. Every movement you look at is going to be put together differently in significant ways.
Ok, that's a couple of things that relate to what I am going to talk about. A third is something that goes on in my mind when I am thinking about composing. Sometimes I just have a very general idea like: "the climax of this piece should be a section that progressively saturates the rhythmic and harmonic space." Good idea, right? Actually, not, because it is too general. Most climaxes saturate the rhythmic and harmonic space to some degree, so this idea doesn't actually get you very far.
So, the general and the specific. Now that I think about it, this might also relate, distantly, to Plato's theory of the Forms.
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas[1][2][3] is a philosophical theory, concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as eternal, absolute, unchangeable ideas.[4] According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms",[5] are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge. The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Whether the theory represents Plato's own views is held in doubt by modern scholarship.[6] However, the theory is considered a classical solution to the problem of universals.
The problem of universals might be described as being about what we mean by certain terms. For examples, there are lots of objects we describe as being "chairs":
What makes them all "chairs"? They are made of different materials and have different shapes. Their functions are even a bit different. We might say that what they share is "chairness" or the form of the Chair. For Plato, this Form has a reality of its own on a transcendent plane and everyday chairs are chairs because they metaphysically share in this "chairness." Aristotle had a slightly different take on it: the idea of a chair is in the mind of the builder and constitutes the "formal cause" of the physical chair. There are other theories, of course, that philosophers like to bat around.
Getting back to music (whew!), my point is that value in music is closely related to specificity. Another thing that prompted this thought is a musical neighbor that I have heard several times recently. He seems to only know two chords and spends hours simply going back and forth between them while improvising singing or synthesizer tracks on top. It is rather annoying and part of the reason is that this kind of thing is generic, not specific. The generic, the general, the abstract is, I propose, the enemy of creativity and aesthetic quality. Those pieces that we particularly enjoy and praise are very particular pieces. They have specific qualities that they do not share with other pieces. This is true, I believe of paintings, sculptures, drama and dance as well as music. Our intellectual faculty is always looking to generalize and abstract to arrive at some higher truth. But in art, certainly music, that "higher truth" is specific, not general. Every good piece of music that I can think of has a unique character that sets it apart from every other piece of music. Pieces of music that sound vaguely like other pieces of music are not highly valued aesthetically.
At this point you could certainly make an opposing argument. Lots and lots of popular music sounds vaguely alike, in fact it is intentionally made so. Lots of people highly value popular music, by definition, therefore my argument is invalid. Well, maybe. I tend to think that popular music has a superficial, immediate charm that fades rather quickly. Those songs that become popular "classics" tend to have just those kind of unique qualities that I have been talking about. Generic pop tends to fade pretty quickly.
So when you are trying to compose a good piece, you are always looking for the specific, not the general. What I find really remarkable is how composers so often manage to take something that seems at first to be rather general, and turn it into something specific and distinctive. A powerful example is the Art of Fugue by Bach, the whole of which is based on a very simple, almost generic, subject:
D minor triad outlined, C# leading tone, movement by step to third, descent by step from 4th to tonic. That's it. Every subsequent fugue is based on a variation of this simple subject.
People sometimes talk about how art is about the imposition of order on chaos. In music at least, it is also about finding the unique and specific in the general and abstract. It is about creating or discovering individuality.
Let's listen to the Art of Fugue. This is Grigory Sokolov in a live concert in Leningrad around 1980:
Despite what conventional wisdom may suggest, reports of the death of humanities-related philanthropy, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. IP's Higher Ed vertical is replete with examples of funders giving big to support the liberal arts.
That said, giving generally flows to the "usual suspects" like endowments, blended curriculum, and digitization projects. All of which makes investor Bill Miller's $75 million donation to John Hopkins University's philosophy department both unique and tantalizing.
According to the school, Miller's largess will allow Hopkins' department to nearly double in size, while also supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and new courses aimed at attracting undergraduates. Deemed "wonderfully contrarian" by university president Ronald Daniels, the gift also appears to be the largest by far to a philosophy department anywhere in the world.
Bill Miller was a doctoral student in philosophy at Johns Hopkins who later went on to be one of the most successful portfolio managers in finance, beating the S&P 500 for fifteen consecutive years, 1991 to 2005.
Miller is a rare donor who can articulate how the liberal arts—and philosophy in particular—influenced his life and career.
Philosophy "has made a huge difference both to my life outside business, in terms of adding a great degree of richness and knowledge, and to the actual decisions I've made in investing," he said.
I put this together with some recent reported research from Google that revealed that the most successful managers and team leaders at the company were not the ones with the highest technical skills, but the ones with the highest skills in working with people.
So what does a philosophy department do with a big whack of money? By "double in size" I assume that they mean to hire more professors, maybe acquire or build a new building, accept more graduate students, offer more undergraduate courses and so on. I kind of hope they don't spend a bunch of money on hardware and "research." Buying a lot of complex machines that go "beep" is really not necessary in philosophy.
I wonder if the strength of philosophy does not lie in its meagre departments and lack of flashy technology? At bottom, the practice of philosophy is pretty much people sitting around thinking and talking to other people. More perhaps than any other discipline, instruction in philosophy is nothing more than a teacher sitting on one end of a log and a student on the other.
I was very blessed in my early days at university by taking a 100-level philosophy course taught by a newly-minted PhD. There were only twenty or so students in the class. We had assigned reading such as Bishop Berkeley's dialogues between Hylas and Philonous that we found outrageous as it made the absurd claim that the physical world did not exist, only our perceptions. Once we got to class and started discussing the matter, we soon found that, no matter how absurd the proposition, defeating our professor in argument was far from easy. As we ranted on with our poorly stated arguments he would walk back and forth in the front of the room. Once we ran down, he would pause, look over at us and say the words we came to realize signaled our doom: "May I rephrase that?" Once rephrased, which he did in the fairest way possible, we would quickly come to see the poverty of our arguments.
Over the years I have come to see the tremendous value of that course to my thinking generally. We were engaged in the actual practice of philosophy, just as Socrates and the Athenian youth did in the 5th century BC when philosophy was largely invented. There are not a lot of public intellectuals these days that have these kind of skills in debate. Public space has long been polluted by a host of logical fallacies that Medieval thinkers would laugh at. Perhaps the most predominant of these is the use of straw man arguments where you state your opponent's position in the most absurd way possible. This is endemic in much public debate.
One public intellectual that seems to have philosophical skills in abundance is Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. The value of these was made painfully evident in a recent interview he did with BBC's Cathy Newman. She was used to interviewing people with the usual rudimentary intellectual skills and frankly, expected to encounter a bigoted reactionary. Instead she found herself faced with a brilliant thinker who was armed with a great deal of research into the topics she brought up. I recommend watching the interview with close attention to what was said:
You might notice that Ms. Newman is constantly misrepresenting what Prof. Peterson is saying and every time he catches her on it. He also turns her most bold attack on him back on her with undeniable logic, which brings her to a stuttering halt. How often does that happen with a big-time television journalist?
I very much hope that Johns Hopkins sticks to genuine philosophy in its department expansion and does not wander off into fashionable nonsense. We are in desperate need of people who can actually think and not just mindlessly parrot "talking points."
