Co-organizers: Aaron Meskin, Jonathan Neufeld, Thi Nguyen, and Alex King (that’s me) Continue reading
Now that increasing numbers of people are stuck at home and sheltering in place, I figured I’d do a little series. Every weekday for the duration of this intense period, I’ll post a short definition of some term in/related to aesthetics and philosophy of art. Let’s see how this goes! See them all here.
Hi Dear Readers,
I know you’re all getting a little itchy to do things, especially if you’re an academic who’s used to attending conferences and workshops all the time.
That’s why I and a few other people are organizing an online, appropriately socially distanced workshop:
Co-organizers: Aaron Meskin, Jonathan Neufeld, Thi Nguyen, and Alex King (that’s me) Continue reading
Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972)
Each month, Francey Russell (Barnard/Columbia) will offer a philosophical reflection on film: a single film, a director, a technique, a genre, an author, etc. Plots will be discussed, hence spoilers. See all of the installments here. Continue reading
Now that increasing numbers of people are stuck at home and sheltering in place, I figured I’d do a little series. Every weekday for the duration of this intense period, I’ll post a short definition of some term in/related to aesthetics and philosophy of art. Let’s see how this goes! See them all here.
This week, we’re looking at terms that have to do with artists themselves. Most of these words will be ones that actual practicing contemporary artists think are off-limits. So buckle up for a sacrilegious week!
What follows is a guest post by Jay Miller.
The neoclassical Lincoln Memorial, designed by Henry Bacon (1922) [source]
I’ll go ahead and dispense with any pretense to political neutrality here. Because, really, the first step in taking MFBBA seriously is to acknowledge the veritable feast of ironies and absurdities offered up in the space of its mere seven pages. Continue reading
L to R: Bates, Lissa Skitolsky, and BL Shirelle
In January, we hosted an interview and preliminary discussion of some pressing issues in rap and hip-hop. We wanted to investigate the fact that, in Bill Adler’s words, hip-hop has never been “a model of civil discourse”. We did that by talking to two queer Black women rappers, BL Shirelle and Bates, to get their takes on the matter. Now we follow that up with a roundtable of scholars, each reflecting in their own way on what BL Shirelle and Bates had to say.
[Warning: This discussion contains explicit language, including a variation of the n-word.]
Our contributors are:
Juan Escalona Meléndez, photography by Ana Lorenzana [Instagram: @analorenzana]
Chef Juan Escalona Meléndez interviewed by philosopher Aaron Meskin for AFB.
This interview took place during January and February, 2020.
Juan Escalona Meléndez is a Mexican-born chef currently working in Mexico City. He studied Genomic Sciences as an undergraduate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and did an MA in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. He has collaborated with various philosophers on food projects and presented at the recent American Society for Aesthetics-sponsored Conference on Food, Art and Philosophy at UNAM. (He also created the conference meal.) He has worked at Noma (Copenhagen), Pujol (Mexico City) and Máximo Bistrot (Mexico City).
Aaron Meskin is head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. He works on aesthetics, philosophical psychology and, recently, the philosophy of food. He is co-editing a special issue of the online philosophy journal Crítica devoted to food, art and philosophy. Before Georgia, he worked at the University of Leeds for 14 years, and that is where his conversations with Juan about food and art began. Continue reading
What follows is a guest post by Patrick Fessenbecker.
In a recent column in The New York Times, Ross Douthat contends that English professors aren’t having the right kind of arguments. Reflecting on the analysis of the decline of the humanities in a series of essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education over the last year, Douthat makes a familiar diagnosis: the problem is that we literature professors no longer believe in the real value of the objects we study. Engaging Simon During’s account of the decline of the humanities as a “second secularization” in particular, Douthat argues that secular attempts to defend the humanities will fail just as surely as secular attempts to defend religious ethics and norms did: it doesn’t work unless you really believe in the thing. Correspondingly, the debates literary scholars are having about how to expand the range of texts and subjects we teach are premised on a basic mistake about what such an expansion involves. As he puts it:
This should, by rights, be a moment of exciting curricular debates, over which global and rediscovered and post-colonial works belong on the syllabus with Shakespeare, over whether it’s possible to teach an American canon and a global canon all at once. Instead, humanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.”
In other words, we ought to be in the business of considering how our conceptions of value and their application should change as scholars recognize the incredible cultural wealth inherent in the diversity of the world. But instead we’re caught between reactionary conservatism and nihilistic critique. Continue reading
During the first week of each month, Francey Russell (Barnard/Columbia) will offer a philosophical reflection on film: a single film, a director, a technique, a genre, an author, etc. Plots will be discussed, hence spoilers. See all of the installments here. Continue reading
