Post by turoldus on Feb 18, 2009 11:21:47 GMT
fter 40 or 50 years of this nonsense, we have to ask ourselves why the arts are universal and why other aspects of the human personality are universal. This simply has got to be the wave of the future. The notion that art is purely socially constructed, indeed, the human personality is socially constructed has to make way for something more complex...Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and cut to the chase to where humanity actually is. The reality of the human situation is that we are biologically determined entities that live in a culture.
THE REALITY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION [2.19.09]
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker
INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker
Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.
And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Denis has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be definitive, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art. I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.
THE REALITY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION [2.19.09]
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker
INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker
Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.
And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Denis has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be definitive, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art. I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.
Obviously the idea that some things may not to have some intrinsic truth behind is unsufferable to Pinker and his Edge pals. Judging from this abstract, however, their understanding of art is just as poor as their understanding of religion.