Dave Maier spent many years as a radio DJ, but after even public radio turned hostile to esoteric music, he left to study philosophy at Columbia. Now, after earning a Ph. D. in the subject, he spends far too much time reading and not nearly enough time writing. He blogs, or has blogged, at duckrabbit.blogspot.com, where at least there is some good stuff in the archives. Email: duck1887 [at] hotmail.com
by Dave Maier Nietzsche is often described as a “perspectivist” about knowledge and truth. His remarks on the matter, however, render the issue far from straightforward. He clearly means to reject some form of absolutism, but which? And what does he leave in its place? One's answer to this question depends quite a bit on…
by Dave Maier In the wake of the 9/11 attacks we heard a great deal about the end of moral relativism, the point being that from now on we would all agree that some things are Just Wrong (and since to say so is Just True to boot, this means the end of irony, skepticism,…
by Dave Maier It's that time again, cosmonauts! Time, that is, for more mixes of ambient & electronic music from hither and yon, spatiotemporally speaking. (Here's the first installment if you missed it.) [Update: link added for second mix] First up, here's a Krautrock mix I posted a while back. I don't have a whole…
by Dave Maier A few months ago, on the New York Times Opinionator blog, filmmaker Errol Morris posted a remarkable five-part series of articles, which dealt with a wide range of fascinating topics, all in search of an understanding of a traumatic incident in his past. This is a time-honored literary exercise, and Morris is…
by Dave Maier As everybody knows, with the proper encouragement computers can make bleeps and bloops, and so: computer music! That's been true for many years, and there are plenty of histories of computer music which will tell you all about the Telharmonium, the Synket, and the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer (pictured here). This…
by Dave Maier He knew very well the dilettantes' manner (which was worse the more intelligent they were) of going to look at the studios of contemporary artists with the sole aim of having the right to say that art has declined and that the more one looks at the new painters, the more one…
by Dave Maier Most Westerners think of Taoism, if at all, as a form of Eastern mysticism, popular with hippies and new-agers. So interpreted, Taoism is a form of skepticism: our beliefs about the world are falsified by the ineffable wholeness beyond our conceptual grasp, as represented by the famous yin-yang symbol. This interpretation is…
by Dave Maier A reader writes in to ask (“naïvely,” as he thinks): In Kant's transcendental idealism, what is at stake? And, if we take it that it is a form of anti-realism and a source of later anti-realisms in philosophy, what is at stake in anti-realism? […] I see that one answer is that…
Mixcloud.com is a site for radio DJs with no place to go. I like it because the idea is to be legal and upfront about the whole business, paying royalties to artists just like real radio. Sets stream at a reasonably high bitrate, and there are some very talented mixers who post there. I post…
Famed ice-hockey scholar and literary critic Michael Bérubé has written in several places about the notorious Science Wars, but not always to my satisfaction, especially as we both march under the banner of post-Rortyan pragmatism. We've gone a few rounds in the past, and I haven't yet been able to make my objections clear to…
In the wake of Republican defeat in the 2008 election, conservatives started casting about for a new standard-bearer. One name which then resurfaced was that of Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. A conservative firebrand during his Congressional days, Gingrich had reinvented himself as a pragmatic innovator, pushing high-tech solutions for…