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Five Minutes with G. Gabrielle Starr

March 28, 2014

G. Gabrielle Starr, author of Feeling Beauty, answers questions about the aesthetic experience.

A Lunch BIT from The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek

March 27, 2014

Yesterday we featured Slajov Žižek’s The Puppet Called Theology: A BIT of The Puppet and the Dwarf. Today, in our final BIT blog post, we turn once again to Žižek; this time highlighting a BIT of his magnum opus, The Parallax View. Here is an excerpt from The Subject, This “Inwardly Circumcised Jew”: A BIT of The Parallax View. In this BIT, Žižek draws on Lacan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kant, Hegel, and Marx to explore the philosophical implications of parallax.

A Lunch BIT from The Puppet and the Dwarf by Slavoj Žižek

March 26, 2014

The philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek has written several books for the MIT Press including The Puppet and the Dwarf, an early title in the Short Circuits series. In this book, he offers a close reading of modern Christianity’s viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. But as Zizek explains to Barry Nolan in an interview with Boston’s CN8 NiteBeat, the book deals with much more—including an examination of the “culture of consumption” and the “era of big ideology.” The goal of the text, he explains, is to “make Lacan back into someone whom even your grandma could understand.”

A Lunch BIT from Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution by Charles Weiss and William B. Bonvillian

March 25, 2014

Even among the many who agree that action to halt climate change is a necessity disagree on what strategies to pursue and, crucially, whether those efforts should be undertaken by private industry or the government. The task of Structuring an Energy Revolution, by Charles Weiss and William Bonvillian, is to convince a reader that a coordinated public-private program to stimulate innovation is necessary. Or, as one review put it:

A Lunch BIT from The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner

March 24, 2014

The debate of free will versus determinism is probably the oldest philosophical argument. We humans have made great advances in science, but yet we still have not figured out the answer to this conundrum. The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner seeks answers to this age-old puzzle. Wegner argues that our conscious free will originates in our brain, and that what we think is free will is an illusion. Despite this controversial view, Wegner makes the case that even though our conscious will is not real; it has helped formulate our notions of morality.

A Lunch BIT from The Neural Basis of Free Will by Peter Ulric Tse

March 21, 2014

Throughout history, the nature of free will has been a hot topic of examination and debate in both philosophy and the sciences. In his book The Neural Basis of Free Will, Peter Tse examines the unanswered questions of free will from a neuroscience perspective. As opposed to philosophers who reason the problem through logic, Tse proposes that we listen to what neurons have to say. Using recent neurophysiological research, Tse presents what the New York Journal of Books called “a groundbreaking new paradigm about how the mind works.”

A Lunch BIT from Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till

March 20, 2014

Jeremy Till wrote Architecture Depends to defend the thesis that architecture….depends. On a lot of things. On random, contingent events and unstable factors that architects have tried to ignore in the past in an effort to preserve their discipline as a pure, autonomous field that exists in a tower above the (literal) city.

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