A stuffy atmosphere pervades Kingdom Hall, the suburban assembly point for the small community of Jehovah witnesses in the magnificent ‘Apostasy’ – the debut film by Dan Kokotajlo. With skew face closeups reminiscent of Dreyer’s Johan of Arc, and a masterful… Read More ›
Quick notes jotted down after the splendid seminar / conversation between Yuval Harari (of “Homo Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” fame) and Thomas Friedman – not less well-know journalist for the NY Times – in the splendid setup of Westminster Methodist… Read More ›
In a deep contribution (“Occidente senza Utopie”, Il Mulino, 2016: see video below: Italian), Massimo Cacciari argues first that there is a substantial conceptual difference between ‘Utopia’ and ‘Prophecy’ – where the latter denotes the act of the outsider addressing the… Read More ›
Modern art is an attempt to burst free of the constraints of tight narrative structures, a continuous effort to drill through the strictures of worn-out visual shapes, to pierce a hole into tired acoustic patterns. Modernism is an incessant subversion…. Read More ›
We live in the so-called dataquake: ‘A few thousands of years ago, you needed to be a god or goddess if you wanted to be painted, be sculpted, or have your story remembered and told. A thousands years ago you… Read More ›
Ne ‘Il Giornale’ del 14 Maggio 2012, Marcello Veneziani articolava una riflessione veramente degna di nota. Voglio riprodurla nella sua interezza, per la forza e lucidita’ del suo argomento (link originale qui): Alla fine ha vinto Marx. Siamo tutti uguali: individualisti… Read More ›
“What brought a single primate line to a rare level of eusociality?” asks Edward Wilson, the well-known Harvard biologist in “The Meaning of Human Existence” (pg. 21). Eusociality is the reason why Homo Sapiens, as a species, was able to conquer… Read More ›
Marvin Minsky needs no presentation: his unflinching atheism was proverbial as the video below clearly testifies. Less well known, as the above video shows, his connection to Russian Cosmism. Sagan, Asimov and other East coast Russian-Jewish immigrants were all permeated by the… Read More ›
Bertrand Russell, in “History of Western Philosophy” pgg. 86-87, writes: The atomists, unlike Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause. The “final cause” of an occurrence is an event… Read More ›
The famous painting by Bosch “The Conjurer” depicts an example of a cognitive fallacy of the human being, which is shrewdly used by the “magician”. This is an instance of “Freud’s Problem” to use Noam Chomsky’s very pregnant category, i.e. why do we know… Read More ›
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