In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob DylanPeter CheyneThe Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan; 422 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His gorgeous (...) write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalogue of types united in aesthetic thrill.Invented characters inhabit this book, as they do Dylan's songs. Most prominent are the personae he extemporizes from others' songs in barnstorming flights of fancy. Upheld by writerly performance rather than argument, they act out his view that "it's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important" (p. 9).The standout weird turn is the antihero he conjures from Webb Pierce's "There Stands the Glass" (1953). This is a country song about alcoholic consolation after a breakup, the toper hoping his love still thinks of him, in his misery. Simple, clichéd even, but Dylan invents a backstory hell of a Vietnam vet who "doesn't recall ever having a soul" and is "betrayed by politicians back home." Standard old-drunk fare, but then comes the nightmare of having "stuck a bayonet into babies' bellies and gouged out old men's eyes," "assassinated priests," and a concatenation of sins. "He rounds up the elderly, women and children, torches their huts" (p. 21). No bar-time happy hours for him; all those become "zero hour," "surrounded by the enemy" (p. 22). Dylan still protests the empire grotesque. Following each dark dive or wild fantasia is a straighter section that zooms out to more objective viewpoints, factoids, and historical analysis."You," ubiquitous and protean. "You," Dylan's projected center of subjective meaning. "You," his device, as he brings you along to reinvent a mood and mind frame, a world for each song. A thesis on mimesis, the second-person fantasies urge the reader to identify with the original first-person narrative, then fly it sky high. Dylan maintains that a successful song sings the listener into an alternative existence, a temporary self, through imagery and rhyme. This is just what Plato warned against, and what Dylan values: the art of making the listener mimetically become, for a few timeless minutes, what the writer and performer sing into being. In the ancient tussle between philosophers and poets, Dylan holds the agora through the harp. [End Page 254]Popular song as fiction is nothing unusual, but criticism as fiction? Is this critical license in extremis or is Dylan stressing the idea that music is always subjective? According to Dylan, songs earn their wings not just in the hearing but in how far and wide hearers can take them. While Dylan fabricates characters that weren't even dreamt of by the song performers, this book is also autobiographical throughout. The commentary relates as much of himself as the records he highlights. The book sustains a mood where the host impishly swaps masks all the while (as when he reveals, in a tiny chapter, that "Long Tall Sally" [1956] is about a one-story-tall woman from the Nephilim tribe in antediluvian Samaria). On Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), he writes, "Everybody assumes you're a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they're not." Here, many readers will flash back to young Zimmerman in Greenwich Village, desperate to pull off his move to the big city, "and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming" (p. 1). Through songs by selected others, Dylan recounts Dylan.Channeling small-hour talk radio, pulp Westerns, and hardboiled prose, the bourbon-scented mood evokes... (shrink)

2021 marks Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking meter? (...) Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none. The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors’ who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster! (shrink)

"The Symons Medal—one of Canada's most prestigious honours—recognizes an individual who has made an exceptional contribution to Canadian life. The 2020 Symons Medal was awarded to Mr. Bob Rae, P.C., C.C., O.Ont, Q.C. Mr. Rae is the 20th Medallist in this series, following a formidable line of recipients. Hon. Rae's lecture is Learning from The Past, Imagining the Future: Reflections from a Political Life. Throughout the address, published in a bilingual book format, he explores such themes as Canada's improbable origins (...) as a nation; post-war emergence onto the global stage; active membership within the United Nations; and the significance of the ever-evolving Canadian constitution—a "living tree document." Welcoming remarks were made by the Honourable Premier Dennis King, while the official response was delivered by the Honourable Roy Romanow, PC, OC, SOM, QC. Hon. Rae is the 2020 recipient in part for his many years of work on humanitarian issues, most recently the Rohingya Refugee crisis, as well as his time focusing on indigenous issues and his decades of public service and teaching. He has always been deeply involved in the political life of Canada—as MP, former premier of Ontario, and interim leader of the federal Liberal Party. The Symons Medal and Lecture Series is named in honour of Professor Thomas H.B. Symons, a long-time supporter of Confederation Centre and a Board Governor. Held each fall, the medal ceremony and its associated lecture offer a national platform for an eminent Canadian to discuss the nation’s current state, shared histories, and future prospects using themes related to their professional pursuits. The award is presented at Confederation Centre of the Arts—Canada’s living monument to Canadian Confederation—in honour of the meetings of the Fathers of Confederation, who first gathered at Province House National Historic Site in the fall of 1864."--. (shrink)

Pitchfork Country: The Photography of Bob Moorhouse showcases the beautiful, almost mystical photos taken by the vice president and general manager of the historic Pitchfork Ranch in Guthrie, Texas. Moorhouse's photographic work reflects his trademark style and traditional western subjects that create the illusion of scenes from a bygone era. As a working cowboy who carries his camera sometimes twenty to thirty miles a day on horseback, Moorhouse has been able to record moments in the field few photographers will ever (...) see. With an appreciation for great light and its selected application to the subject, his photographic images are an accurate portrayal of ranch life. Viewed in future years with the work of Erwin E. Smith, Ray Rector, and others who have photographed ranch life of the past 150 years, Moorhouse's images will be the standard for documenting ranching in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Also 04 Activeable in a limited edition. Distributed for the National Ranching Heritage Center. (shrink)

As we begin our exploration of our relationship with animals, we come face to face with Peter Singer and his insistence that speciesism is a vice. It is important to come to know what he means by speciesism, why he regards it as a moral mistake.

In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marx...

Learn to achieve the best possible images with minimal lighting equipment Author Bob Davis is a photographer whose high-profile clients include Oprah Winfrey and Eva Longoria, and whose work has appeared in Time, O Magazine, and People. Along with his invaluable professional advice, this beautiful full-color book includes a DVD featuring portions of his workshop curriculum. He covers the elements of lighting and shares his two-strobe technique that will enable you to create studio-quality lighting anywhere with only minimal equipment. High-profile (...) photographer Bob Davis is especially known for his lighting techniques; this book shares his advice on lighting for professional photographers and serious amateurs Covers all the key elements of photographic lighting, with informative illustrations and lighting grids Details the author's pioneering two-strobe technique that reduces the amount of equipment a photographer must carry to a shoot and dramatically lowers equipment costs Features professional tips and stunning full-color images 60-Minute DVD includes video from the author's three-day lighting and photography workshop Lights, Camera, Capture: Creative Lighting Techniques for Digital Photographersoffers your professional advice worth many times the cost of the book. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 456-470 [Access article in PDF] Ethics without Exit:Levinas and Murdoch Bob Plant Hearts open very easily to the working class, wallets with more difficulty. What opens with the most difficulty of all are the doors of our own homes. —Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings... there is no debt to acquit. From the outset, I am not exonerated. I am originally in default. —Emmanuel Levinas, (...) God, Death, and TimeIN HIS RECENT ARTICLE "Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit?," C. Fred Alford highlights a number of insightful comparisons—and many important contrasts—between the respective conceptions of ethics proffered by Levinas and Murdoch. Alford's avowed objective is to "criticize Levinas sympathetically," or to "disrupt" what has come to be known as "the Levinas Effect" and the tendency of many commentators to make Levinas "become everything to everyone." 1 Given what one commentator calls "the facile 'postmodern' temptation to lump together all differences under the general rubric of the 'Other,'" 2 Alford's objective is, I believe, wholly commendable. (As Arthur Schopenhauer pithily remarks: "the man who is everyone's friend is no one's friend." 3) Nevertheless, in the following discussion I want to "disrupt" Alford's own reading of Levinas; not, I hope, to make the latter simply a conduit for saying "whatever.... [I] wanted to say in the first place" (p. 24), but to present a fuller picture of Levinas's singularly difficult, evocative and often puzzling philosophy. I shall do this by critically responding to and developing a number of points [End Page 456] Alford explicitly raises. To what extent my reading of Levinas aligns him with Murdoch, I leave for others far better qualified to assess.Let us be clear from the start, Levinas is—as Hilary Putnam rightly notes—a "moral perfectionist." 4 But this is not to say that Levinas's work is "otherworldly." Although Alford does not use this latter term, it is clearly implied in his analysis. Thus, contrasting Levinas and Murdoch, he remarks that, "like Levinas, Murdoch's goal is to go beyond the limits of the self. Unlike Levinas, Murdoch is content to remain within a world of beings" (p. 37), and likewise, that Murdoch wants us to "climb the ladder of love only high enough to be free of their vanity and egoism, but never so high as to leave the world behind" (p. 38). According to Alford, "the other is an abstraction for Levinas.... Only at a distance is the other abstract enough to remind us of infinity" (p. 25)—indeed, a "barely contained passion for otherness, exit, and transcendence runs through Levinas" (p. 40). In a similar vein we are told that, for Levinas, "the self is remarkably real, a tangible fleshy thing.... and a barrier to infinity," and it is "for this reason,... a shattering experience is necessary, like that of Saul on the road to Damascus, an experience that does not bring me closer to my deliverer.... Only this can open me up—not to reality, but to infinity" (p. 38). More pointedly still, Alford asserts: "Levinas was never interested in the concrete reality of the other person, whose fleshy reality can only get in the way of transcendence" (p. 37). Thus, although he acknowledges that Levinas "often writes about ethical relationships as though they were real relationships with real people" ("what is not true is that Levinas is talking about some Other more august and transcendent than real other people.... we know the infinite only through other people"), Alford nevertheless defends his own "turning to Murdoch" on the grounds that she is "a theorist who remains strictly within the realm of everyday life, finding there subtleties of knowing, caring, and being that Levinas believes come only by way of the infinite" (p. 34).While Levinas's attitude toward the "everyday" or "ordinary" is hardly transparent (after all, the imperative of the other's face is said to come "from most high outside the world" 5 ), Alford overstates the "otherworldly" aspect of the former's ethics. Against the allegation that Levinas... (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

According to many philosophers, belief is a settling state. On this view, someone who believes p is disposed to take p for granted in practical and theoretical reasoning. This paper presents a simple objection to this settling conception of belief: it conflicts with our ordinary patterns of belief ascription. I show that ascriptions of unsettled beliefs are commonplace, and that they pose problems for all of the most promising ways of developing the settling conception. I proceed to explore the implications (...) of my argument for the relation between belief and credence, and for the relative importance of belief in psychological explanation. (shrink)

Bob Hale presents a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another. He argues that facts about what kinds of things exist depend on facts about what is possible. Modal facts are fundamental, and have their basis in the essences of things--not in meanings or concepts.

In documenting the dizzying diversity of human languages, Evans & Levinson (E&L) highlight the lack of universals. This suggests the need for complex learning. Yet, just as there is no universal structure, there may be no universal learning mechanism responsible for language. Language is a behavior assembled by many processes, an assembly guided by the language being learned.

This book is a collection of essays written by Bob Hale (three co-authored), with a critical introduction from Kit Fine. They comprise Hale’s final years of work, adding to and extending beyond his landmark monograph Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (OUP, 2013, 2nd edition 2015). The essays develop and consolidate several key themes in Hale’s work, most notably the notion of definition, especially as it extends beyond definition of a word to definition of (...) a thing more generally, and its relations to essence and existence; how the recently influential notion of truthmaking relates to and illuminates some of these issues; and ontological questions connected with Hale’s metaphysical commitments on the one hand, and his commitments in the foundations of mathematics on the other. Several of the essays engage with and respond to work by Kit Fine, and contributions to Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (OUP 2018). As such, these essays also demonstrate a rich and fruitful philosophical dialogue between Hale and his critics and friends. (shrink)

In the future, when we compare the welfare of a being of one substrate (say, a human) with the welfare of another (say, an artificial intelligence system), we will be making an intersubstrate welfare comparison. In this paper, we argue that intersubstrate welfare comparisons are important, difficult, and potentially tractable. The world might soon contain a vast number of sentient or otherwise significant beings of different substrates, and moral agents will need to be able to compare their welfare levels. However, (...) this work will be difficult, because we lack the same kinds of commonalities across substrates that we have within them. Fortunately, we might be able to make at least some intersubstrate welfare comparisons responsibly in spite of these issues. We make the case for cautious optimism and call for more research. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

"Few of Randall's nearly 1800 photographs were seen or even printed until 1998, when he donated the negatives to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. The following year, more than 100 of the photographs were exhibited on that campus as part of a commemoration of the 35th anniversary of Freedom Summer. Those photographs are now presented in this book, enhanced by Bobs Tusa's extensive introduction. Faces of Freedom Summer offers a rare and moving visual record of a remarkable era (...) in American history."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

In the following paper I shall outline a number of preliminary ideas concerning the relationship between the Holocaust and certain themes which emerge in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. As this relationship is distinctly twofold, my analysis will include both a textual and a rather more speculative component. That is to say, while I shall argue that reading Levinas specifically as a post-Holocaust thinker clarifies a number of his philosophical and rhetorical motifs, so, in turn, does this challenging body of (...) work offer a means by which to re-think both the horror and ethical significance of the Holocaust itself. During the course of my argument I shall additionally refer to the writings of Primo Levi, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger through whom I hope also to establish the central role guilt and confession play in Levinas’s own thinking. (shrink)

Rational models vary in their goals and sources of justification. While the assumptions of some are grounded in the environment, those of others are induced and so require more traditional sources of justification, such as generalizability to dissimilar tasks and making novel predictions. Their contribution to scientific understanding will remain uncertain until standards of evidence are clarified.

My history as a Chicagoan, my history as a photographer, the history of the city, and, in a small way, the history of photography - without any plan or anticipation, these photographs brought these histories together for me." City Spaces will be a welcome addition to those interested in fine art photography, architecture, Chicago, and the urban scene."--BOOK JACKET.

Focillon fastens exactly on a deep difference in the understanding of aesthetic contemplation in the Western and Eastern traditions. Western analyses presuppose and embody assumptions about the ontological ultimacy of individuals that are absent from Eastern traditions in which the ultimate is conceived of as nothingness. Focillon grasped this, and his views are contrasted with those of Bergson, as well as being confirmed by his contemporary, the eminent Japanese philosopher Nishida.

This chapter concentrates on two discussions, both of which enlist Wittgenstein's rule‐following considerations in support of radical and highly revisionary conclusions about the objectivity of meaning ‐ conclusions which may appear to entail, and have been taken to entail, consequences for the objectivity of truth and judgment which are no less radical and revisionary. There is widespread agreement that Wittgenstein advances, in the rule‐following sections of Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, considerations that are quite destructive of (...) certain conceptions of meaning, understanding, and rule‐following into which one may easily slide when attempts a general philosophical account of them. Saul Kripke interprets central sections of Philosophical Investigations as developing a 'skeptical paradox' about meaning. Kripke himself describes the skeptical conclusion as 'insane and intolerable'. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, paintings, films, musical compositions, titles of books -- and even novels. In his splendid biography, Ray Monk has made this very compelling human being come alive in a way that perfectly explains the fascination he has evoked. Wittgenstein's life was one of great moral (...) and spiritual depth. Although his work addresses problems of logic, language, mind, and knowledge, he often described it as having an ethical point, and once said that he "could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view." In successfully bridging the gap assumed by many to exist between Wittgenstein's life and his work, Monk's biography helps to explain the interest in Wittgenstein's later philosophy on the part of Buddhist scholars. (shrink)

“I promise to mow your lawn, but I don’t know whether I will.” Call promises of this form “Moorean,” based on their resemblance to Moore’s paradox. Moorean promises sound absurd. But why? In the literature on assertion, many have used Moore’s paradox to motivate a knowledge norm of assertion. I put forward an analogous norm on promising, according to which one should only make a promise if one knows that one will fulfill it. A knowledge norm explains why Moorean promises (...) are absurd, accounts for a variety of linguistic data, and sheds light on how promises generate obligations. (shrink)

Why engage in inquiry? According to many philosophers, the goal of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer. While this view holds considerable appeal, this paper argues that it stands in tension with another highly attractive thesis: knowledge does not require absolute certainty. Forced to choose between these two theses, I argue that we should reject the idea that inquiry aims at knowledge. I go on to develop an alternative view, according to which inquiry aims at (...) maximizing the epistemic value of our credences. This alternative view makes room for knowledge that falls shy of certainty, and it coheres nicely with a rich body of work in epistemic decision theory. I proceed to highlight the implications of this replacement for some important topics in epistemology, including the dogmatism paradox, the nature of interrogative attitudes, and the norm of practical reasoning. (shrink)

This collection addresses fundamental themes in Marx's social and political thought. It covers key controversies in the analysis of Marx's overall intellectual development, the influence of Hegel, the Marx-Engels relationship, the validity of historical materialism, the significance of class and class struggle, the state and political parties, and reform and revolution. It also addresses Marx's work as historian, anthropologist, student of time and space, social psychologist, social interactionist, and literary scholar. It also covers debates regarding Marx's views on technological determinism: (...) *national identity *nationalism, and cosmopolitanism *cities and citizenship *welfare and human rights *science and ideology *patriarchy and the family *gender and sexual orientations *culture and religion *alienation and fetishism *justice in capitalism and communism. Bob Jessop provides an extended general introduction and also summarizes and interrelates the various articles at the start of each volume. Contributors adopt a wide range of approaches and cover some sixty years of analysis. (shrink)