certified copies: notes toward a theory of the knockoff
To see the original as no less conditional than the copy may just be more workable than the opposite, in which beauty is an ontological question. If any beauty I encounter is, by virtue of its being a copy, a mediated experience — and potentially degraded as a result — the world in which the work of art is created, or copied for that matter, becomes a secondary one on a hierarchy of being.
Erik Anderson on IKEA, knockoffs, and copies–certified or otherwise.
summer reading: anna aslanyan
By Anna Aslanyan, Reviewer @anna_aslanyan Earlier this summer, talking to fellow reviewers about books we pretend to have read, I promised, rather unwittingly, to read The Man Without Qualities. Although Robert Musil never finished his trilogy, I feel bound by my word to read it from cover to cover. The only choice left is the […]
dreams of reason
First, there is Hume’s engagement with scepticism, which is the most thoroughgoing such engagement of all modern philosophers. (Descartes was just using scepticism as a stage device to frighten conventional thinkers into the arms of his own new system.)What I like is Hume’s refusal to accept any easy answers, combined with an equally resolute refusal to say something bonkers (ie, that we don’t in fact know anything). We could all do with more of Hume’s moderate scepticism, especially in science. This is one thing that years of science journalism taught me.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Anthony Gottlieb.