On Feb 25 at a local humanist meeting I will give a brief talk The Devil’s Advocate: On the Utility of Theistic Concepts and Myths for Psychologically-minded Atheists, followed by a group discussion.
Continue reading The Devil’s Advocate: On the Potential Usefulness of Theistic Myths
Tag: learning from stories
A Bit of Art for Value Pluralism
In line with my learning from art project, I try to always think of a set of works of art that are helpfully related to content I develop (or delve). This is to get more out of art than we naturally do. And it can help improve one’s understanding. The task is actually quite difficult, because most brains (including mine) do not naturally index art in this way (but I believe one can deliberately build such indexes in our brains).
Here are a few works of art that came to my mind on the topic of my recent blog post, Psychological Hedonism meets Value Pluralism: An Integrative Design-oriented perspective – CogZest. Continue reading A Bit of Art for Value Pluralism
Birthday Wishes to a Dear Relative: May You Have Your Chocolate Box and (Secular) Buddha Too
Cher —-,
Wishing you the best of what we hoped for during our irregular childhood “Cat Stevens Power Hours” together, Continue reading Birthday Wishes to a Dear Relative: May You Have Your Chocolate Box and (Secular) Buddha Too
Betroffenheit: The Show and the Emotions
“Betroffenheit” is a German emotion word. Max Wyman compared it to being gobsmacked. I might add nonplussed. But English and French words only capture part of the meaning of betroffenheit. Crystal Pite, a brilliant Canadian choreographer (Kidd Pivot productions), created an entire dance show that translates betroffenheit in several of the brain’s (verbal and non-verbal) languages.[1] Since seeing this very powerful show a couple of weeks ago, it has frequently come to my mind (a light perturbance); and I’ve discussed it with many people. I had been resisting the urge to blog about it, for lack of time. But reading Brett Terpstra’s blog post, “How’s it going?”, about the grief he is experiencing from losing his dog, Emma[2], led me to reply to his post with the following.
Continue reading Betroffenheit: The Show and the Emotions
What Inspired Mrs. Robinson and Other Songs in The Graduate?
There must be a thesis on this somewhere: How did Simon & Garfunkle’s soundtrack to The Graduate come to be what it became? I don’t mean the administrative part. I mean: what was the specific assignment S&G received? What were the constraints? And more interestingly, how did S&G translate this assignment into the masterpiece they created? Continue reading What Inspired Mrs. Robinson and Other Songs in The Graduate?