Nigel Warburton: “In my view philosophy is primarily the attempt to understand, and as such is an activity of enquiry. There’s no guarantee that discovering how things are will benefit us psychologically: it might in fact make things much worse.”
Jules Evans: “I’m not arguing that all philosophy is therapy, but rather that ancient Greeks and Romans viewed philosophy that way, as did many Indian philosophers. … Ancient philosophy really can help people overcome suffering.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
When Philosophy Lost Its Way
These two professors pin it on “the locating of philosophy within a modern institution (the research university) in the late 19th century. This institutionalization of philosophy made it into a discipline that could be seriously pursued only in an academic setting. This fact represents one of the enduring failures of contemporary philosophy.”
100 Years Ago, American Women Competed In Venus De Milo Lookalike Contests
Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges had a serious rivalry over it. A Harvard professor collected measurements from female students all over the Northeast. Every few years a big-city newspaper announced a new Venus. There was even a full competitive event at Madison Square Garden.
‘They Were A Model To Me’: Patti Smith On Frida Kahlo And Diego Rivera
“They helped me really prepare for my life with Robert [Mapplethorpe]. These were two artists who believed in one another, and each trusted the other as a shepherd of their art. And that was worth fighting for through their love affairs and fights and disappointments and arguments. They always came back to each other through work. They were lost without each other.”
Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? NY Times Critics Discuss
A.O. Scott: “The nominations are a numbers game, and in each case you can offer a nonracial explanation for the oversight. Other movies and actors just had a few more votes.”
Wesley Morris: “But I also don’t think any voter wants to be told that he or she has to vote for a predominantly black film or: racism!”
Manohla Dargis: “The lived, embodied experiences of the membership greatly matter and that sometimes even the most well-intentioned white people just don’t see the racism and sexism in front of them.”
What Do We Love About ‘War and Peace’?
“Tolstoy’s huge novel about Russia during the Napoleonic Wars has been adapted many times, despite the difficulty of catching the essence of a work whose essence has a lot to do with sheer scale. When the book was published, in 1869, people wondered … Was this a history or a novel? And why was it so big? It’s big because it’s both.”
Couplets Off The Cuff: Meet The Improvised Shakespeare Company
“What distinguishes [its] intricate, erudite brand of improvisation is not that every show is new (which it is), but how the plots, themes and language are deeply rooted in a specific aesthetic. It makes the shows meatier than most improvisation, if less wildly unpredictable.”
‘We’re Screaming And Crying And Laughing’ – What It’s Like To Dance For Pina Bausch
“The work is very theatrical, but we don’t have any acting classes – we never did. We’re not actors. Pina put us in situations where people might feel we were acting, but we’re not. We might have been talking about something that happened to us, and she put it on stage.”
Ai Weiwei Does Department Store Windows
“This is better than MoMA,” said Ai about the Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris, site of his latest installation. He found “that working in a department store had been liberating. It allowed him to go beyond the white cube of most galleries and use the atrium and window displays in an interesting way, he said, and he liked that passers-by could see his work.”
Orlando’s Opera Company Is Back, Eight Years After Shutting Down
Opera Orlando, formerly Florida Opera Theatre, “will announce this week that two professionals with national reputations will take the helm full-time – a level of commitment to the genre not seen since the collapse of Orlando Opera in 2009. After that company went bankrupt, a small but fiercely devoted group of volunteers formed Florida Opera Theatre to stage small-scale productions and recitals.”