Big Ideas
...doing philosophy, in a pub in London, as and when we feel so inclined
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EVENT: 26 Aug 2008 12:08 - How Much Democracy Is Too Much?
We tend to assume that “democracy” is a Good Thing, like love, learning or lucre. In that case, the question might seem bizarre: of course we should have as much democracy as possible, and no amount could be too much. Certainly any attempt to hold back greater public involvement in government is lik …
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EVENT: 29 Jul 2008 12:07 - What Does It Mean To Be Modern?
Does “modern” just mean “contemporary” or “recent”, or is it more like a state of mind, a way of life or even a set of ideas? Is it about being a consumer in a liberal democracy? Is the modern world slowly progressing towards a steady state of relative peace, liberty and tolerance? Can we expect th …
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EVENT: 16 Jun 2008 12:06 - What Can We Do About Vagueness?
If we study logic, we begin by learning that truth is a black or white matter. In particular we know that either a given claim is true or it isn’t; it can’t be both and it can’t be neither. Logic is often called the “laws of thought” and we hope that it captures the essential nature of rational ded …
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EVENT: 27 May 2008 12:05 - May ‘68 Special
What did the baby boomers ever do for us? May’s Big Ideas event will be an anarchic May ‘68 special, invoking the spirit of Woodstock and the Sorbonne and casting aside our usual format for a looser, more open-ended approach in which we might cover anything: postmodernism, pop music, radicalism, ar …
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EVENT: 29 Apr 2008 12:04 - How To Grasp Power (A Brief Guide)
We hear and see the word power in a political and social context almost every day. Politicians come into power, hold power and lose it. People are seen as powerful by virtue of a perceived ability to get other people to do what they want. But what is power really and how does it work? Can it be iden …
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Oulipo Laboratory: 30 August 2009
Rich Cochrane will be running a highly interactive session on Oulipo techniques for writers on 30 August at the Treehouse Gallery in Regents Park. Well experiment with some classic surrealist and Oulipean ideas, create a pataphysical encyclopaedia, solve literary puzzles and write collaborative tex …
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Melanie Philips Scare Quotes Masterclass
Just a quickie this, inspired by a Philips missive I came across by accident this morning while looking for something else. The main subject doesnt excite me much: the resignation of the Bishop of Rochester. The paragraph that caught my eye was this one: Meanwhile the Government is flirting with ch …
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No Ontology Without Epistemology!
Theres been a bit of agnosticism in the air recently, and it reminded me of a popular argument against the existence of God. I think its a bad argument, and Id like to try to set out why. For our purposes here, God can stand for any supernatural something at all Ill try to stay out of theology. No …
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Align playlist
Robert and I finished the last walkthrough of Align yesterday, and the music is finalised (more or less I reserve the right to tweak). So here, for the anoraks I know are among you, is the list of what Ill be playing (bits of), not in order of appearance. Acid Mothers Temple, Side D from Absolutel …
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Two Types of New Age Counterfactual
I was looking at The Lost Science of Measuring the Earth by Heath and Michell this morning in connection with the upcoming Align performances (if you havent signed up, its not too late). In Michells section I noticed a couple of claims that are wrong, but in interestingly different ways. (It should …
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Misquantification in Advertising
Nice People Take Drugs, said the ad on the side of buses. It drew complaints [UPDATE: See below]. Why? Well, I suppose that should be obvious. But it isnt, or not exactly. Without any context, my first reading was: All people who are nice take drugs That is, ∀(x) N(x)→D(x) Of course, I …
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Branded Grammar
As some of you may know, BigIdeas has recently jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Since Twitter seems to be reaching a Facebook-in-2007-like critical mass, all kinds of widgets have been added to it to make it more useful. Unlike Facebook, none of these seems to be about werewolves or fish, which is a …
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Align: London Psychogeography in July
This July, Robert Kingham and Rich Cochrane are presenting the first two performances of their multimedia psychogeographic lecture/performance Align. Its an immersive, hallucinatory narrative illustrated by images and music that takes an oblique slice of London psychogeography and examines it throug …
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Is Rhetoric A Dirty Word?
The term rhetoric is most often levied as a term of abuse, deployed when someone’s empty words are not backed-up by their deeds. More often than not, that someone is usually a politician, spinning a yarn. But do we only refer to rhetoric when it is done badly? Are the classical skills of rhetoric, …
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Is Music a Universal Language?
As prep for last nights event I wrote up some notes based on some rather ancient research work, largely to limber up and remind myself of some things. Ive posted them below be warned, this is a bit long and pretty sketchy, but at least those who were there might find it useful. Its Henry Longfello …
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Is rhetoric a dirty word?
The term rhetoric is most often levied as a term of abuse, deployed when someone’s empty words are not backed-up by their deeds. More often than not, that someone is usually a politician, spinning a yarn. But do we only refer to rhetoric when it is done badly? Are the classical skills of rhetoric, …
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TONIGHT: Is Music A Universal Language?
Its Longfellow whos usually credited with the claim that music is a universal language. He didnt know much about music but plenty of people who do have expressed the same view, especially musicians themselves. But in what ways is music like a language? Can it communicate emotions, atmospheres or id …
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Music and Sound Poetry
Ive been listening to a lot of sound poetry lately, and came across Dick Higginss short essay A Taxonomy of Sound Poetry on the estimable ubuweb. I was particularly interested in the boundary between this kind of poetry and music, and Higgins makes a useful suggestion thats at least part of the stor …
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Having Fun with MPs’ Expenses
Arent we just loving the story about MPs expenses that the Telegraph cheerfully eked out to us over the course of last week? Yes we are! But why its a huge waste of taxpayers money, isnt it? Well. Lets look at some rough numbers. According to the spreadsheet of MPs expenses on the Guardians web sit …
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Calculated Cackhandedness
Charlie Brookers take on the BNPs recent party political broadcast seemed to me to hit one particularly interesting nail on the head. Lets borrow his hammer and see if we can drive it a bit further in. Im talking about this: [B]y referring to professional politicians, Griffin is presumably suggesti …
Big Ideas
