my mind on books

American Scientist Online has published this review by George Lakoff of Ray Jackendoff‘s new book, Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Link to Authors@Google: Ray Jackendoff

[tags] George Lakoff, Ray Jackendoff, review, book, linguistics [/tag]

Following up the recent post here on “Philosophy and TV” … “Pop Goes Philosophy” is a monthly column at PopMatters from George Reisch, the editor of the Popular Culture and Philosophy Series at Open Court. Discussing the relationship between philosophy and popular culture in his latest column (in response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education), Reisch concludes:

When philosophy went pop and the doors of the ivory tower were thrown open, in other words, the point was not to lure the public inside. Some may wander in, of course, and find they like that “extremely self-reflexive relationship” Asma describes. But the vast majority hope that philosophers will take the chance to get outside, to look up from their intense focus on their own tradition and take seriously what’s going on in popular culture.

Open Court also has a podcast series drawn from the various “… and Philosophy” books. I can’t wait to download some of these, with titles like: “Knowing When to Be Afraid: Rationality and Suspense” (from Hitchcock and Philosophy) and “Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be in One” (from More Matrix and Philosophy).

This notice just came in an email today:

The Seventh International Conference on Neuroesthetics
Many Faces of a Face
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Berkeley Art Museum
University of California, Berkeley

When Velazquez’s portrait of Juan de Pareja was first exhibited in Rome, one art critic remarked:

“This is the truth; the other exhibits are merely paintings.” To what extent, and by which neural mechanisms, can we divine the intentions of others by studying their face? What happens to our ability to perceive faces when the brain is damaged? What attributes makes us judge a face as being beautiful?

How can we simulate faces through the computer? These are some of the questions that our distinguished speakers, from Europe and the United States, will address at this year’s meeting on neuroesthetics. at the Sixth International Conference on Neuroesthetics. The conference, which is sponsored by the Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation and the Institute of Neuroesthetics in London, is free and open to the public.

Visit http://plaisir.berkeley.edu for more information and to register.

In France they watch philosophers talk on TV – as discussed in a recent book called Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television by Tamara Chaplin (found through this blog post, see also publishers’ website)

By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.

Meanwhile in the US we take the opposite approach, issuing a spate of pop-culture-related “…and philosophy” books (such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer), as recently discussed in Philosophy Now.

I’ve just been trying out online mind-mapping at mind42.com, with a map of some notes on ‘Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas‘ by Richard Ogle (The map below might take awhile to load.) It was pretty easy to start mind-mapping and adding links; it looked like images could only come from flickr or Yahoo Image Search, though. I guess I would have to upload images to flickr to get them on the mind map.

You can drag the map around with your mouse to see all the parts; there are some links to click on. Controls along the bottom will increase/decrease the size of the map, expand/collapse the nodes, etc.

I expect to be adding to the map as I go further along with the book.