Huenemanniac

Getting distracted by ideas

November 2009

  • Because I would not stop for Death…

    … he kindly dropped by my office for a photo opp. This is William Holloway, Philosophy major, completing a creative assignment for another class. Continue reading

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  • Music update

    I’ve been to two chamber music concerts this year, both of them excellent. The first was last September, with the Shanghai Quartet. They played fascinating, difficult, and very compelling pieces by Penderecki and Yi-Wen Jiang. They have an incredibly balanced tone — very unified, and highly expressive. But it was their performance of Schubert’s “Death… Continue reading

  • Ladyman and Ross, Every Thing Must Go

    I recently finished this book, which aims at correcting current ways of doing metaphysics by insisting that metaphysicians take seriously what contemporary physics tells us about the world. The problem is that “many” (I guess) contemporary metaphysicians suppose that the world, ultimately, is composed of tiny, billiard-ball like particles, which bang in to each other,… Continue reading

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  • James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible

    Most readers are probably familiar with the Documentary Hypothesis. The basic idea is that the Bible, as an artifact, is best explained by supposing that it is a compilation of several ancient texts, written by different people in different times and cultures. Somebody (“the Redactor,” maybe Ezra) compiled many of the texts by the third… Continue reading