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nofatclips · 6 months

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Mysteries Of Love (Julee Cruise cover) by The Golden Filter, bonus track from Syndromes

#music #the golden filter #cover #covers #julee cruise #david lynch #angelo badalamenti #penelope trappes #stephen hindman #golden filter #david keith lynch #Bandcamp

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ridethedarkerwave · 8 months

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The art of philosophical dialogue.

For the past two years, the thing in life that I have been the most excited about is my current philosophical writing project. For many years now, I have sought to write a book, my first book, on ethics and animals. This project grew out of my dissertation work, but it has changed shape in significant ways twice now. Around 2013 or so, I realized that I wanted to make the emotion and virtue of compassion much more central to the overall book. More specifically, I am interested in examining the importance of compassion and how compassionate treatment of animals is most compatible with a deontological (non-utilitarian) ethic that extends a fairly strong form of respect to animals, akin to rights but not necessarily reducible always to rights. I don’t think this is something that has been done before.

Then, in fall 2021, I had a major epiphany. Instead of writing another dry philosophical treatise that only a handful of academics will read and will ultimately just collect dust on some library bookshelves, forgotten into history, as so many academic books today will, why not write something more creative, engaging, and memorable? Why not write a philosophical dialogue on compassion and animals — and not just a dialogue, but one that occurs within a fun, creative story, with interesting characters — something that people outside of academia will enjoy reading, including some of my students? And so began my story, Elea. (Elea is one of the main characters, named after the Ancient Greek goddess of compassion.)

Historically, Plato is the philosopher most known for writing philosophy in the form of a dialogue. I’ve always enjoyed reading Plato, partly for that reason, and I sense that some of my students tend to be more engaged when reading philosophy in the form of a conversation occurring within some sort of narrative. For Plato, the narratives are based on real life stories, including the life and death of his teacher, Socrates. Whenever I have taught the Apology or (parts of) the Phaedo, many of my students become curious about this peculiar character, Socrates, and his peculiar ideas. I have also used John Perry’s Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality on several occasions, which is in the form of a fictional scenario involving three made-up characters. But the art of writing philosophical dialogues has largely disappeared, with occasional exceptions.

My move towards writing philosophy in the form of a creative dialogue and story has also been inspired by my pandemic experience and, in general, my love of fantasy and science fiction. Throughout the summer of 2020, I spent countless hours, every day, getting lost in the sci-fi video game, No Man’s Sky. As the real world around me seemed more and more like a terrible place, I became deeply invested in creating a new life and new world within this beautiful, open-world, sandbox game in which you can explore countless alien planets while trying to just survive. It made me realize that I want to build interesting worlds in my writing, and combine that somehow with an examination of the philosophical ideas that seem important to me. Now, whenever I feel jaded and estranged from “the real world” (which is quite often), I find joy and new energy in the story and characters I’m creating. I can envision doing this for the rest of my life.