You ask your partner whether she bought the vegetables for tonight’s dinner. She doesn’t look up from her reading, and answers your question in a way you know makes it untrustworthy. She answers mindlessly. Her mind is with her reading, but she can summon up just so much attention as is required to bring you…

The point of Cage’s 4’33” is not that we should pay attention to sounds per se. The sounds that we are asked to pay attention to, are the sound we ourselves are producing: sounds, that is, that carry some intentional structure, and to which, normally, we would never pay any attention because of our concentrating…

We do not treat the circular object of the CD as a representation of the sound that is “burned” into it. The zeroes and ones do not in any way represent the sounds of the music, though everyone agrees that they somehow carry them. Why then do we say that a photograph represents what it…

The wisdom in the way our parents lived, and the speciesism therein: they might think of other people first as members of this or that family, and then, perhaps, also, as ugly, or beautiful. They would simply assume that since these people had parents, so they would if not soon then eventually find a partner…

Mass art (television), and cartoons, etc. are a mere epi-phenomenon of art. In regard to mass art the core consideration is the freedom of expression and where it meets the others’ rights not to be offended. Mass art is an epi-phenomenon of art because it addresses particular people, singled out not by the characteristics of…

Of course, we don’t have to believe along with the believers that Gods, wizzards and witches are real entities. It’s pretty clear that neither they nor their working can be perceived polymodally, and thus they cannot be proven real—so we can at the least remain agnosticist (no need for militant atheism). Gods, wizzards, and witches,…

So I finally got around to reading Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein and the fist shock came from an unsuspected angle: Monk could amply make use of letters Betrand Russell wrote to his then love. Why did this shock me? The shock was due to the realisation that a biographer writing about a contemporary person…

Some concepts are said to derive their meaning from their opposite. For instance, light supposedly requires the dark for us to make sense of the concept. I think we would never have arrived at the concept of light, even when it was exchanged now and then by darkness, if we had never seen whence light…

In my view, the only thing positive about Madonna’s music — apart from the financial constancy of the Madonna industry — is Madonna’s Absence. She does not sing (one assumes that she cannot), i.e. she is not present in her singing, the sounds of voices do not present themselves as produced by a singing; the…

Oh, how art makes a mockery of life. Of late, enjoying profoundly the great jazz classics — the likes of Miles Davis, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Lennie Tristano, Warne Marsh , Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy — I feel horrible. I feel about how what they did was make stuff that intimated them to an anonymous…