Looking at some of the iconic images that we recognize as such (we don’t seem to have a definition of iconic images) one might want to think that for a person to be in a particular iconic image is for her or him to be a moral witness (following Margalit’s definition thereof). But is that…

It is an instructive exercise to compare so-called iconic images (as in: photographs) to paintings that have become an icon. A clear example of the latter would be Picasso’s Guernica, of the former: Vietnam Napalm, photograph by Nick Ut, 1972. Iconic Photographs A photographer does not make an iconic image. She makes photographs and one…

I think that, by now, I have read almost all the books these two crime writers have written. Jim Thompson will hand his readers the life of a man making decisions that form, from the very beginning—as well as from the very thoughts that motivate the man—the make-up of a looser. The man may believe…

People who lack a vision are bound to mistake politics for content, someone’s self-assured utterances for his understanding of things. We find such people all over the globe. Yet, some people have a vision, but it is the wrong one. What should we do about them? I guess I am finally waking up to real-life.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution is a point well taken: “the” world is a human world: we get from it what we recognise. Yet, his analysis of this, in terms of two forms of intuition and 12 categories of understanding, is a capitulation to logic—reminding one of Plato’s. Plato, among other things, messed up a beautiful myth…

It is said that, on account of climate changes due to the greenhouse effect, birds migrate to areas in the world where, before, they could not, normally, be spotted. …Birds are always athome… There is an obvious sense to a bird’s ignorance of country borders, of course, but, I think, from the bird’s point of…

Claude Lanzmann argued (a.o.) that the Shoah cannot be represented (photographically, I would want to add). He states this clearly in explaining what he would do had he found documentary footage. Now if something cannot be represented, then surely it can be misrepresented. (Rather, every representation of it would be a misrepresentation.) This leads to…

The central claim Yesterday, I explained an argument to my class, and one of the students stared at me in disbelieve. Then, after taking my explanation into consideration, he smiled—some sort of smile of defeat. Eliminative Materialism claims that that smile is all and only physiology—muscle contractions and neurophysiology. In a sense, that is indisputably…

Students working on the issue of art’s autonomy and recent works crossing the borderline with morality, may be interested in the following case. Both Steve Kurtz and Robert Farrell are facing charges of wire fraud brought in connection with absurdly-alleged ‘bioterrorism.’ Their “Critical Art Ensemble” used bacteria to experiment on genetically modified food. The CAE…

I have been getting so many questions about things I have said inTrouw, that it seems appropriate to me to explain my point of view in my own words. For that I have to rely on what others have reported to me about the article in Trouw in which I have been quoted, because I…