Concepts and Knowing

Granular Certainty, the Vertical Filing Cabinet, and the Transformation of Files

Craig Robertson

Anthropomorphizing paper acknowledges the anxiety associated with misplacing loose paper. Circulating through the office, papers were expected to manifest the valuable attributes of information as a discrete unit but not to become disconnected from the ov... See more

My suggestion is that art appreciation is another kind of striving activity. We aim at getting correct judgements about art, but getting correct judgements isn’t the actual point. If correctness were our real purpose, then we should do all we can to get the right answers—which would often involve deferring to experts. But such deference would miss ... See more

Art Is a Game

From Poetry and Prophecy, Dust and Ashes, on plough.com:

Biblical inerrancy is a modern doctrine, and these kinds of reactions, too, invite the accusation that I am judging an ancient text by standards not native to it. Indeed, I am. This is a necessary step in a process called "reading." My disgust and confusion are forms of information; they measure my distance from the text's world. A reading that entered fully into the text's thought-world, that required no haggling or silent dissent on the way, would be a useless exercise - you could bring nothing back from it; it would dissolve like a dream. Nor are such objections simply modern. Alter's notes detail many instances in which medieval and early-modern textual critics tried to smooth away the violence and contradictions of the text.

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L. M. Sacasas

Solving a crisis by escalation seems not to have gone out of fashion. It signals, of course, a failure of imagination, but also an institutional imperative. What can an institution possibly offer you except more of itself? For example, the one remedy for the problems it has unleashed that Facebook cannot contemplate is suspending oper... See more

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