virtual philosopher

Was Wittgenstein Wrong About Games?

Thomas Hurka thinks he was. Like several other eminent philosophers he believes that Bernard Suits in his unjustly neglected book The Grasshopper (reviewed on Virtual Philosopher) shows why Wittgenstein was wrong when he said that 'game' can't be defined, and says some intereresting things about games in the process.

In a recent paper for the Aristotelian Society 'Games and the Good' (2006) Hurka wrote

    ...Wittgenstein was not right, as is shown in a little-known book that is nonetheless a
    classic of twentieth-century philosophy, Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life and
    Utopia. Suits gives a perfectly persuasive analysis of playing a game as, to quote his summary
    statement, “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

You can read the rest of Hurka's article here.

Stuart Franklin's Landscape Photography: Europe's Changing Landscapes

Magnum President Stuart Franklin's latest large-scale project is a series of photographs of Europe's changing landscapes. This will culminate in a book to be published by Thames and Hudson. A selection from this work in progress together with my essay based on interviews with the photographer is published today in the current issue of Portfolio Magazine 44 (Autumn 2006). I have cut and pasted a couple of extracts from this article below. You can also download the complete text of the article [20KB rtf] Download stuart_franklin_landscapes.rtf (without illustrations). Franklin is best known for his photograh of a student facing up to a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989.

‘What I am trying to do is create a series of landscape images – powerful in their own right – that communicate our vulnerability to climate change, yet maintain a level of ambiguity.’ Stuart Franklin

This landscape series is more poetic, more abstract and more overtly linked to an artistic photographic tradition than any of Stuart Franklin’s work to date. Here he is documenting some of the ways in which climate and technological change are transforming Europe, with an eye for formal power, textures, and the occasional surreality of juxtaposition.
[...]
Traditional landscape artists have tended to record stable beauty. Change, where it occurred was seasonal and cyclical. Contemporary landscape photographers such as Misrach, Adams, and Franklin, in contrast, are documenting transitions, infiltrations, and transformations. No longer celebrating the spirit of place, such photographers recognise the menace that can lie behind beauty, and the transience and vulnerability of environments that we might otherwise have assumed to be unchanging. In a few decades we may interpret Franklin’s Changing Landscapes very differently.

On Allan Ramsay's Portraits of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Allan Ramsay painted  remarkable portraits of the great philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1766. Rousseau had fled persecution and come to England at Hume's invitation. The portraits were painted while Rousseau and Hume were staying in London, where Rousseau, who at this time was best know as a novelist, was something of a celebrity. The relationship between the philosophers began well, but later dissolved in acrimony, with Rousseau accusing Hume of all kinds of betrayals (some of which he might just have been guilty of). Terrified that Rousseau, who was writing his Confessions at the time, might put his semi-paranoid beliefs into his autobiography, Hume pre-empted him by publishing  a pamphlet which included transcripts of letters sent by Rousseau.

The two portraits are both in their way Rembrandtian (Hume's is like the Kenwood Self Portrait; Rousseau's closer to the Cologne Self Portrait as Zeuxis - sometimes known as The Laughing Philosopher). They hung side by side in Hume's house in Edinburgh. They're still in Edinburgh, but sadly not side by side any more.

I had intended to publish a book on this philosophers' quarrel one day, but never got round to it. I did write an article, though, about the portraits:[36KB rtf] Download art_and_allusion.rtf . A shortened version of this was published in The Philosophers Magazine. Fortunately David Edmonds and John Eidinow hit on the same idea recently and produced Rousseau's Dog - a better researched book than I think I'd have managed - and on the basis of their excellent earlier book Wittgenstein's Poker , I happily handed over my notes to them.

Update. See my post for 23/11/06 for link to a new article by Douglas Fordham on Ramsay's Hume/Rousseau portraits.

Writing By Bill Brandt - A Bibliography

I have compiled a short bibliography of writing by Bill Brandt [16KB rtf] Download writing_by_bb.rtf.

Brandt wrote relatively little, but what he did write was eloquent and memorable. For instance, in 1948 he described his approach to photography: 'I found atmosphere to be the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty'...explaining this further:

'When I have seen or sensed - I do not know which it is - the atmosphere of my subject, I try to convey that atmosphere by intensifying the elements that compose it. I lay emphasis on one aspect of my subject and I find that I can thus most effectively arrest the spectator's attention and induce in him an emotional response to the atmosphere I have tried to convey.' [from 'A Photographer's London' introduction to Bill Brandt Camera in London, Focal Press, 1948].

Wikipedia article on Brandt

Bill Brandt Archive

Useful Brandt Bibliography from the V and A Museum

Encyclopedia Britannica article on Brandt

Not Quite 'This Sporting Life' - My Days as a Rugby League Player

A short piece that was included in the Cambridge University Rugby League USA Tour brochure, 2006 [336 KB pdf].Download tackling.pdf

The Gambler's Argument for Believing in God's Existence: Blaise Pascal

Attached is a short dialogue on the question of whether it is a good gamble to bet on God's existence, exploring some of Blaise Pascal's thoughts on the issue. This appeared in the journal Think (issue 7, Summer 2004), and also in the British Humanist Association's Thinking About Death (London: BHA, 2004) edited by Peter Cave and Brendan Larvor.

Here is the first page or so:

Imagine you are on your death bed, You have been an agnostic all your adult life, but are now aware that you have at best a few hours to live. You still believe that there is a small chance that the Christian God exists, that is why you never felt able to embrace atheism and declare that there is no God. But you are not convinced that there is a God. In fact on balance you believe there is no God, no heaven, no hell, and that within a few hours you will simply cease to exist forever, except in other people’s memories and by the other traces you have left behind you. At this moment, a friend who has read Blaise Pascal’s Pensées comes in and tries to persuade you to embrace a belief in God.

You: I really think this is it. I have to be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll last much longer.

She: Don’t speak like that, you could still recover.

You: No. Ive spoken to two doctors now. They only give me a matter of hours. I’m about to slip away to nothing. I can’t say I feel too bad about it. Perhaps it’s the painkillers I’m on, but I feel quite serene. I’ve been lucky, I’ve had quite a good life. Plenty of friends, no serious hardships. …Why are you crying? Don’t cry. Let’s talk about something else. Look out of the window, the crocuses have come out already. It’s not that bad.

She: It might be.

You: What do you mean? Why are you looking so scared?

She: What if you are wrong? What if Hell really exists and you end up there forever?

You: But it probably doesn’t exist, does it. Be realistic It doesn’t seem very likely. You’ve been looking at too many Hieronymous Bosch paintings…Hell is a medieval belief. We’re in the twenty-first century....

[For the whole dialogue, download below]

[12KB rtf] Download gamblers_argument.rtf

Philosophy of Photography Bibliography

You can download a selected bibliography on the philosophy of photography here.  This bibliography does not include anything published after 2002. Suggestions for new articles and further books to include very welcome. [12 KB rtf] Download phil_of_phot_bibliog.rtf

Bill Brandt Bibliography: Books by and About Brandt

A  list of books by and about the photographer Bill Brandt is available here [rtf 24KB]:
Download bks_by_and_about_bb.rtf
More to follow. I'm planning to annotate this list in the future, supplement it with a list of key magazine and journal articles about the photographer, and also to provide lists of Picture Post and Lilliput stories by him. Let me know if there is a demand for this.

Art and Philistinism

Here is an honest reaction to Cornelia Parker's ‘The Distance (a kiss with string attached)’ Parker had carefully wrapped Auguste Rodin’s sculpture ‘The Kiss’ in string. It is from M. Simmons, who, in a letter published in METRO, (Thursday Feb. 27, 2003) wrote:.

‘I cannot begin to describe how angry I am about Cornelia Parker’s string tied around Rodin’s beautiful work of art The Kiss.’

He/she does in fact go on to reveal how angry he/she is, and also makes the following critical judgment of the work:

‘It is indeed a load of crap [then makes a point about the nature of art]  but the public should not be surprised at what the Tate calls art. Just look at the bricks, the unmade bed, the lights that go on on their own (which, incidentally, happens in our office and has done for the last ten years) and so on.’

It is easy to make fun of such comments. But they are sincere and raise interesting questions.

This was the starting point for a talk I gave at Tate Britain in 2003 when my book The Art Question came out. Extract from this book.

The full draft of my talk can be downloaded here [24KB rtf] Download art_and_philistinism.rtf

Veronica Bailey

I first came across Veronica Bailey's photography when I was writing about the architect Erno Goldfinger. Bailey photographed some of Goldfinger's books from his house in 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, end on, using a digital process, to create formally striking images, which, combined with the books' titles produced a kind of indirect biographical comment on Goldfinger and his wife Ursula. I wrote a short piece about a later series of images, Postscript, for Portfolio Magazine. This series uses the letters of Lee Miller and her lover/husband Roland Penrose as the basis for large-scale colour digital prints. Download this article [12Kb Rtf]Download veronicabailey.rtf .

There is an interesting feature article by Sue Steward on Veronica's photography from Eye magazine.