“Philosophy group at bookstore starts Aug. 3” plus 2 more |
- Philosophy group at bookstore starts Aug. 3
- Educate Together astounded at 'philosophy'
- Dance and/as philosophy
| Philosophy group at bookstore starts Aug. 3 Posted: 19 Jul 2010 09:10 PM PDT Point Reyes Books will host the first meeting of a new philosophy study group, Living the Question, at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 3. Jacob Needleman, author of The Heart of Philosophy and A Sense of the Cosmos, will co-host the group with John Gouldthorpe. The group will meet bi-weekly for two months. The bookstore is at 11315 Highway One in Point Reyes Station. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Educate Together astounded at 'philosophy' Posted: 19 Jul 2010 04:27 PM PDT The Irish Times - Tuesday, July 20, 2010 PATSY McGARRY MEMBERS OF Educate Together "were astounded yesterday to see their philosophy of education described in The Irish Times as 'a French model that seeks to create an entirely secular sphere within the classroom'," the group's chief executive Paul Rowe has said. "This comment, attributed to a dispute within the Irish humanist association, is completely untrue," he said. He was referring to a report which quoted Dick Spicer of the Humanist Association of Ireland (HAI) as saying that a majority of HAI board members favoured "a French model that seeks to create an entirely secular sphere within the classroom, as currently practised in Educate Together schools". Mr Rowe said: "The Educate Together model of school is a multi-denominational model, in which the beliefs of all children are guaranteed equality of respect in all aspects of school life. A wide and rich programme of religious education is provided as part of Educate Together's 'Learn Together' curriculum." He said that "far from being 'an entirely secular sphere' it provides a comprehensive eight-year programme that encourages children to develop their own identity as they explore religious and non-religious beliefs in an educational forum. "The programme covers the main belief systems in the world and involves considerable discussion of religious ideas, festivals and celebrations." Educate Together schools also facilitated parents who organised faith formation classes outside school hours. "In this way many Catholic children are prepared for sacraments in Educate Together schools." But in the Educate Together programme "no child is registered, labelled or separated by the religious identity of their family and no teacher is required to teach as truth a faith that they may not hold themselves," he said. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 19 Jul 2010 09:00 PM PDT  Of all the forms of art (especially contemporary art) I have written about in the last few years, dance is one of those for which I have been unable to say anything coherent. Movement is indescribably difficult to work out unless one has the vocabulary for it. I therefore decided to watch Pinoy-French Contemporary Dance at the PETA Theater Center, knowing full well that I would be venturing into a totally new experience.
But what astonished me that night was that, not long after the open forum ended (where the four questioners at Donna Miranda's lecture-performance couldn't get a word in edgewise), I found myself ruminating about a very different yet obvious vocabulary to speak about dance. It was one I was familiar with, sort of. It was that this performance spoke to me as much as philosophy as it was about dance. Why not? I have to admit that the first contemporary dance concert I watched was one at a small studio along West Avenue many years ago. The most recent one I watched before last night was Ballet Philippines' Neo-Filipino, a concert from which I gained a new appreciation for the music of The Postal Service and Wim Wenders but very little else. It reminded me of why I have been reticent of late to talk about contemporary art: sometimes, it tends to be all the same. So it was that Miranda opened the evening with her new lecture-performance "Anything Less is a Reckless Act." Now I read the advance word: people would be asked to choose between watching the video of a dance and Miranda talking about it. There are no other alternatives, unless one wishes, in this case, to stroll up the street to the fast food restaurants, grab a quick bite, and walk back down in time for the interval. When I spoke to some people I knew, they would rather choose the dance. "I came to enjoy the dance," said one of my interlocutors. And so, when Miranda began her spiel and pronounced the rules, about 90 percent of the audience headed over to the theater. It dawned on me that something was not what it seemed, and so I decided to stay. It was a brilliant choice. The lecture was a very intriguing insight into how a dance comes together, or seems to come together, but it turned out to be more than that. By choosing to outline what was going on and deliberately placing it apart from all of us, the lecture-performance was a very good example of, not to mention a play upon, the kind of contemporary hermeneutics I have been writing about. There was the deliberate attempt to describe and foreground one's own prejudices. There was the decision to distance one's self from one's own work. The author became another interpreter. Or so I thought. Miranda's own language was inherently subversive: admitting to imposing meaning, for instance, was really an invitation for us to question what she was meaning to do. And in essence, what she was doing explicitly was what was implicitly going on in the other place: depriving us of the chance to fulfill our expectations so that we could make the only real choice left that night: the choice to regret our other choices. In other words, she invited us to reflect upon what we did--if we had ears to listen.
And yes, the open forum was very interesting. The Way is not a way The main performances, which were by the choreographer Lin Yuan Shang and a member of his dance troupe in France, were another hopeful sign that something different was taking place. We did expect this to be a display of what the French cultural attaché called "kung fu dancing," but it was more than that. As the act progressed, something was being made explicit to us. Some quotes from the Tao Te Ching were being projected onto the screen in both Chinese and English. In the process, we saw how kung fu, a martial art made beloved by hundreds of films of varying quality and not a few film stars, was rooted in a thought system whose echoes have only emerged in the West in the 20th century (for example, with Martin Heidegger's discussion of being).
As the choreographer and I discussed briefly after the open forum, Taoism is a very good example of an Eastern philosophy. In fact, one should not even bother calling it a "philosophy," which is a Western construct, or even a "religion" though it is often classified as such. He explained that in Taoism, "the body and the philosophy are not separate." Hence, performing the body is an act of doing philosophy, if one could call it that way. In the East, the dichotomy between body and mind made more prominent by Rene Descartes is almost non-existent.
In fact, the performances reminded me of another Taoist form of body performance, tai chi, and many of the moves were similar. One of the emphases in Lin's performance was on how kung fu, like tai chi, was both meant to evoke movements in nature. For instance, he repeated some of the quotes while performing, emphasizing each movement as he noted its allusion to, say, water.
But it was an interesting commentary on how people really saw kung fu that at one point, four scenes were being simultaneously projected on screen. These were four martial arts movies; the longest clip was from the recent Kung Fu Hustle, and that clip depicted sheer violence, the (necessary) counterpoint to the serenity and calm which was earlier depicted. For Taoism teaches, indeed, that balance is important. This was highlighted in the last segment, which showed the contrasts between nature and the busy working world where, as the Dave Matthews Band song puts it, "ants are marching."
Lin's work is where dance as philosophy is most clearly laid out, but the connections were slightly less clear in the more contemporary number that followed, performed by a dancer from his troupe. "In-Between" highlighted, however the question of confronting the "other," and how paying attention to the language of movement allows us to see the struggles of emerging and trying to live. I could sense this as a teaching moment for those who are fond of the kind of thought made popular by Emmanuel Levinas and (later) Jacques Derrida, where the emphasis is on ethics as first philosophy.
So what?
The risk I take in outlining how dance and philosophy interact is a risk Miranda identified explicitly in her piece: it is an imposition of meaning. Yet this is a suspicion post-modernity makes when meaning provides the account that justifies the way its world operates. What prevents the critic who happens to think philosophically from saying that it is an imposition is precisely the openness of texts like dance, texts which are non-textual in the strict sense, to the possibility of interpretation. What it means does not justify its existence; movement happens whether we mean it or not.
Miranda's work, founded as it is on the obsession with theory and "making meaning" (something the author shares to some extent), lets us examine the question of choice, which is in many ways one of liberal modernity's fondest shibboleths. But it is open, of course, to the question of how intimate relationships begin and end, among other things. And while Lin's first set of works in this show highlight how Taoism puts modern dualism into question, it is always open as well to questions surrounding, for example, the commodification of the martial arts.
But the pedagogical moment is precisely where teachers of philosophy must open people's imaginations to the possibility of meaning. This is perhaps where people can learn how to see things differently and be changed as a result. So what is left after unpacking what is possible, or what can be coherently said, in movement, is a different view of the world.
Photo provided by PETA Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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