“Can philosophy save us | Darragh McManus (MalaysiaNews.net)” plus 2 more |
- Can philosophy save us | Darragh McManus (MalaysiaNews.net)
- Self-expression reigns in BioShock 2 (Toronto Star)
- Deaths Elsewhere / 'Father Dowling' novelist dies at 80 (Pioneer Press)
| Can philosophy save us | Darragh McManus (MalaysiaNews.net) Posted: 06 Feb 2010 03:57 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Our culture – the media and the broader populace – is obsessed with the economy. And since Lehman Brothers went kablooey in September 2008, our fascination has gone to a deeper level. Googling the word "business" gets a scarcely feasible 1.6 billion hits. "Economics" gets 92 million. (Weirdly, "Gordon Brown is a moron" returns almost 60 million. I don't know what that signifies.) And this is fine: money is important, we all need jobs; redundancy is awful. I wouldn't dismiss that in any way. But should economic and attendant political matters be given so much weight? Is this the highest ambition of human beings, to attain or hold on to material wealth and power? Should we not have matured beyond that after four billion years of slow evolution from simple-celled prokaryotes to homo sapiens? Should we not have reached the point where higher matters concern us? Matters such as pondering the mysteries of life. The nature of the self. Dreams and consciousness. Language and thought. The search for a fundamental truth to it all. Why is there virtually no mainstream news or debate about the deeper questions of existence? Will we ever see Anna Botting announcing that 72% of people suffer from an existential malaise? Jeremy Paxman aggressively asking a stuttering minister why, shockingly, three-quarters of us have never sought to attain enlightenment. A News at Ten report on new research suggesting life is a collective dream out of which we "wake" at the moment of death. The odd contemplative gem sparkles in the dull firmament of mass culture – Radio 4's wonderful In Our Time and Moral Maze, Alain de Botton's lively, accessible primers – but they are few. Surely there is more to the only self-aware creature in existence than jobs and money, and even other important matters such as healthcare, education and the social fabric. We need to reverse the Cartesian maxim and create a society defined by "I am, therefore I think." Besides, most people say they're sick of hearing about the recession/economy. So why not ease back on that (and lay off the vacuous celebrity rubbish while we're at it) and discuss philosophical matters instead? I'd even introduce it to schools. Perhaps not to exam level – indeed, part of the point of philosophy is that it makes exams somewhat redundant – but it should be taught to children each day, from an early age. I don't mean religion, folklore, mythology or eastern esoterica, valid subjects of study though these are. I mean the western tradition of philosophical enquiry, defined as "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge or conduct". A good grounding in philosophy can impart an immeasurable gift: the ability to think clearly, rationally, precisely and imaginatively. More than that: it imbues you with a profound instinct to think. Contemplation becomes reflexive, like breathing. Philosophy makes you question everything, mull it over and come to your own conclusions. It cautions that those conclusions may not be valid, and to always be open to amendment. It provides the intellectual building blocks of reason, patience, divergence, dialectic and curiosity. And it instils a sense of wonder at just about everything: from great existential questions about the nature of reality and our place in it, to ethics and aesthetics, to something as simple but fundamental as: who am I? For both adults and children, philosophy is a balm, a consolation, an instrument and an inspiration. And who knows, it may even give all our economic woes the perspective they sorely need. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Self-expression reigns in BioShock 2 (Toronto Star) Posted: 07 Feb 2010 01:45 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. In 2007, BioShock barnstormed the games world. A burlesque on Objectivist philosophy, a meditation on the nature of free choice (and by extension on games themselves) and a near-perfect first-person action-adventure, powered by a jaw-dropping twist that'll be talked about in spoiler-averse whispers for decades, it was something eggheads and meatheads could agree on. Press and punters fell over themselves looking for new ways to praise it, carrying it on their shoulders as triumphant proof that kick-ass games could be Important Art. On Monday, the inevitable sequel hits the streets. But how to follow such an act? How does a creative team – a team almost completely different from the creators of the original – go about crafting the successor to a game that, rightly or wrongly, has been called the Citizen Kane of its medium? "I felt honoured and humbled," says Jordan Thomas, creative director at 2K Games' Marin studio. "My job is, in part, to treat the creative offspring of my former co-workers with respect, but also to avoid boring them with an excess of safety. Because everyone seems to have sieved out different subjective rewards from the original, trying to please them all equally would have led to madness. "Fortunately, the artistic standards of my colleagues are unbelievably high, and I never saw them flinch. So it was more a question of picking our constants and making the game we personally wanted to play, knowing that a lot of smart people would queue with picket signs in the aftermath." The BioShock universe, for those who've not sampled it, is centred around Rapture, the undersea Objectivist paradise created by mad tycoon Andrew Ryan. Consumed by its own excesses and its unrestricted trafficking in ghoulish genetic modification, Rapture in the first game had become a grotesque anti-Eden of pure survival of the fittest, its majestic Art Deco vaults plagued by ravenous zombies addicted to mutagenic goo, patrolled by the hulking Big Daddies and their corpse-harvesting charges, the Little Sisters. BioShock 2 presents Rapture 10 years later, now under the care and control of altruist/collectivist Dr. Sophia Lamb and her Big Sisers – and no less nightmarish for the change in management from Rand to Marx and Mill. "Ryan's philosophy of rational self-interest was so extreme, his political rivals had to be similarly larger than life to pose any real threat to him," Thomas explains. "Lamb's organization, a unity cult called the Rapture Family, once suppressed, has now seized control of the city. And the player, an overwhelmingly powerful individual, no longer enslaved to the city, constitutes a very direct threat to that utopian vision." Here is where BioShock 2 becomes an inverse mirror of its predecessor, almost a refutation. Where BioShock's thesis presented "free will" as ultimately an illusion – and made a convincing indictment of the very idea of "player freedom" within the manufactured experience of games – BioShock 2's philosophy seems to reaffirm the power of individual agency to effect change. "One of our keywords was `Expressivity,'" says Thomas via email. "By that I mean that we want players to own the experience, to craft a play style which is all their own ... Rapture is a living simulation which connects a diverse set of enemy behaviours to the game environment, and then supports hundreds of responses to the player's dozens of weapons, tools, and other forms of input. "It's especially rare in shooters, because, frankly, it hurts to get it right. With all that wild unpredictable player behaviour to account for, what we do often feels more like zookeeping than, say, filmmaking. But the player's feeling of self-expression is worth it." Beyond tactical choices, the player of BioShock 2 will have greater agency over the game's narrative. "The first game was all about the setting," Thomas says. "This one is more about a specific small group of people, each of whom gazed upon paradise and were consumed by it. (The player) makes decisions about the fate of key characters – not just Little Sisters this time. "I can't say much more about any intended subtext without spoiling the reward, but ... these choices dramatically shape the story, particularly in the final act. That, too, we feel, is rare in shooters. So we're proud of the power over the narrative that the player has, this time around. "I'm a big fan of embracing the subjective – that is to say, offering some compelling knowns, but holding back on a lot of the connective tissue for people to speculate and fill in with their own theories. Meaning in games is malleable, very participatory. You can guide it, but to force it is to betray its very nature." Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Deaths Elsewhere / 'Father Dowling' novelist dies at 80 (Pioneer Press) Posted: 06 Feb 2010 10:23 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Ralph McInerny, a longtime professor of philosophy and medieval studies at the University of Notre Dame who also was a popular mystery writer best known for his "Father Dowling" series of novels, has died. He was 80. McInerny died Jan. 29 at Our Lady of Peace Hospital in Mishawaka, Ind., after a long illness, according to the university. A member of the Notre Dame faculty from 1955 until his retirement in 2009, McInerny gained international renown as a scholar, author and lecturer who specialized in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century theologian and philosopher. McInerny, who also wrote and lectured on ethics, philosophy of religion and medieval philosophy, directed the university's Medieval Institute from 1978 to 1985. And from 1979 to 2006, he directed its Jacques Maritain Center, which is primarily an archive for the study of materials related to the 20th-century French Catholic philosopher and his influence in the United States. McInerny "was one of the leading scholars worldwide on the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas," said John O'Callaghan, an associate professor of philosophy who replaced McInerny as director of the Maritain Center. And then there was McInerny, the prolific author of approximately 100 novels. Beginning with "Her Death of Cold" in 1977, he wrote more than two dozen mysteries featuring Father Dowling, which led to the 1989-91 "Father Dowling Mysteries" TV series starring Tom Bosley. Father Dowling is "a priest detective whose secular interest in crime is merely a mask for his deeper concern for the spiritual welfare of the victims and criminals involved," wrote James R. McCahery in the "St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers."Among McInerny's other series are the "Andrew Broom" mysteries, the "Sister Mary Teresa" mysteries (under the pseudonym Monica Quill), and the "University of Notre Dame" mysteries featuring Roger Knight, a Notre Dame professor, and his brother Philip, a semi-retired private investigator. In 1993, McInerny received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. "Stained Glass," his final Father Dowling mystery, was published in October 2009. "Sham Rock," his final mystery featuring the Knight brothers, will be published in April. "Looking back at his career, you see just how prolific he was," said Matt Martz, an associate editor at St. Martin's Press who was McInerny's editor for the Father Dowling and Knight mysteries the last two years. Born Feb. 24, 1929, in Minneapolis, McInerny served a stint in the Marine Corps from 1946 to 1947. He earned a bachelor's degree from St. Paul Seminary in St. Paul in 1951, a master's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1952 and a doctorate in philosophy from Laval University in Quebec in 1954. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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