Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Review of Slumdog Millionaire

Hey, check out my film review of "Slumdog Millionaire" at Swans Commentary.

4 comments:

Zetetic_chick said...

Hi Jeff,

This comment is not about your post, but about philosophy.

I read one of Steven Hales' papers on relativism. Actually, I need to read it again, to grasp it fully. I've haven't ordered his book on relativism yet.

Anyway, philosopher Mark Ressler (a professional philosopher interested in the logic of relativism) wrote a paper criticizing Hales' thesis:

http://markressler.com/doc/Toward-the-Logic-of-Relativism.pdf

See Ressler website here (he has other papers on relativism):

http://markressler.com/

Another website that can be of your interest is this of mathematician and relativist thinker Gabriel Stolzenberg,

http://math.bu.edu/people/nk/rr/

He has good articles in response to physicist Alan Sokal's attack on relativism, posmodermism and social sciences.

See specially his paper "A physicist experiments with scholarly discourse":

http://math.bu.edu/people/nk/rr/as.html

Jeff Meyerhoff said...

Hi Z,

These are great links. Ressler's so young, but he writes clearly and the piece is nice and short. I don't have the expertise in logic to evaluate it, but I want to look at it further. Also, his thesis adviser is Graham Priest, one of my favorites.

And I've always been irritated with Sokal, so it's nice to see a critique of him. That old radical criticism of the fuzzy thinking Europeans is so tiresome. While it's good to see through pretentious bullshit, whenever I read some of the European stars: Deleuze, Adorno, Derrida, Zizek, I find them profound and illuminating. Aside from simply misstating what they are talking about as Stolzenberg shows, it's as if Sokal and those debunkers are saying: "Look how these phony Europeans don't use the criteria I use and don't follow the tradition I follow. I will show you what their work looks like when you assume my world is true."

Raam Gokhale said...

You and your readers might be interested in my blog (slumdogphilosopher.blogspot.com). Thanks.

Jeff Meyerhoff said...

Thanks for the link Raam.

Jeff