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The “specialist”, Chesterton would say, is the one who knows more and more about a very tiny domain; therefore, his major achievement is to know everything about nothing.

UNIVERSITY consists in a virtual platform for artistic thinking and reflection, both trans-artistic and trans-national, towards a “meta-school” based on tutorial and non-specialized methods. Pedagogically speaking, UNIVERSITY aims to launch the very first “altermodern artistic school”, where practice and theory are no longer legitimized concepts and everybody can both teach and learn.

Because in this “technical tie” age:

1 + 1 = 3

AGAINST DUALITY

NEUTRAL POINT OF VIEW

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NPOV is a fundamental wikimedia principle and a cornerstone of wikipedia. all wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without bias, all significant views that have been published by reliable sources. [...] “neutral point of view” is one of wikipedia’s three core content policies, along with “verifiability” and “no original research.” [...] the neutral point of view [...] is not a lack of viewpoint, but is rather an editorially neutral point of view. an article and its sub-articles should clearly describe, represent, and characterize all the disputes within a topic, but should not endorse any particular point of view. it should explain who believes what, and why, and which points of view are most common. it may contain critical evaluations of particular viewpoints based on reliable sources, but even text explaining sourced criticisms of a particular view must avoid taking sides. the neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting perspectives on a particular topic. it requires that all majority views and significant minority views published by reliable sources be presented fairly, in a disinterested tone, and in rough proportion to their prevalence within the source material. [...]

COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE.

reblog, #54

AGAIN THE ‘THIRD WAY™’
or the need for a “trial” dialectics

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[...] There is a widespread myth about the word ‘liberty’, a myth propagated by philosophers from the “left” and “right”, by conservatives, radicals, modern liberals, and classical liberals. The myth begins with a distinction: liberty takes two basic forms: negative and positive. Negative liberty concerns the absence of constraints, impediments, or interference. For instance, a person has freedom of property — understood as a negative liberty — if others may not take her property or interfere with her use of it. In contrast, positive liberty concerns the power or capacity to do as one chooses, or the power to act autonomously. A person has freedom of property — understood as a positive liberty — if she actually owns and controls some property. Bill Gates and I both have the negative liberty to own a yacht, but only Gates can afford a yacht. He has the power to do something I cannot, and in that respect, he is more free. Now for the myth about liberty, read the entire article HERE.“

reblog, #53

REALSERVATISM
a new dogma for the new decade

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["The Curator's House", Estoril/Portugal, 2008]

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I’ve just changed my “political views” on my Facebook profile from “Estonian reform party” to “Realservative.” I continue to dearly love the Estonian Reform Party, one of my ten favorites in the North Atlantic community. (I’m also pretty fond of the Piratpartei.) But I’d like to explain “Realservatism” and what it is really about:

 

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Being really, really, really real. This is a bedrock, inviolable principle of realservatism.

 

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Keeping it really real. Why be real in the first place if you drift away from realness over time? There’s no sense in it.

 

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Being realer than an onion peel. It is useful to have external metrics for one’s overall realness level. I find that an onion peel — already quite real — is a solid one. If you’re realer than an onion peel, you’re doing something right.

 

(4)

Realism. Let’s appreciate the limits of what we can do and what we can know definitively. There are lots of unknown unknowns — another way of putting this is that Knightian uncertainty is important to keep in mind. (…)

 

COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE.

DOGMA 2005 HERE.

 

reblog, #52

OU UMA PROPOSTA ÉTICO-ESTÉTICA

PARA UM CERTO EGOÍSMO INSTRUMENTALISTA

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["The Curator's House", Estoril/Portugal, 2008]

On the subject of instrumentalist egoism, survival vs. flourishing, and the pre-moral “choice to live”: someone just reminded me of Rand’s “causality versus duty”, which supports interpreting Rand as holding the less sophisticated views on these matters. Consider two quotations:

 

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Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.” I think this supports the view of a pre-moral “choice to live”. It also suggests that living is understood here as the logical contradictory of dying (rather than as flourishing).

 

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Reality confronts man with a great many ‘musts,’ but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: ‘you must, if–’ and the ‘if’ stands for man’s choice: ‘–if you want to achieve a certain goal.’ This again lines up with the pre-moral-choice-to-live view. And I think it suggests that there are no ends to be found in nature, no goals that are metaphysically privileged. Rather, we simply choose what goals to pursue, and an action can be rationally criticized only when it fails to fit with the agent’s chosen goals. I think this stands in contrast to the aristotelian view.

 

[Michael Huemer]

 

[DOGMA 2005]

 

 

reblog, #51

this is
UNIVERSITY™

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