Tag: Harry Potter

After my recent brush with cultural commentary, I’ve been thinking about the business of art and media criticism. Sometimes I wonder whether a philosopher ought to be in the business of diagnosing the Zeitgeist. Nonetheless, I keep finding myself drawing general conclusions from cultural trends, predicting an uncertain future or analyzing something as grandiose and amorphous…

Probably my readers have all heard the old joke: Mathematics is the second cheapest department to run, because all you need are pencils, paper, and waste bins. Philosophy is the cheapest, because you can dispense with the bins. The implication is that we hold on to everything, even bad ideas and bad work. When I…