Essays and Criticism

Reviewed Work: The Criticism of Didactic Poetry: Essays on Lucretius, Virgil, and Ovid by Alexander Dalzell

Criticism of Benacerraf’s Criticism of Modern Eleatics

I analyze here Benacerraf’s criticism of Thomson arguments on the impossibility of ω-supertasks. Although Benacerraf’s criticism is well founded, his analysis of Thomson’s lamp is incomplete. In fact, it is possible to consider a new line of argument, which Benacerraf only incidentally considered, based on the functioning laws of the lamp. This argument leads to a contradictory result that comp...

The Art of Criticism? Criticism as Art!

Dialectic and Social Criticism

other approaches. The first of these is `material thinking' (das materielles Denken): `a contingent consciousness that is absorbed only in material stuff', a form of thought which is rooted in existing conditions and cannot see beyond them. At the `opposite extreme' is the transcendent critical method of `argumentation' (das Räsonieren), which involves `freedom from all content and a sense of v...

Music Criticism and Adorno

Résumé When thinking of Adorno and music criticism, two strategies suggest themselves. The one is to look at the kind of criticism, cultural criticism in general and music criticism in particular, propagated by Adorno. It is, after all, difficult to overestimate the degree of his influence on musical thought in the twentieth century (whether one agrees with his views or not) and of the intellec...