On Love as Comedy

Comedy as freedom of expression

Information Science is a broad, inclusive disciplinary area. If rather than looking to define or delimit it, we look for its driving principle or ethical rationale a good choice would be Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights. This is a powerful statement on intellectual freedom encompassing freedom of opinion, expression and access to information. Without the freedom to gen...

Improvised Comedy as a Turing Test

The best improvisational theatre actors can make any scene partner, of any skill level or ability, appear talented and proficient in the art form, and thus "make them shine". To challenge this improvisational paradigm, we built an artificial intelligence (AI) trained to perform live shows alongside human actors for human audiences. Over the course of 30 performances to a combined audience of al...

From Chloroform to Thalia and Erato, Liebig's Muses of Comedy and Love Poetry.

546 doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000001289 Instead of dance, Erato (“beloved”) governed romance as the Muse of Love Poetry. On this Italian card advertising a company cofounded by chloroform pioneer Justus von Liebig (1803 to 1873), a seated Erato (right) is pictured playing the cithara, the musical and etymological precursor to today’s guitar. If a 20th-century actor portrayed Erato poorly, that th...

Descartes on love and/as error.

Love as a Reactive Emotion

One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically (a) an affectionate attachment to another person, (b) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and (c) paradigmatica...