Read Leonard Cohen and Philosophy Online
Authors: Jason Holt
Tags: #Philosophy, #Essays, #Music, #Individual Composer & Musician, #Poetry, #Canadian
W
IELAND
S
CHWANEBECK
earned his PhD in 2013 from Dresden University of Technology with a study of the impostor motif in American literature and film. He gave up a career in music, for though he’s been practicing his burning violin for ages, his Mozart continues to sound like bubble-gum. As long as they keep ejecting him from the Tower of Song, he will focus his energies on teaching and researching topics in Gender and Masculinity Studies, Adaptation Studies, and British film history, stopping occasionally to ask himself why he doesn’t look good in a hat.
G
ARY
S
HAPIRO
is a philosopher who has been lecturing both in the US and in Stockholm, Ireland, Athens, and Turkey since his recent retirement as Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Richmond. His books include:
Nietzschean Narratives; Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women; Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel
; and
Archeaologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying.
Shapiro is currently completing a book on
Nietzsche’s Metapolitics of the Earth
, after which he will turn to thinking about the meaning of land and earthwork art as ways of making sense of the relations of humans with the earth. In the spirit of Cohen’s naming the place of thinking and philosophy as the space between the nameless and the named, he plays with questionable and questioning expressions like “geoaesthetics of the anthropocene” and “post-periodization.”
B
RENDAN
S
HEA
, PhD, teaches philosophy at Rochester Community and Technical College. He has published articles on the history and philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of popular culture. Somewhat embarrassingly, he first learned who Leonard Cohen was when watching the 1990 Christian Slater film,
Pump Up the Volume.
P
ETER
S
TONE
is Ussher Assistant Professor of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He received his PhD from the University
of Rochester in 2000. He has previously taught at Stanford University and held a Faculty Fellowship at Tulane University’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs. Much of his research concerns the contributions that random selection can make to democracy and justice. He is the author of
The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making
(Oxford University Press, 2011) and the editor of
Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader
(Imprint Academic, 2011). He has also published articles in such journals as the
Journal of Political Philosophy
, the
Journal of Theoretical Politics
,
Political Theory
,
Rationality and Society
, and
Social Theory and Practice
. Last time he checked, his friends were not gone, and his hair wasn’t grey.
L
ISA
W
ARENSKI
, PhD, is a philosopher who works primarily in epistemology, metaphysics, and the general philosophy of science. She teaches at City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Lisa is a former dancer and choreographer. Lisa first heard the song “Suzanne” one night at the age of thirteen when she was drifting off to sleep. She didn’t hear it again, but never forgot it, until some years later after the performance of a duet that she choreographed. One of her dancers then played
Songs of Leonard Cohen
for her for the first time, and she has been gripped by “Suzanne” ever since. She knows that she’s half crazy. (But that’s why you want to be there.)
B
ERNARD
W
ILLS
is Professor of Humanities at Grenfell Campus Memorial University in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. He has a doctorate in Religious Studies from McMaster University and a Master’s in Classics from Dalhousie University. He hails from Cape Breton Island, Canada though he has spent well over a decade in Newfoundland. He is of such an age as to recall enjoying Leonard Cohen on his mother’s eight-track cassette player. In spite of this he continues to root among the garbage and the flowers of contemporary culture turning up scholarly papers, essays, and poems as he goes.
E
DWARD
W
INTERS
studied painting at The Slade School of Fine Art before reading philosophy, taking his doctorate in philosophy at University College London. He has published widely in aesthetics and art criticism. He was co-director of History and Theory in the School of Architecture at University of Westminster and was head of fine art graduate programs at West Dean College. He has also taught history and philosophy of art at University of Kent. His latest
book,
Aesthetics and Architecture
, is published by Continuum. As a result of a residency in southern Spain, he is currently working on a philosophical travelogue in conjunction with a series of fine art prints, entitled,
Málaga Suite
. He regrets having played the favorite game so carelessly, but is grateful for a life in bars, where he fought against the bottle in the graceful company of beautiful losers.
Aaron (biblical),
19
Abraham (biblical),
22–23
Abu Ghraib,
222
Aeschylus
Agamemnon
,
213
aesthetics, best explanation in,
149
afterlife, question of,
228
Airplane!
(film),
32
Alexander, Jeffrey,
162–63
Alexander the Great,
6
Altman, Robert,
32
ambiguity,
126
ambivalence,
125
Amos, Tori
“Raincoat,”
69
Strange Little Girls
,
69
Anaximander,
133
The Answer, critique of idea of,
19
,
22
Antichrist,
41
apocalypse,
46
apokalypsis
,
46
Aquinas, Thomas,
234
art, Apollonian versus
Dionysian,
80
asceticism,
173–74
askesis
,
217
Auden, W. H.,
25
Aufhebung
,
134
auteur theory,
xi
Bach, J. S.,
80
Badham, John,
32
banality of evil,
161–62
Barbour, Douglas,
149
Bauman, Zygmunt,
164
Beatlemania,
207
Beatles
“She Loves You,”
134
Beaudelaire, Charles,
239
The Ethics of Ambiguity
,
126
The Second Sex
,
131
Benjamin, Jessica,
107
Berlin, Irving,
40
“Always,”
51
Berry, Chuck,
x
Bieber, Justin,
25
biological essentialists,
35
Bird on a Wire
(film),
32
Bizet, Georges
Carmen
,
83
“black romanticism” (Scobie),
239
Blake, William
“The Garden of Love,”
150
Blakley, Ronee,
62
Bloom, Harold
The Anxiety of Influence
,
221
body, as shaping mind,
102–3
Bogart, Humphrey,
244
The Book of Revelation (biblical),
237
.
See also
John the Apostle: Apocalypse
Boucher, David
Dylan and Cohen
,
57
Brel, Jacques,
57
Brod, Harry
“Jewish Men,”
33
Bronner, Ethan,
226
Bruno, Giordano,
159
Buckley, Jeff,
24
,
67
,
73
,
132
,
242
,
245
Buddha,
174
Buddhism, and compassion,
239–40
Butler, Judith,
37
Gender Trouble
,
36
Callas, Maria,
57
on absurdity,
18–20
resignation in,
19–20
Canadian history,
146–47
Carroll, Jim,
ix
Carson, Anne,
39
Cash, Johnny,
67
Catherine of Alexandria,
13
Catullus,
203
Cave, Nick,
78
“The Secret Life of the Love Song” (lecture),
75
Chagall, Marc,
217
chansonnier
,
57–58
Cheese, Richard,
73
Lounge Against the Machine
,
73
Christgau, Robert,
62
Christianity, and compassion,
239
Cicero,
3
classical theory of concepts,
118
The Cloud of Unknowing
,
231
,
234–35
,
238
,
239
Coates, Susan W.,
106–7
Cohen, Leonard
as acquired taste,
61
affirmation/negation in,
236
on afterlife,
228–29
“Ain’t No Cure for Love,”
93
,
206
,
211
“All There Is to Know about Adolf Eichmann” (poem),
162
“Always” (cover song),
51
ambiguity in,
127
“Anthem,”
16
,
22
,
47–50
,
96
,
172
,
213
“Avalanche,”
206
“Ballad of the Absent Mare,”
34
,
205
,
209
,
236
Beautiful Losers
(novel),
109
,
139
,
141–45
,
220
Best Reading of,
140
Canadian context of,
143
,
145–48
,
150–53
Obscenity Reading of,
139
Political Reading of,
146–48
,
150–51
,
153
Psychological Reading of,
144
Religious Reading of,
150
Sexual Reading of,
149–50
“Because Of,”
28