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In an earlier paper, I presented a novel objection to closure-based skeptical arguments. There I argued that the best account of what makes skeptical scenarios effective cripples the closure-based skeptical arguments that use those scenarios. On behalf of the skeptic, Christopher Buford and Anthony Brueckner have replied to my objection. Here I review my original argument, criticize their replies, and highlight two important issues for further investigation.

What epistemic defect needs to show up in a skeptical scenario if it is to effectively target some belief? According to the false belief account, the targeted belief must be false in the skeptical scenario. According to the competing ignorance account, the targeted belief must fall short of being knowledge in the skeptical scenario. This paper argues for two claims. The first is that, contrary to what is often assumed, the ignorance account is superior to the false belief account. The second is that the ignorance account ultimately hobbles the skeptic. It does so for two reasons. First, when this account is joined with either a closure-based skeptical argument or a skeptical underdetermination argument, the best the skeptic can do is show that we don’t know that we know. And second, the ignorance account directly implies the maligned KK principle.

Epistemological contextualists maintain that the truth-conditions of sentences of the form 'S knows that P' vary according to the context in which they're uttered, where this variation is due to the semantics of 'knows'. Among the linguistic data that have been offered in support of contextualism are several everyday cases. We argue that these cases fail to support contextualism and that they instead support epistemological invariantism—the thesis that the truth-conditions of 'S knows that P' do vary according to the context of their utterance.

[Extract] From approximately 1770 to 1970, in a series of industrial revolutions, human standards of living were utterly transformed by the ingenious application of the arts and the sciences. The University of Illinois economist Deidre McCloskey put it this way: Two centuries ago the world's economy stood at the present level of Bangladesh.1 In 1800 (in our dollar terms) the average human being lived on $3 a day; a person in contemporary France or Japan lives on $100 a day. In Norway, the average person earns forty-five times more than their predecessor did in 1800, a remarkable $145 a day. China today has managed to reach an average of $13 a day. That is four times the 1800 level and that number is rising rapidly. Only 1.1 billion of the world's 6.7 billion people still live on $3 a day. If anything is progress, then that is progress.

[Extract] Across forty years from the 1950s to 1990s, Cornelius Castoriadis developed a critique of bureaucratic capitalism. The article looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Castoriadis' theory. The weaknesses stem from Castoriadis' economic theory; the strengths from his theory of meaning. Castoriadis' attempt to link a critique of growth to the critique of bureaucracy fails but his analysis of the tenuousness of meaning in modern bureaucratic societies is much more successful. Bureaucratization causes the draining of meaning (imaginary significations) from societies dominated by public and private bureaucracies. Superficiality, incoherence and sterility triumph over sense. Societies become consumed by hobbies and lobbies, and foist a huge amount of junk on their denizens. Junk science, junk art, junk politics, junk culture and junk everything proliferates. Everywhere one turns trivial pursuits prevail.

[Extract] The 2008–2010 Global Financial Crisis communicated a lot of messages. One of them was that the age of the post-industrial economy was over. Capitalism was changing, yet again. The great Joseph Schumpeter long ago observed that first comes the destruction and then comes the creation. The post-industrial age was now itself post, more past than future. The charisma of the knowledge industries was deflating. The reality of mass part-time service industries was upon us. Various advanced economies (it turned out) were much less high-tech than they had claimed to be. High-tech and info-tech proved instead to be a shaky facade for the low-interest rate fuelled housing booms. After 2000 these booms inflated under-performing economies. Inevitably in due course the booms turned to bust.

Music is a ubiquitous and hard to grasp cultural form. It is semiotically and aesthetically open-ended; yet even a 'non-musical' person is able to follow the basics of rhythmic structure and flow. Its presence in social and cultural life is further complicated by its multiple forms of existence - as both 'live' and 'technologically mediated', as self-referential language and as accompaniment to text, dance and other cultural expressions. This collection brings together philosophers, sociologists, musicologists and students of culture who theorize the multiple roles of music through cultural practices as diverse as opera and classical music, jazz and pop, avant-garde and DIY musical cultures, music festivals and isolated listening through the iPod, rock in urban heritage and the piano in contemporary Asian societies.

Music does what all creative media do. It translates one idiom into another. That is what philosophy and religion also do. This is the introduction chapter of the book, which reflects on the structural parallels between music and religion. Some of the most powerful interpretations of music are philosophical interpretations. What makes philosophical interpretations of music so powerful is that they are translations. It points out that music is an art of space. Musical performance and the acoustic physics of music all manifest their key characteristics in space. In addition to broaching these universal philosophical themes, the book tackles the question of how musical meaning and value are formed in specific times and places. Due to its peculiar connotative powers, music is able to perform a range of cultural functions: it can be used to reinforce identity or challenge it, and maximize social status or subvert it. Keywords: art of space; cultural theories; music; musical performance; philosophical interpretations; religion

[Extract] Bob Dylan has spent a lifetime despising the nineteen-sixties - all the while being held up everywhere as its avatar. This comic tale of mistaken identity is the the story of his life. No matter what he says - let alone what he sings - it seems to make no difference. When he wrote a percussive-pulsating one chord rant-chant against living in a 'Political World' in 1989, it was dismissed by critics - sub-standard Dylan, they said. What they were really saying was: no, we don't believe you. You are a protest singer at heart. You don't really loath politics, whatever you might say or do. So books continue to be written about him as if he was a nineteen sixties political radical playing loquacious-hipster king to Joan Baez's platitudinous-remonstrating queen. No matter how much he might excoriate this notion of his marvelous biography, Chronicles, Volume One - one of the great pieces of American literature, on a par with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Angie March - it changes nothing. Left-liberal writers still compulsively lionize him in their own image - and their feckless children, who populate the modern media machines, regurgitate the same risible cliches about him.