william.scherk

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Well worth a listen are two recently-uploaded visual-radio pieces from ARI's Youtube channel.  I wish a few of our founding-people regulars were still around to masticate this lecture. My first impression was that Binswanger is both precise and sloppy:  the lack of 'show notes' or references makes it cloudy where exactly he is relying upon someone else's work. He implicitly invokes both Plutchik and Ekman, but does not say their names, rubbishing one, but basing his next ten minutes on the other. 

The oral-aural culture is weird in the Objectivist traditions. One of the not-so-unfair criticisms of Ayn Rand's occasional essays are the lack of citation where they would really help: who is she talking about?  Same with Peikoff in OPAR, which is in part why I think that one hit the wall several times before I could finish reading it. So with these two, I build up a charge of questions for a Q & A that doesn't happen ... yet.  Since Binswanger usually operates from a subscriber-maintained walled garden, it is interesting for him to put his wonk out for general feedback -- instead of within his Loyalty Cult.  The ARI channel doesn't seem all that well-visited, but it has open comments.

I'd love to get Marsha Enright and Steve Shmurak on a five-way discussion via Skype one day discussing these Binswanger tapes; I think they likely have paid the five bucks at an earlier time for a three-hour MP3, or and that the lecture has already had a round of critiques. Lazy me hasn't noted yet when it was first struck as an independent essay or reading or whatever we might call this genre.

So, Enright, Shmurak, Boydstun, and I think Robert Campbell. I would be not other than host and sound-board monitors, at most a compere, so that leaves one other person I am missing. 

Who am I missing? 

[ADDED: I put out feelers to the trio above on Facebook, with a query about how old this item is. I could probably look that up myself, but why not be social?]

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13 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

I can't imagine a single reason to listen to HB about  anything, especially emotions.

---Brant

A single reason: Entertainment value! And it's magnified if Binswanker dares to briefly step outside the fortress gates. He's spent a lifetime practicing the bravery of being out of range. Seeing him exposed to the simplest of basic informed criticism on territory that he doesn't control would be high entertainment.

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