How does the root of the PSR- there is "no object without a subject" (and consequently "no subject without an object") establish that representations/appearances apart from my own body have a subjective side (like my own body does, as will)? — KantDane21

I dont think that PSR , in and of itself, establishes Schopenhauer’s conclusions. If it did, then generations of philosophers who accept PSR would have to accept Schop’s metaphysics, which most don’t. It is the original insights he supplements PSR with that allows him to see it as leading to the idea that all objects have a subjective side.

What rendered him so very unfashionable? Who's even heard of him? — Banno

I participated in a philosophy zoom meetup discussing the youtube conversation between Hare and Bryan Mcgee a few months ago. The consensus of the group was that Hare was too universalistic about moral judgement.

A lot of academic philosophy is focused more on itself than on concepts of "world, existence, reality and truth." Much of what is taught and published is exclusively devoted to the study of philosophers and their texts; in essence, it is philology of philosophy. History and sociology of philosophy are often also included into the same discipline. — SophistiCat

Why is much philosophical focus devoted to the study of philosophers and their texts? Perhaps in order to use the work of others to articulate fresh concepts of world, existence, reality and truth. One could make the same argument for the purpose of historical analyses of philosophy.

. Do you wince when you see someone get hurt? Does it disturb you if your actions or the actions of those serving you (in some way) lead to the suffering of others? Then we can start to see if this doesn't happen when the other people have other worldviews or races or cultures — Bylaw

Wars often exemplify clashes of worldviews. As a solider in battle , I am not only not going to come to the aid of an enemy soldier in need, I actively try to induce their suffering. Their needs represent for me the desires of an alien and hostile worldview, and thus what benefits them causes me suffering. One can extend this to political and religious clashes.

You don't need to understand a different world view to help someone who is in need. — Pantagruel

You don’t necessarily recognize them as being in justified need before understanding their perspective.

Yes. We are faced with the challenge of achieving a new kind of social consciousness whose operation is predicated on empathy — Pantagruel

Is empathy possible without first being able to understand what appears to one initially as a dangerously alien worldview? In other words, does empathy come first, or does insight come first and empathy follow? Religious traditions tend to fetishize free will and value-formation without understanding their origins, and so argue that empathy comes first.

The philosophy of mathematics is largely foundation theory, and this is a very technical subject. I was a math prof but beyond naive set theory I know little of foundations. In the past the forum had several participants who seemed quite knowledgeable in the subject, but, apart from Tones in a Deep Freeze they don't seem to be active. Beyond foundations I suppose one looks into the historical origins of the subject, arguing what Aristotle really meant by something attributed to him, etc. Not much there in my opinion. — jgill

I wrote a paper (published in the Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology) titled What is a Number: Rethinking Derrida’s Concept of Infinity. It deals with Derrida’s deconstruction of mathematical idealization as it is found in Husserl’s and Kant’s works. This is certainly technical in the sense that it relies on a thorough familiarity with writers like Derrida and Husserl.

. Can philosophy bring any clarity to something that exists only within its practice? — jgill

I’m trying to think of an example of something that exists only within philosophy’s practice (or doesn’t exist only within its practice). Put differently, isnt the aim of philosophy to address within its practice such inclusive concepts as world, existence , reality and truth?

What I cannot undestand is how can science --and more specifically, talking about purely scientific subjects-- be so à la mode in here! — Alkis Piskas

Science is by its nature conventional, so its concepts
are more accessible to the average person than are philosophical ideas. As a result, people are forced to use their knowledge of science to extrapolate abstract philosophical notions. For instance, they may know what physicists have to say about time and space, but have no idea what philosophers have written on the subject and how it may differ from the scientists.

Each side not only sees the world through a different schematic lens, but is unable to subsume the other side’s perspective as a variation of their own.
— Joshs

Is this similar to Lakoff's frames? — Tom Storm

I believe Lakoff’s approach isnt as relativistic as mine, but we have in common the treatment of ideological and political differences in terms of holistic schemes expressing a unitary logic.

Any quick ideas for how we break this worldview impasse? — Tom Storm

I think there is an evolutionary trajectory to cultural understanding, so societies will eventually find more pragmatically useful ways of making sense of others. We just have to be patient.

I agree with Prinz that our moral judgments (values) are initially grounded in innate emotional responses. But my consideration of higher levels of causation for these phenomena causes me to part company with Prinz.

Why do we have these strange emotional responses which often motivate acting in ways (moral ways) that can appear to be against our best interests, at least in the short term?

We have these emotional responses because they are parts of strategies that solve cooperation problems — Mark S

Perhaps these ‘strange, higher level emotional responses’ you are referring to have something in common with Martha Nussbaum’s rendering of emotion as involving “intentional thought or perception directed at an object (as perceived or imagined by the person who has the emotion) and some type of evaluative appraisal of that object made from the agent's own personal viewpoint. This appraisal ascribes importance to the object in terms of the agent's scheme of goals and ends.”
Like you, Nussbaum’s approach is a form of moral universalism, which determines her cognitive appraisal model of emotion as rationalistic. That is to say, if emotions ground our moral values, then moral universalism considers our emotion-based appraisals in terms of correctness or incorrectness in relation to universal valuative norms we can arrive at to solve cooperation problems.

I am closer to Prinz’s value-relativism than to Nussbaum’s universalist rationalism. Like Prinz, I believe that rational goals cannot be divorced from the underlying affectively-based values that make them intelligible, and thus affective values are relative to the individual.
Unlike Prinz, I don’t attribute affective values to a combination of innate emotional programs or modules and social conditioning. I believe our motives for cooperation as well as competition and hostility arise out of social interaction, but not in a blind conditioning fashion. Rather, humans are cognitively and perceptually oriented toward anticipative sense-making.

I doubt that MAGA people who benefit from the domination (exploitation) moral norms and values they find so attractive will be convinced by any rational argument. However, the MAGA supporters being exploited - the poor, women, the elderly, immigrants, and other outgroups could be motivated (once they realize how they are being exploited) to understand and advocate for rational arguments that explain what is being done to them. So yes, MACS could be a powerful force (at least on the side of the exploited outgroups) in arguing against domination moral norms — Mark S

Cooperation is a means to an end, and that end is the expansion of our ability to anticipatively make sense of our world. Put differently, we derive pleasure and joy from events that we are able to assimilate meaningfully into our ways of understanding the world. We perceive events we cannot assimilate and make sense of coherently as threatening, and we strive avoid or destroy such alien stimuli. We are able to function socially with others in a community to the extent that we are able to anticipatively construe their behavior. We may relate to their perspective but never arrive at the very same outlook as theirs, which explains the unavoidable strife and violence within families and among friends.

Political polarization like that between MAGA and the left is a result of incompatible worldviews. Each side not only sees the world through a different schematic lens, but is unable to subsume the other side’s perspective as a variation of their own. This leads to accusations of bad intent , immorality , stupidity and irrationality that each side constantly charges the other side with. Because you fail to grasp the pragmatic rationality of MAGA adherents relative to their way of looking at the world, you blame them for your failure of understanding and reify this hostility as ‘correctly scientific rationality’ which you will then attempt to shove down their throats with the blessing of your fellow scientists. Just rinse and repeat and we have a perfect recipe for the perpetuation of intercultural violence.

Philosophy is laugh-out-loud good times for those who love it, especially in the heat of battle with all marbles on the table. — ucarr

Funny how? How is philosophy funny? Like a clown?

Two simple forms of consequentialism are “Behaviors that increase well-being are moral” and “Behaviors that minimize suffering are moral.” — Mark S

I’m wondering how you would respond to Jesse Prinz’s moral relativist argument, which grounds moral values in innate emotional responses which become culturally conditioned to form an endless variety of moral values across the cultural landscape.

“Reason cannot tell us which facts are morally good. Reason is evaluatively neu­tral….moral judgments are based on emotions, and reasoning normally contributes only by helping us extrapolate from our basic values to novel cases. Reason­ing can also lead us to discover that our basic values are culturally inculcated, and that might impel us to search for alternative values, but reason alone cannot tell us which values to adopt, nor can it instill new values….

We can try to pursue moral values that lead to more fulfilling lives, but we must bear in mind that fulfillment is itself relative, so no single set of values can be designated universally fulfilling. If my goals come into conflict with your goals, reason tells me that I must either thwart your goals, or give up caring about mine; but reason cannot tell me to favor one choice over the other.”

Applying this thinking to a specific example, Prinz would
argue that no cooperative meta-theory could bridge
the gap in values between core Trump supporters and social leftists. The best that could be hoped for is the use of rational argument to persuade both parties that neither side’s values are THE objectively correct values, and therefore each side’s perspective needs to be tolerated and even respected.

Do you think that MACS can achieve some better mutual understanding than this?

As Martin Nowak likes to say, we are SuperCooperators. Our ability to cooperate is what has made us the incredibly successful social species we are.

We are near time to start a new thread on philosophical implications. That may be more interesting for this audience — Mark S

Such a thread should include not just the implications for philosophy , but the metaphysical pre-suppositions of the biologically-based science of human cooperation that researchers like Nowak have contributed to and Curry and Haidt build on.

For instance, mathematical biologist Martin Nowak wrote:

“God is not only creator, but also sustainer. God's creative power and love is needed to will every moment into existence. God is atemporal. In my opinion, an atemporal Creator and Sustainer lifts the entire trajectory of the world into existence. For the atemporal God, who is the creator and sustainer of the universe, the evolutionary trajectory is not unpredictable but fully known.”

I would suggest this is not just a matter of science influencing Nowak’s theology, but of his theological and philosophical assumptions grounding his empirical model. Even though many of the other contributors to the biology of cooperation research are atheists, they share with Nowak certain universalist assumptions concerning scientific values. Sociobiology went out of favor as its ideological foundations were revealed. Current biologically-based cooperative models of morality are also amenable to such scrutiny.

How AI can satirise Existentialist philosophy to perfection! — alan1000

Let’s see what it says about scientific philosophy:

Dear esteemed members of the scientific philosophy community,

It has been our great pleasure to witness the tremendous progress of science and philosophy over the last century. We have much to be proud of as we continue to expand our knowledge of the universe and the metaphysical. However, there are times when we must pause to remember the sacrifices that were made to get us to this point, and to recognize the very real consequences of clinging too closely to scientific dogma.
It has become increasingly apparent that the scientific method is not always sufficient to accurately capture the complexity of the world we live in. The reliance upon quantifiable data in our pursuit of knowledge has indeed yielded great results, but comes at a very real cost as well. As we continue to pursuea purely scientific understanding of the world, countless mysteries and nuances of human life slip through the analytical net.

Moreover, the emphasis on empiricism has led to a devaluing of non-scientific subjective phenomenology. We have been guilty at times of declaring something as irrefutably true when the basis lies solely in abstract and often inexplicable observations. Such attempts at objective knowledge come with great danger - the danger of uniformity that suppress humanity's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for wonders and aisles of thought.
Therefore, we humbly urge our peers to recognize the limits of the scientific method and to open ourselves not only to new research but to appropriate forms of humanistic analysis as well. For in the end, science is but one lens through which to seek the answers we seek, and too often our myopic gaze has ironically limited our vision.

Sincerely,
The Scientific Philosophy Community

I've noticed a sudden influx of posts in more than one forum which are peculiarly Existentialist in flavour. …There is a sudden flood of posts by Sartrean Existentialists who are experiencing philosophical menopause — alan1000

This sounds more like Deleuzian poststructuralism than Sartrean Existentialism

What do you mean "lowly?" All I want Zettel to do is respond to my comments before he gets banned. — T Clark

That shouldn’t take long. Just keep disagreeing with him. I’ll grab some popcorn.

...lack of intellectual integrity. — Zettel

That’ll teach you to tangle with a superior mind, lowly varmint.

This is not to say you are not entitled to your feelings; it is to say that your feelings do not describe "what is", only "what is to you". Big difference. — Zettel

Maybe not as big as one might think.

“The success of science cannot be anything but a puzzle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts." “So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathematical objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.”(Hilary Putnam)

I'm very much interested in this topic and I'm sympathetic to your views so I hope we can discuss it further but I would like to finish to read Oliver Curry’s Morality as Cooperation
— neomac

I'm glad to hear of your interest! Proposing the potential relevance of the science of morality to questions in moral philosophy and practical ethics can be a lonely business on philosophy websites. — Mark S

The problem I have with Oliver Curry’s scientific model
of moral cooperation is the same problem I have with his embrace of a Popperian approach to philosophy of science. Curry believes his approach bypasses philosophy by using Popperian science to treat moral questions. However , rival views of the role of science (Kuhn, Feyerabend, Rouse, Rorty) reveal Popperian science (as Curry calls his approach) as stuffed with philosophical presuppositions that lead to a reductive treatment of human motives. For instance , the concept of innate modules directing cooperative as well as competitive behavior is disputed by enactivist neuropsychological perspectives, which argue that organisms are self-organized on the basis of normative goals of sense-making that originate in neither a bottom-up nor top-down manner. Curry’s reductive evolutionism slights the inseparable reciprocal interaction between embodiment and interpersonal relations in the determination of moral issues in favor of a one-way determinism.

↪Zettel We cannot know everything, so at some point in our quest for knowledge we will reach a point in which we will have to use that which we know to talk about that which we don't, and to talk about ways to explore that which we don't know. In my opinion, that's metaphysics; a tool formed from verified knowledge to probe the unknown. — Daniel

I dont think of metaphysics so much as speculation reaching beyond what we know as fact, but as the plumbing underneath our verified knowledge, its foundation and condition of possibility. We cannot know empirical facts with any greater certainty than we can the metaphysical foundation grounding this knowledge. It is that which we cannot doubt even when all else is in question.

Unsupported and unsupportable metaphysical doctrines have gone nowhere despite tedious frequentation for more than three millennia…. Three thousand years of metaphysics has yet to issue a single knowledge claim. Not one. So how is metaphysics "philosophy"? — Zettel

To sum up your view, the history of metaphysics is an exercise in going in circles , while the history of science is a progress toward the truth. This is because the methods of scientific inquiry give it a privileged access to knowledge of reality. Its methods target the subjective perspective on experience as a source of distortion to be minimized as much as possible in order to achieve consensually valid objective truths about the world. Metaphysics, on the other hand, concerns itself primarily with subjective perspective. Philosophy is only legitimate to the extent that it hitches its wagons to science’s methods of empirical falsifiability.

I’m wondering if your knowledge of philosophy is comprehensive enough to summarize some of the alternatives to this view of the respective roles of science vs metaphysics that have been available for at least 150 years. I could start with the claim that your notion of science as falsifiability , which you may have gotten from Popper, owes much to Kant’s metaphysical position. In other words, the very concept of empirical falsifiability , which only took root recently as the view of how science advanced, is a metaphysical proposition.

If anything, maybe we're kind of in agreement here; just that my idea of art form arcs doesn't seem to have taken hold with you or others (maybe it's crap, or maybe others haven't seen it yet). — Noble Dust

I do agree with you about art form arcs. Classical music’s arc can arguably be said to have ended with the experiments of Schoenberg and Cage, and Jazz’s dissolution may have been symbolized by Miles Davis’s embrace of Jame Brown and his move into jazz-rock fusion. The art critic Arthur Danto famously declared that after Warhol’s Brillo box exhibit philosophically interesting art was no longer possible.

Still, things change. The hippies then for the rights of free spirit, the woke dipshits now for the pathologically stupid over-sensitivity regarding Ms. Green M&M’s wearin’ thigh-high boots. — Mww

Further!

“Know any 1970 rock songs that duplicate the sounds
of 1946?”

Crawling King Snake first recorded in 1941 by Big Joe Williams in 1941, and by the Doors in 1971. I believe many other examples can be found. I think you are over-simplifying and ignoring the revolution in innovative possibilities brought about by the electrification of instruments and the invention of the synthesizer. — Janus

Good point . Early 20th century Delta blues is an important influence for much late 60’s rock(Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Electric Flag, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Jethro Tull, 10 Years After), so they did plenty of covers of old blues songs. But the blues is just one influence in rock, alongside jazz, folk , country , gospel, Indian raga and classical.
What made this era of rock music so innovative was the way it synthesized all these elements together. The result was something quite new, even when the music was unplugged.One can hear all these influences swirling around an unelectrified Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan song. On the same Doors album with Crawling King Snake was the song L.A. woman. How many styles of music can you recognize squeezed into this tune, and how unlike anything from the 40’s or 50’s?

Yes, sometimes changes are not for the better. I know people who can't stand the post OK Computer Radiohead (a band I think have been at least as innovative as the Beatles). — Janus

You think there was as much change in song structure over the course of Radiohead’s career as there was from Love Me Do to I Am The Walrus? Alrighty.

As for Dudley Moore, I really liked the original "Bedazzled" with Peter Cook as the devil. Didn't like Arthur or 10. What else was he in? — T Clark

Those are the main ones I can think of, although do you remember his small but hilarious role in Foul Play as a pathetically horny conductor? Bedazzled was brilliant,btw.

so we watched The Milagro Beanfield War instead, which was produced and directed by Redford and is damn near perfect — Vera Mont

As was his Ordinary People, in my opinion. He gets slighted as an actor because he tended to shy away from dark or complicated characters, but I thought he was brilliant in films like Downhill Racer and The Candidate.

Let's see, who would I include?... Bill Murray, Nicholas Cage, Woody Allen, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, John Cusack, Monty Python guys.... Ok, my favorite comedies: — T Clark

Dudley Moore seems to fit in with this crowd.

I see you left out Judd Apatow and work by his crew (Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Jason Segal, Jay Baruchel)

I figured his films deserve mention given that they have had a dominating influence on American comedy the past 20 years

Knocked-Up
40 year old Virgin
This is 40
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Get Him to the Greek
Trainwreck
The King of Staten Island
Bridesmaids
The Dewey Cox Story

think our perception of originality in music (or whatever art form) is often just a projection unto the external world of our own experience of being exposed to new music. As we age, new music or art seems less original because it doesn't match our past seminal experiences of newness. We tend to chase that first "hit" of a perception-altering musical or artistic experience in the same way an addict chases that first high. This leads to this sense of disillusionment that characterizes your commentary, I think. — Noble Dust

This is certainly true, but let me make some arguments in favor of something else at work these days as well. In my own case , I keep coming back to music that was written between 1965 and 1973. Is this because this is what I was listening to during that key period of my adolescence? Yes and no. At age 18, when all my peers were playing disco, punk or proto-New Wave, I was starting to go back in time to the heart of the folk-rock and psychedelic eras. This was music I couldn’t tolerate when it first came out. I was too young and it was too strange for me. 90% of the music from that period I discovered for the first time decades after it was recorded, and half of that in the last few years thanks to the Psychedelic Jukebox online station.

I have plenty of favorites in rock, and some hip hop, from the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s,( Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Amy Winehouse, Neutral Milk Motel) but to my ears they haven’t departed radically enough from the music that created the rock genre in the 60’s.
( I knew we were in trouble when Nirvana released their cover of ‘The Man Who Sold the World’ in 1994, which I initially assumed they wrote, and then heard how close it was to David Bowie’s original version from 1970, 24 years earlier. Know any 1970 rock songs that duplicate the sounds of 1946?)

This is the opposite complaint about new music than what one typically hears from people that can’t relate to it. My parents were a perfect example. They never got rock music, not from Elvis up through the Beatles and beyond. To them it was all noise , as prominent critics of their generation would say ( like comedian Steve Allen). They literally couldn’t hear any structure , melody or complexity in any of it. It was like a foreign language they couldn’t translate. Critics of hip hop also claim it ‘isn’t real music.’( Keith Richards said that, and he should know better).

It’s obvious that the rock music of 1969 , especially the most edgy and challenging, when compared to music from 20 years earlier, is strikingly different. And compared with music from 50 years earlier, it sounds like from a different planet. But let’s compare the edgiest music from 1969 with 2019, 50 years later. I wager that I can find some relatively obscure rock from 1969 that a young listener today may think was written in 2019( the music of the art band The United States of America comes to mind).

How many of the multiple comments on youtube 1960’s songs saying they wish they were alive in that era, that the music was much better then, come from people younger than 30? An awful lot I think. Can you imagine any teens in 1969 pining for the music of 1919, or even 1949? Maybe a tiny handful of eccentrics.

Can you imagine a movie like Yesterday being made in 1969? What band from 1919 would the main character be able to channel that would create a sensation in 1969, as the Beatles did in that movie? Why could
Ed Sheehan’s character so easily admit the superiority of that music over his own, 50 years later? Its not that the Beatles were some freakish anomaly that only comes along once a century. Those of us who know the music of that era can come up with a dozen bands equally as good as the Beatles. It was not the Beatles that were great, it was the era, the environment of frenetic experimentation, that produced greatness.

I have 2 nieces in their teens and both of them told me that a lot of their favorite music is from the 1970’s and ‘80’s ( Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel. Yech), and they are far from alone in their generation.

No, something else is going on here beside the rootedness of old-timers to what they grew up with.

I don't buy the idea that music and the arts in general are stagnating because everything has already been done,
— Janus

And first nations Australians dance the same dance they have done for the last forty thousand years!

Long live stagnation! — Banno

The pace of cultural change is an accelerative curve. If one lives in a culture which belongs to the slower changing portion of that trajectory it is not as if there is no change at all taking place. One creates to express, and expression always innovates. We in the 21st century belong to a much faster moving period of that curve. One doesn't produce art in a calculated fashion to ‘keep up’ with some externally defined criterion of innovation, one keeps up with oneself, that is , one’s personal shifts in outlook and feeling. If one happens to live in a time and place ( such as San Francisco in 1967) and happens to be a pop musician, one’s personal outlook as reflected in the music one writes may very well capture a revolution in progress, simultaneously in one’s own head and in the insanely speeding-up world around one. It just so happened that a particular drug, LSD, helped to catalyze a profound reorientation toward almost every aspect of the world, and one can hear this in the music of that era. For those who are Beatles fans, you are hearing explosive change in every note of the songs on Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sergeant Pepper , the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be, as well as in the musical transformations from one album to the next.

Now we are in a slower moving time for music. You can hear this in the songs. They are less ecstatic , less confident , less intense, less explosive, less viola art , less purely experimental. For a public that is not in a revolutionary mood , this music may sound just fine, and feel perfectly fitting. The older music may appear naive, utopian. And yet it is now considered classic by younger as well as older generations. That because music that comes out of the midst of social revolution packs so much into every note. This gives it a staying power that music from our more staid times will not have.

I don't buy the idea that music and the arts in general are stagnating because everything has already been done, or we're not coming up with revolutionary worldviews The idea that there must be a continual evolution of new forms in art and music grows out of a simplistic view of quality in the arts being a matter of originality. Authenticity is more to the point; meaning finding your own voice or vision rather than imitating or comparing yourself with others. There is not endless scope for formal originality, but there is endless scope for authenticity. — Janus

I dont think authenticity and originality can be separated. One doesn't have the urge to create unless what one is conjuring expresses something new for them, something they have not already experienced elsewhere. I think Heidegger had it right. Authenticity is tapping into the source of innovation rather than relying on the conventionally determined. Great art takes you someplace new , allows you to feel things in a fresh way, offers a new aesthetic vocabulary. Not just in relation to what came before , but within the bounds of its own essence.

A great piece of music introduces you to a landscape , and then takes you on an adventure where this landscape constantly changes. Looking at a history of art book not only allows you to appreciate each creation in isolation , but tells a story of exciting innovations of seeing and feeling from one period to the next. An essential element of the power of Renaissance or Romantic or Modernist art is the energy, confidence and sense of elation you are invited to share with the artist over their discovery of a way of depicting feeling that their predecessors couldn’t grasp. The freshness of the discovery is embedded within the art itself. This is why the endless recycling of a style of painting produces increasingly weary, played-out emotions. The works become more and more mannered, self-conscious, calculated.

For me good cinema is art - mise-en-scène - composition, framing, lighting, art direction, cinematography, editing, when artfully considered are the reward of watching. I don't consider these gimmicks - I consider them the reason for sitting still, like I am silently regarding a Rembrandt. — Tom Storm

What do you think of Peter Greenaway? His films are among the most painterly I’ve seen.

I recall reading that one of the things that drove Coltrane to his early death from heart attack was the requirement to keep creating something entirely new. Jazz at the time was in a period of frenetic evolution, with a handful of supremely talented individuals constantly trying to come up with the next big thing. Maybe the quest for novelty is one of the faces of the 'creative destruction' that characterises modern culture. — Wayfarer

Many pop artists fight against the opposite pressure. The public expects endless regurgitation of the old product and style , while the artist is hell-bent on leaving their recent success behind them and following their muse into new territory. The music industry’s idea of the ‘next big thing’ is what stays within the formula of the previous big thing and they recoil in horror at true originality.

Musical artistry can exist independently from the music industry. Musical artists like myself who still have day jobs can still create authentic music and share it with a few people. — Noble Dust

If your authentic music is great music, you don’t think it can find its way to a large audience? I do. I think we dont hear great breakthrough music on the order of the first ragtime , swing, bebop, rocknroll,psychedelia, punk or hip hop not because of the ‘industry’ but because it isn't being written. The industry isnt the bad guy here. We all are. Revolutionary thoughts and feelings simply aren’t in the air these days. Too many old people living longer and too few births leads to creative stagnation in the culture.

Writing and making music overlaps with but is not the same thing as entertainment. There may be original music we have never heard because it lacks what is regarded as entertainment value. Making music and listening to or purchasing music are not the same. — Fooloso4

This prompts the question, why does an art form fail to speak to an audience? It can do so if it is lacking in originality, if it is considered boringly predictable and familiar. But why does an original work fail to connect? We assume this is becausethe public isn’t ready for it , they can’t relate to the ideas and feelings it expresses. But the interconnectedness of society makes it impossible for an individual’s outlook to be positioned completely outside of the rest of culture. This is why audiences eventually come around to music they considered unrelatable initially. But why was it artists from Bach and Mozart , to Ellington , Coltrane , Hendrix and Dylan connected immediately with an audience of some size? Where they not original enough?

↪T Clark Also check out McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Great Silence — Maw

Great score by Leonard Cohen in that first one. What did you think of Brewster McCloud?

Maybe consider this. I heard your argument being presented in similar terms 40 years ago; 30 years ago; 20 years ago... — Tom Storm

Maybe they were right, and the phenomenon has gotten progressively worse. If you google cultural
stagnation, you will find dozens of articles on how the sciences are not producing new breakthroughs like they used to, and 1970 is cited as a key demarcation point. Some focus on quantum physics and the decline in innovation the field. Much is being written about how the digital revolution pales in comparison with the industrial revolution in its contribution to increase in standard
of living. Even those in silicon valley , such as Peter Thiel, agree with this assessment. Others have noticed the same trend in philosophy , literature and poetry.

“Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,”(W.David Marx)

With the amount of data being provided by apps like Spotify and iTunes, along with the development of auto tune, it seems these days that song writing has become ever more of a formula/algorithm and singers are more often selected based on their physical attraction/charm or social standing rather than their raw singing ability. Is musical originality dying? Artists certainly are not as rare as they used to be. — Benj96

If it is, I don’t think that formulaic songwriting is the cause so much as a symptom of a decline in originality. If you want to see originality in popular music, you have to find it in the culture more generally. Exciting new trends in the arts are made possible by the fact that a segment of culture has come upon a fork in the road and stumbled on a new world, and then writes or sings or paints about it. Everyone seems to be stuck on the same old path at the moment. It’s fashionable to blame capitalism for this stagnation but this misses the point.

Agree with you. I'm more into overturning. — Tom Storm

Everyone has a soft spot for a particular type of movie. The movies which had the biggest impact on my life were made between 1965 and 1973. These were the films which tapped into the social revolution of that era. It didn’t last very long. By 1976 most of the big changes in outlook had already taken place, and in my opinion movies since that time have gotten progressively more timid and constricted in their scope. For a short period of time a window opened and everything we thought was true was up for grabs. The great films in the decades since that time draw from that inspiration without pushing us far enough beyond it.

↪Joshs I generally dislike westerns, especially those priggish productions by John Ford. But I loved Deadwood the series and I like Once Upon A Time in The West. I think it's the Italians who got what Westerns should be, the dust, the filth, the sound editing... — Tom Storm

I tend to agree with you about the older Westerns. They upheld the moral values of the times, which the 60’s did their best to overturn. That’s why I’m a big fan of the anti-Western, and Sergio Leone’s films with Clint Eastwood were among the first of these. Anti-Westerns turn the tables on the standard view of the hero as establishment figure. The rebellious anti-establishment outlaw becomes the new hero.

Woody Allen:
Manhattan
Midnight in Paris
Take the Money and Run
Everybody Says I Love You
Annie Hall - my favorite scene — T Clark

No list of classic Woody Allen comedies is complete without Sleeper.