Steven Parmenius

I have been talking to my class about the golden record flying through space aboard the Voyager satellite. It contains, as is well known, the greatest musical hits of humanity. This was the project undertaken by the hard bitten man of science Carl Sagan in what actually amounts to an astounding act of blind faith. What the disc contains is signs, visual and aural signs, and the act of faith involves the conviction, perhaps an utterly groundless conviction, that the alien receivers can construct a context in which these signs can signify. Let’s take the song ‘Dark was the Night Cold was the Ground’ recorded in the 1920’s by the American gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson. This consists of sonic information. Notes on the guitar and slow, melodic moaning. Minimally our putative aliens would have to sense sounds rather than, say, chemical information or, like a shark, minute changes in the pressure of a medium. Music is addressed to one particular human sense though sound DOES make vibrati

  I know philosophers and scientists who don’t like history and historians who are more than a bit suspicious of philosophers. Some of this, perhaps much of this, has to do with an attitude prominent in the last century and not dead in ours: the notion that philosophers are the handmaids of science rather (in fact exactly!) as they once were the handmaids of theology. Philosophy is on the side of science and scientific discourse has a certain way of framing things. As Lyotard says, it is (for most of its direct practitioners at least) a denotative language game and a denotative language game is referential and realist. A realist and referential language game is framed in terms of necessity. If Darwin had not discovered natural selection someone else would have because it is there to be discovered. It can be read (indeed MUST be read) directly from nature for nature has an underlying structure that is fixed and determinate. Do species evolve by natural selection? Yes because, if we ask