Steven Parmenius

                  Protestants  and atheists (with a smattering of Thomists) do this thing called analytic philosophy of religion in which I have very little interest. It is rigorously discursive, highly formalized and, as far as I can tell, utterly a-historical. As a historicist, then, it does not get to first base philosophically, at least where I am concerned. There are those with a taste for such things but I, alas, am not one of them. Nor will I EVER be one of them. That said, I do recall one bit of discussion generated by Plantinga et.al. and that concerned the Great Pumpkin from the Peanuts cartoon strip. Plantinga held that certain beliefs could be ‘properly basic’. A properly basic belief might be a belief in something like the principle of induction: i.e. that we can generalize from experience. Notoriously, post-Hume, there is no agreed on ‘proof’ of the principle of induction which does not presuppose the principle of induction. Induction cannot be induced from experience be

  Right now I am listening to Piano and String Quartet by American composer Morton Feldman. It is well over an hour which is actually short by the standards of his later works, some of which extend to Wagnerian length. We are used to thinking about music as, at very least, some kind of event. By this I mean an exciting, interesting, diverting, consoling event. This event is embodied in certain patterns. One of these is melody. Alas, there is almost nothing in the Piano Quintet that could be called a melody even in the most basic sense of that word. Well, we also like rich satisfying harmonies, at least if we are of European extraction. There are only the barest outlines of harmony in this piece. There is a pulse, I suppose, though it is not the kind of pulse we could consider a discernible rhythm. There is nothing to hum here and nothing to dance or even move to. A composer of the last century would expect complex and innovative musical forms using advanced compositional techniques. Fe