Of Philosophy, Love, and E. Y. Harburg

Abstract

When the idle poor become the idle rich"; or, social theory and poetry on the musical stage.I have marveled all my life at the talent for vast communication-not the talent that swells and fattens upon devices, but the talent that, having mastery over devices, says what it has to say and commands listening. Plato does this wonderfully well. Although he speaks mistrustfully of the irrational within us, he in fact writes very boldly and even gaily from his own unconscious mind. He is often "iddy" and sometimes sexy, and he constantly felt what Jowett translates as "the flutter and ecistasy of creation." Hence I infer that Plato is saying to us, from the start, " I am a man; it's a man you hear speaking to you; it's a man's writing you now read." And so, when that man begins soaring, as he so often does-rising in flight toward the eternal objects like cosmonauts among the stars-the rest of us feel the same lift and buoyancy.Communication begins, then, with a real presence. But this real self, speaking, wants to say things to other people-perhaps to very many people-in such a way that they can recognize his meaning and feel the thing as he feels it. When a philosophier attempts this, he has a fairly easy time with other philosophers, who have agreed upon a jargon that will admit ideas but not disturbances. Brit sriplpose he wants to talk to everybody; what then?Well, he will feel burdened by the kind of message he characteristically uses. He works in the area of largest generalizations. Generalizations are hard on the intellect, and it is supposed that messages about them won't reach common folk. This notion is plainly false, because people generalize all the time and could not survive if they didn't. Moreover, generalizations (or opportunities for them) are presented to all of 11s in just the same way: they are imbedded, alive, and calling out for recognition, in immediate, particular, and visible fact. Therefore the Barrows Dunham is a philosopher and author. His most recent books are Heroes and Heretics and Ethics Dead und Ai'ive. 69

TERRESTRIAL, HABITABLE-ZONE EXOPLANET FREQUENCY FROMKEPLER

“…Active stars have random brightness fluctuations on time scales that include transit times, adding noise to the photometric signal, reducing the likelihood of detecting a planet, especially a small one. The Kepler team finds that giant stars have significantly more noise than dwarf stars (Christiansen, 2011), and that even dwarf stars have about 30% greater photometric noise than expected on the basis of previous observations of the Sun (Dunham et al, 2011;Gilliland et al 2011). The result is that small planets are less likely to be found around active stars.…”