Soutine and more on week 1 Moral Philosophy (second article)

Soutine's at Courtauld Gallery

The other day I had a couple of hours in which I decided to take a look at the soon to temporarily close Courtauld Gallery (for around 2 years starting this Autumn).

My  quick whizz included  the Soutine exhibition - the works on show are portraits of Hotel staff and looking at these I felt that what was on show was the Paris of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris.

Soutine was apparently a mate of the louche Modigliani (famously Amedeo painted Soutine’s portrait on a door!) – for me it was a nice exhibition, not too extensive and an artist I’d not taken much note of before.

There was something about the works of Soutine that made me think of Francis Bacon - subsequently I see that Bacon was indeed a 'fan' of Soutine.

Boats on The Seine (1877)

Also while at the Courtauld I took some time to appreciate another figure new to me Pierre Bonnard- like the River Seine in Paris (1922) and Two Oxen by him


And talking of the Seine great too to see some of Alfred Sisley's paintings including Boats on The Seine (shown here- left).

Moral Philosophy second article

And back to my 'homework from Week 1 of Moral Philosophy  second part looking at an article entitled -

A Philosophy Tool Kit  it's by the Australian philosopher called Alan Hájek - (there's an audio version you can listen to there as well).

The idea here is that Hájek is supplying us with some tricks to make the study of Philosophy a little easier -

Here are some notes from my reading/listening..

1) The (as in definite description)  is an important word - implying a value to the phrase that follows such as Doing The Right Thing ..

2) A claim that makes a wide range of cases 

use extreme cases e.g. biggest or smallest  - The Big Bang is given as an extreme case