Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats -… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Popper and Nabokov are very different people in some ways - and I'm ready to devote large chunks of my life to both of them. Popper didn't think much of words but thought ideas mattered, and Nabokov didn't think much of ideas, but words mattered, and so on. But both of them had a sense that this is a world… — Brian Boyd Copy Share
Any artist who really engages with the problems in their medium at that moment and tries to deepen the problems is likely to discover… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
There's a young Danish guy who has done a lot of work from an evolutionary perspective, Mathias Clasen. Basically, his argument is we've evolved to fear the monstrous, to be very wary of large, unknown, life-threatening forces. In art, we can play with these things in ways that allow us to feel the intensity of the horror, but in "safe… — Brian Boyd Copy Share
I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Everything is humanities. The sciences are a form of the humanities. They involve traditions of inquiry; they involve social engagement with ideas. They do… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
Scientists, to give them credit, do not think of the humanities in a negative way. It's the bureaucrats who want to cut costs who… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
“Writing of Pushkin, Nabokov once observed quite accurately that his subject was the threefold formula of human life: the irretrievability of the past, the… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
I would be very surprised if on another planet we discovered a species as intelligent as humans that didn't have narrative, or didn't have… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
It seems to me to make as much sense to talk about literature as a large-scale human phenomenon without bringing in evolution as it… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
If an artwork never gets any attention from anybody, then obviously it's got problems. If it gains attention from a very small elite, then… — Brian Boyd Copy Share Image
