Sister Aimee's own image — flamboyant, brave, brassy, neurotically fragile — defied contemporary attempts to pin it down.
The podcast also manages to circumvent the outdated tropes of mid-century music appreciation upon which many contemporary attempts to explain classical music still rely — that pedantic tendency to rehash the style of Leonard Bernstein's lectures, but generally without his complexity or charisma.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.
Here we just note that traditional and contemporary attempts to assess the efficacy of mental states have run up against philosophical difficulties as well, difficulties that tend to overshadow the experimental evidence accumulated thus far.
There are contemporary attempts to analyze supererogation in terms of virtue (Kawal 2009), but they seem to fall into circularity: if the supererogatory is defined as what the (idealized) perfectly virtuous person would judge to be so, we still have to decide, independently of a theory of supererogation, who this ideal moral agent is.
It is possible that the Byzantine flavour to these images was also connected with contemporary attempts through diplomacy to achieve reconciliation with the Greek Orthodox Church, in which van Eyck's patron Philip the Good took a keen interest.
But for anyone who has been following Austrian politics in a post-war context, this film was one of the first contemporary attempts in the mainstream Hollywood media to confront the fact that Vienna's dark Nazi past still affects people's lives today.
Reviewer's comments: This article presents some interesting suggestions as to the chief ingredients of contemporary attempts to tell the history of life on earth - natural selection, symbiogenesis and plate tectonics - but it fails miserably as a piece of intellectual history.
Depleting opera audiences have more and more contemporaries attempting to connect to new viewers by adapting already established stories or creating pieces out of historical events, like Nixon in China.
As we'll see below, contemporary compatibilists attempt to speak to this issue.
