For the 74th session of the Philosophical Foundations of Law and Finance (Friday, April 15 · 6:00pm - 8:00pm, Room 5.16, 309 Regent street, London, United Kingdom) we will continue to read Homer’s Iliad [available at http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/homer/html/application.html] and apply a rather interesting theory by Kevin Dutton who’s written a book entitled, “Flipnosis, The Art of Split-Second Persuasion”(2010). The book is in some way a scientific continuation of unfair arguments catalogue by Aristotle in his Art of Rhetoric.
The idea of flipnosis is that there are certain forms of persuasion that are so instantaneous that they appeared to be hard-wired into our biological system of being. These might be thought of “one-liners” that change our perception of the world, and with it, our immediate relationship to the world such that we act in a way that is completely different to the way in which we would have expected.
If one were to ask how many times per day you are being bombarded with “flipnotic” arguments, ads and purposive persuasion, what would the answer be? The average answer is 30 to 40. But the actual number is closer to 400 times per day. It happens so often that we have become habituated to it.
As part of our close reading of the Iliad, which is a poetic description of battling wits, gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines, we look for instances for flipnosis. Does flipnosis occur in the Iliad? Of course, but where precisely and how, is what we wish to catalogue. We see how it operates to protect the forsaken and change the course of war.
Afterwards, we will submit to the charms of the Galleria at 17 New Cavendish St, Marylebone, W1G 9.
See you soon,
Joe & Rezi
