by Charles Siegel

Last week the Supreme Court temporarily restored access to mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in combination to terminate pregnancy. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the most conservative circuit court of appeals in the country, had halted shipments of mifepristone while weighing a suit by the state of Louisiana. For now, at least, shipments will resume while the case proceeds in the Fifth Circuit, and possibly in the Supreme Court as well.

The case is another in the endless series of battles over abortion access that have played out in the years since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. The point of Dobbs, as Justice Alito so solemnly intoned, was to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But that is not what the implacable foes of women’s reproductive rights want at all.

In the four years since Dobbs, they have tried, in every way imaginable, to subvert the will of the people. They have poured billions of dollars worth of lobbying and litigation into this effort, and will never stop.

Take Missouri, for example. Two years after Dobbs, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution, enshrining the right to abortion. Yet Republican legislators immediately sued to invalidate it, and have sought to place a contradictory referendum on the ballot soon too. Similar fights have occurred in Kansas, Arizona and elsewhere.

And they’re not content with trying to undo the actual votes of the people in state after state. Read more »

by William Benzon

The term was coined by interior designer David Hicks back in the 1960s, but I didn’t know that when I coined the term earlier this year.

I’ve been taking photos of my meals for several years now. Every now and then I’d sit the camera on the table and take a shot. The shot below appears to be my oldest tablescape. It’s from Hoboken’s Malibu Diner back in July of 2029.

It’s a straightforward shot of a cup of coffee, though obviously the coffee is not visible from this angle. You can see the shadows of the coffee saucer, the cup’s handle, and a spoon cast on the tabletop by the overhead lighting, some light glinting off the cup, and some very faint coffee stains a bit left of center. To the right you can see a booth next to a window and, through the window, some building. Light from the window reflects off the tabletop to the right of the cup. By the nature of the shot, the tabletop itself tends to play a big role in such shots, as does the ground in landscapes.

As for David Hicks, and his meaning for the term, as I said, he’s an interior designer. He coined the term to characterize the selection of objects for, and arrangement on a table in a decorative way. That is, his usage refers to the table and the objects on it. In contrast, my usage refers to a photograph taken from a certain vantage point. The act of coining the term signaled my intention to explore tablescapes in a systematic way.

Given that I am by inclination a street photographer I have little interest in tabletops composed for their visual appeal. I take my tabletops like a find them. In the rough, and in front of me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rafaël Newman

Amid the present surfeit of geopolitical obscenities, one incident is distinguished—by the absurdity of its moral aesthetics. On April 20 this year, the New York Times reported that the Israeli military was investigating an IDF soldier who had allegedly sledgehammered a statue of the crucified Jesus in a village in southern Lebanon. Local Lebanese authorities and Christians in Israel expressed their dismay; the Israeli army condemned the soldier’s actions as “wholly inconsistent with the values expected of its troops” and noted that it was assisting the affected community with the restoration of the statue; and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender.”

Setting aside for a moment the grotesquery of solemn protests at vandalism perpetrated on a depiction of the putative son of God while the IDF has been murdering with impunity actual children of God in Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran, the soldier’s alleged actions might be considered under two opposed aspects. One could understand, even empathize with his (presumed) rage at the image of a suffering Jew serving as the central symbol of a religion whose central tenets are love and forgiveness. At the same time, however, it seems that the soldier will have thus misunderstood the more crucial (and more sinister) theological message of the crucifixion, which is that human sacrifice is not to be renounced, as promulgated by the Old Testament parable of the Binding of Isaac and by the consequent Jewish rejection of Christ as the Messiah, but rather that such sacrifice may, in fact, be necessary for redemption: and that such a message is one of profound and important significance for Israel’s current campaigns in the territories that surround it, where the lives of civilians are being treated as necessary collateral damage in the pursuit of Israel’s (and, as it happens, Netanyahu’s own) larger aims. And that it thus serves as a ready justification of that same soldier’s other, more lethal actions in Lebanon.

As for the Israeli administration’s severe condemnation of the soldier’s alleged action, that likely has a different, more cynical motivation: namely, the fear of offending, and thus alienating, the vital American lobby of Christian Zionists. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

“When asked about a ‘major cyberattack’ from China, the president shrugged with indifference. ‘It is what it is.’ … Three days earlier, the president described China’s support for Iran as just ‘one of those things’” —Steve Brown

A year after coming out with Nihilism and Technology, Nolen Gertz wrote just plain Nihilism (2019), an “examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters.” It’s a really short book, but it took a while to wade through it all. Here it all is even more briefly assembled to highlight the salient points. 

We typically think of nihilism as very simply meaning, “we believe in nothing” (4), but he takes us through Western philosophy to get to a view that, “Nihilism is about evading reality rather than confronting it, about believing in other worlds rather than accepting this one, and about trying to make ourselves feel powerful rather than admitting our own weaknesses” (73).

THE HISTORY OF NIHILISM

Gertz explains the trajectory along lines similar to the move from pre-modernism to meta-modernism. We once trusted God, then flipped that trust on to science; then we questioned the possibility of knowing anything at all, and now we’re just starting to recognize the need for a few core Truths. Gertz goes back further to Socrates’ provocation to question everything: “From a Socratic perspective, nihilism can be overcome by enlightenment. From a Cartesian perspective, nihilism can be overcome by self-restraint. But from a Humean perspective, nihilism cannot be overcome. It is simply a product of human psychology” (28).

Then he gets to Kant who shifts us from the idea that we can’t know things to the idea that our values are contrary to genuine freedom. Freedom means obeying the self, and, since our desires aren’t within our control (we discover our tastes rather than choose them), our desires aren’t within our freedom but are “forced upon us.” So, true freedom (and morality) can only be understood as obedience to reason. 

Then Nietzsche argued that there isn’t one universal morality, but “the end result of a war between rival moralities” (41), and the morality of the Christian church was against life itself. We’ve been conditioned to renounce strength in favour of group safety, but “repressing an instinct is not the same as removing that instinct . . . Since it was ‘immoral’ to be cruel to others, members of society could only maintain their morality by redirecting their cruelty at themselves. This self-cruelty is what became known as ‘guilt’” (46).

What’s all this got to do with nihilism? Read more »

David Hammons. Untitled, Ca. 1990.

Metal coat rack, rubber, plastic bags, tin can and found hat

More here and here.

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by Michael Liss

Eight years ago, in May of 2018, motivated by a series of discussions with my then-graduating son, I wrote a piece for 3 Quarks Daily titled “The Graduate Schools His Father.”

Then, chaos descended upon the land. Trump, Biden, Trump. Wars, pestilence, theological disputes, DOGE, gigantic icebergs of cash floating away from the mother ship. Economic upheavals, mass firings/ritual sacrifices of entire Departments, even the slaying of the first-born East Wing (it’s being replaced, you might have heard).

Also, Deals, many Deals. So many, you will lose count of them (that’s by design, by the way). Just this past week, the President has concluded his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. A veritable master class—it may be the greatest set of Deals in the history of Deal-making—a diplomatic coup eclipsing the Congress of Vienna.

Eight years is a long time for a fire-alarm to go off, especially when it is the 24/7 model with the flashing kaleidoscopic lights. Yet, especially if you are a parent, the time goes by in an instant, and suddenly they are adults.

I decided to revisit what I had written in May of 2018 and what he had said. How much did the world change in eight years, and how did the country react to it? I armed myself with numbers from a recent CNN-SSRS poll that contained current results along with historical data.

To start with, in what world were we living, in May of 2018? Read more »

…. Ménage à trois

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by Robert Jensen

Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers markets.

Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so functional and reliable that we forget about the countless systems that undergird modern life. We turn on a faucet without wondering where the water came from and flush toilets without thinking about waste-treatment plants.

Most people probably prefer invisible infrastructure for beef production and poultry processing, but Taylor believes that the legibility of infrastructure—making systems visible and understandable—is crucial for justice and sustainability in food production.

“There is a transformative power in making infrastructure accessible, on a human scale, specific to a place,” said Taylor, an architect and a farmer. “Our goal is a food system that people can understand—what it is, how it operates, where the food is coming from. That makes it easier to see the need for real change.”

Taylor said that one problem in today’s food system is “the missing middle.” Between a globalized corporate industry on one end of the spectrum and local farmers markets on the other, there is not enough regional storage and processing infrastructure, either for small farmers who need to sell crops or for businesses that make and bake food products. Taylor wants to change that, starting close to her own backyard. Read more »

by Lei Wang

Stephen Colbert in conversation with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson:

COLBERT Which is better, to know or not to know?

TYSON To know. Of course.

COLBERT But why? Why is it always better to know?

TYSON Well, you asked for my opinion.

COLBERT Yes, that’s what Oedipus thought too.

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” Neil deGrasse Tyson once tweeted: “those who divide everybody into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.” I would like to be part of the latter, but I’m afraid my favorite pastime is putting people into elaborate boxes, including myself (4w3/INFP-T/Scorpio Rising/Earth Snake/Obliger/Heretical-Investigator Projector, etc.).

One of my favorite parlor games is called Essence, a guessing game in which one person in a friend group—the guesser—leaves the room and the rest of the people choose a person in the group the guesser has to guess. But the guesser can only ask for clues in metaphors, for example: “If this person were a body part, what body part would they be?” Or: what holiday/cuisine/piece of furniture/type of music would this person be? Members of the group throw out options until the entire group comes to a consensus (nape of the neck/bar stool/bento box) which involves some pretense and courage on the part of the person being guessed, to participate in the determining of their own essence and to potentially be indicted by what the rest of the group really thinks of them. I love this game, especially since discovering my friends don’t see me as a disposable spork, instead a long-necked spoon for stirring.

I am constantly looking for ways to systematize the world, so that I might—what, prepare? The real advantage of having a brain, the cognitive scientists tell us, is not so we can think. It’s so we can predict. There are people who want to know and people who don’t want to know, people who eat the ass end of the asparagus first and people who don’t save the best for last. I am someone who looks up the ending of any movie that seems even vaguely thriller because I can’t stand the mystery. I read the Wikipedia articles for books I’ve never read, books I plan to read, books I never even plan to read. I just want to Know What Happens. My way of procrastination is to discover yet another personality archetype, take another 100-question survey, read the associated book, find out if I am a Leaver or a Merger, Hufflepuff or Slytherin, what my sleep position says about me, what kind of dog I am (supposedly a Corgi, but I’m actually just an affectionate cat).

Writers love symbols, of course—Alexander Chee has a lovely essay on his relationship to tarot, which is his relationship to trust—but so does the rest of the world, it seems, with the boon of astrology apps. In times of uncertainty, we look to fortune-telling because everything else is unpredictable anyway, so why not? Read more »

by Jim Hanas

A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fourth might have been the trolley problem.) 

Philosophy might be understood as the articulation of all possible relations—universal/particular, whole/part, cause/effect—and while there are likely more than four, there may be fewer than we think. Look how exciting it is when a new one comes along. (At least until we discover it is an old one with a new name.) Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal was a game changer we’re still working through. Recent examples might include Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” or Nassim Taleb’s “antifragility.” These are novel functions that can be defined, discussed, tested, and installed in new philosophical systems. I would love to read a catalog of every possible such component, though I’m sure some Hegelian would tell me it is called “the Logic” and maybe I should read it. To which, fair point.

Mount Analogue, the unfinished, posthumously published novel by René Daumal—the somewhat unclassifiable French poet, pataphysician, and spiritual seeker—begins with a unique relationship that I’m not sure can be found elsewhere in fiction, philosophy, or myth.  Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Human intuition is a marvelous thing. With scant evidence, we can make assessments, judgments, and predictions that are often surprisingly close to correct. But our intuition can also lead us astray. Worse, an intuitive idea can be virtually impossible to give up, even when we know it is wrong. It is a worthwhile habit to challenge our intuition from time to time.

Mathematics is especially good at shaking the foundations of our intuition.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” ―William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Our lives consist of a finite span of time spent moving through a limited part of a three-dimensional world. Our intuition can fail when it comes to black holes, quantum physics, infinity, high-dimensional geometry, and other exotic situations. One of the formative experiences of my mathematical life was learning that there are different sizes of infinity.

And that is only the beginning. Even as an undergraduate math major, you learn about shapes that have an infinite perimeter, even though they have a finite total area. Or that the rational numbers are everywhere and nowhere on the real number line [0]. Or the Banach-Tarski paradox that says one solid ball can (theoretically!) be cut into pieces and reassembled into two solid balls just as large as the original one. Or the famous Monty Hall problem that shows our gut instinct about probabilities can’t be trusted.

As your mathematical reasoning muscles get stronger, you get better at knowing when to trust your intuition and when to trust the math. In math, what seemed impossible yesterday often becomes inevitable today. You almost get used to believing unbelievable things.

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ―Lewis Carroll

And yet, I continue to be surprised. And I didn’t have to go to infinity or to a black hole, either. This time, I was surprised by Prince Rupert’s Cube, a perfectly normal shape in our usual three dimensions. Read more »

Seven cyclists passing from Brixen into Vahrn, on a bike path behind a vineyard in South Tyrol.

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by Tim Sommers

(1) Aristophanes. This is my favorite theory about the origin and nature of romantic love. Humans were once spherical, four-armed, four-legged, two-headed beings that rolled around everywhere confidently. They were cut in half by Zeus for trying to scale Olympus and attack the gods. Love is the search for your missing half and the ache to become whole again. Notable: Aristophanes says some of us were originally composed of two women, others of two men, and still others a man and a woman. In other words, your gender is not what determines whether your other half is male or female.

(2) Socrates/Plato. At the same dinner party as Aristophanes (aka The Symposium), Socrates offered this one. Love begins with desiring one beautiful body, then that body’s beautiful soul, then beauty as an idea, and finally the very form of beauty: love becomes the desire for the eternal. He lost me at loving beauty as an idea.

(3) Ovid. Despite being the author of some of the most famous love poetry in Latin literature, Ovid abandoned the philosophy and metaphysics of love for a practical, and not at all poetic, approach in Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Love is a craft. To succeed, master the moves. In other words, he wrote the first instruction manual for pick-up artists in recorded history. His advice? Take her to a gladiator match or a chariot race. Ask her who is fighting or riding. Pretend to care about her answer. If her dress drags at all, pick it up “for her” and get a good look at her ankles. Strategically brush a real, or imaginary, speck from her dress. Press against her whenever the crowd surges — whether you really must or not. Master stroke? Press against her at the height of the excitement in the ring and she will confuse her excitement at the gladiators (or chariot race) for excitement towards you. Apparently, there is empirical support for this move in contemporary social psychology. It’s called misattribution. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

Read below or listen here:

In this interview, Angie Pepper and Richard Healey discuss their arguments for adopting an abolitionist approach to animal rights, focusing on a recent article in which they argue that the political and social power we wield over animals kept as pets is illegitimate.

In their article (linked below), Angie and Rich argue that pets have three moral complaints against the relations of power to which they are subject. First, they argue that our power over pets disrespects their moral independence: the fact that non-human animals are not simply available to be used to serve the interests or projects of others. Second, our power over pets systematically sets back their interests in exercising control over their own body, actions, and environment. Third, in subjecting pets to asymmetric relations of power in which they are heavily dependent on humans for the satisfaction of their interests, we subject them to objectionable risks of harm. Angie and Rich argue that, taken together, these complaints support the claim that the power relations central to the institution of pet keeping are illegitimate. Therefore, they conclude, we have a strong moral reason to abolish this institution.

In the interview we discussed how their thinking has been developing since writing the article, political and philosophical challenges to abolitionism, and what more just relations with animals might look like. To read their arguments in more detail, and in their own words, see their recent paper “Pets, Power & Legitimacy” here:

https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/phimp/article/id/6219/

To read more of their work, see here:

https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/angie-pepper/publications/
https://richardhealeyphilosophy.wordpress.com/publications/

START OF TRANSCRIPT

MO: Welcome… Perhaps we can start by you introducing yourselves; what you do, where you’re at, and what sort of themes your work concentrates on.

RH: Up to you…

AP: Hi, my name is Angie Pepper, I am a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Roehampton. I am principally interested in questions of what we owe to non-human animals, so I’m a moral and political philosopher, but I am primarily interested in questions of justice with regard to other animals. So, thinking about how we ought to treat them, what they are entitled to, thinking about the ways in which we might be wronging them… So I guess that kind of sums me up.

RH: I am Richard Healey, I’m an assistant professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and I’m interested in all the topics that Angie just described, and often we’re working together on those questions, at least recently. I also do some work on… so, my primary work at the moment here at Aarhus is focused on informed consent, and requirements for informed consent, and we’re interested in a bunch of difficult questions around the nature of what informed consent looks like, disclosure and understanding. I guess more broadly I’m interested in, well… most of moral and political philosophy (laughs)… so, those are the things I’m working on at the moment, but yeah, I have fairly broad interests. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Christopher Hall

I did something a little odd this past semester: I had my students write an assignment where I instructed them to use AI as much as they wanted. The assignment was to produce a cover letter and a resume to respond to a job ad I had given them; normally, for any given assignment, I’d give them parameters for how AI was to be used, either not at all or under guidance and supervision. But here, I took the reins off.

The reasoning was pretty simple: those reins, held by a communications professor hoping these Gen Z students might be directed to engage the engines of generative thinking that remain in their minds, wouldn’t be there at all when it came time to apply for their entry-level jobs in a few years’ time. So why not have them produce the very best product possible, which some of them could only do with the help of AI, and have their professor look over it to make it sure it wasn’t hallucinated garbage?

Not doing so, making them write what would likely be inferior documents just so I could criticize them, seemed backwards and a little cruel, like dragging a lot of abacuses into a math classroom and making the students do algebra just for the sake of, you know, doing it old school.

So that was my covering rationale; the real rationale is that I’ve been trying to convert all of my assignments over multiple courses to meet with the reality of AI, with marginal success, and I ran out of steam here. I had thought that, perhaps, I’d get them to produce something in class, have other students critique it in a kind of workshop atmosphere – I didn’t have a really clear idea of what I wanted to do at the beginning of the term, and predictably as time ran short I went for what was essentially the “default” option. And, seriously – writing a draft cover letter on the spot, in class, getting peer feedback, revising, getting more feedback, etc. – was I trying to replicate a process that is simply outdated? As I’m increasingly finding, the process of getting students to stop relying on artificial intelligence means, paradoxically, introducing a level of artificiality, a distance from practicality, into the classroom. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

On Water

Somewhere I have stowed my astrology reading so I could put my hands upon it when I wanted to see it again. I don’t remember where. So there is something about a water sign [Scorpio] — a certain muddiness and flow of memory. All is at the bottom of the sea. Why is it so important to remember the longitude and latitude of any one thing? That’s for earth people on their certain ways across the sea’s broad expanse. Whatever the shift in tide, the turn of the current, throws up interests the water person, though it is not what he or she set out to find in the morning.

Euripides says that “The parched earth loves the rain; and high heaven, rain-filled, loves to fall earthward.” So, water is this too, a messenger between longings, as anyone given a chemistry set as a kid knows — those dusts that sit desiccate in a test tube until water brings out the longing of each for the other and a third being is created. Yet there is something else. There is a poem of mine which ends with a walk by the sea after a great winter storm looking at the bits and pieces of washed up wreckage, then I look out at the ocean where:

The waves still roll fiercely from far out
breaking over a new sandbar then gathering up
again to break once more full upon the shore,
and I think of how on even the calmest day there
is a little shimmer against the solidness of land,
a little rolling againstness, and I feel the ancientness
of the anger hard and tight in her belly six miles
down in the dark fold of the Mindanao Deep.

So, water buoys, carries, flows, dissolves, beaches, creates, destroys. It sucks under. It throws up. It rains. It pours. Empedocles calls fire “destructive strife” and water “tenacious love,” and he saw that love and strife produced all change in their combinings and separatings. Read more »