By Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Conference season is drawing near for many academics. In our discipline, Philosophy, already the regional conferences are in full swing, and the American Philosophical Association will have its large Eastern Division meeting in early January. This has got us thinking about these conferences and the many papers that will be presented at them. The trouble, as we see it, is that the paper sessions are so often disappointing, and so frequently less fruitful than they otherwise might be.

It's not that the papers chosen for presentation are poorly written or intellectually inept. To the contrary, the content and even the style of the writing of the papers tends to be of very high quality. What makes conference sessions in Philosophy so frequently disappointing is that, for reasons we cannot fully grasp, the disciplinary norm still heavily favors reading one's paper to one's audience. That's right: At professional Philosophy conferences, it is most common for speakers to read to their audiences. Conference presentations tend to last 20-30 minutes; then there is often a second speaker who offers a critical comment on the first presenter's paper, and the commentary often runs for another 10-15 minutes. And sometimes there is yet a third recitation — the first presenter is given the opportunity to respond briefly to the commentator's critical remarks, and this, too, is often read from a prepared text. Then, with what time is left, the floor is open for questions from the audience. And even when a speaker elects to present her work using presentation technology, still the dominant tendency is to simply read from the projected slides.

Many Philosophy conferences run for two to three days. Imagine three full days of being read to in this way. Even under the best circumstances — with dynamic readers and exciting content — it's simply exhausting.

That philosophers should be in the habit of reading their papers out loud to each other at professional meetings strikes us as bizarre. Notice how the disciplinary norm differs when it comes to pedagogy. These days, it's almost unheard of for a professor of Philosophy to read her lectures to her students. It is far more common to speak extemporaneously from notes, which forces the instructor to devise fresh formulations and to think on her feet. After all, we are educators, and in our classes we often present to our students highly detailed and challenging ideas. And when teaching material in our own research areas, we commonly take ourselves to have no need for a prefabricated script. Moreover, as almost everyone in the profession will readily admit, the really exciting exchanges at Philosophy conferences occur in the informal setting of the conference reception, or, even more frequently, the hotel bar. Why, then, should we persist in reading to each other in the official conference sessions? Why not adopt a new practice of talking to the audience?

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

Hearing about the HannoverGEN project made me feel envious and excited. Envious, because I wish my high school had offered the kind of hands-on molecular biology training provided to high school students in Hannover, the capital of the German state of Niedersachsen. Excited, because it reminded me of the joy I felt when I first isolated DNA and ran gels after restriction enzyme digests during my first year of university in Munich. I knew that many of the students at the HannoverGEN high schools would be thrilled by their laboratory experience and pursue careers as biologists or biochemists.

What did HannoverGEN entail? It was an optional pilot program initiated and funded by the state government of Niedersachsen at four high schools. Students enrolled in the HannoverGEN classes would learn to use molecular biology tools that are typically reserved for college-level or graduate school courses to study plant genetics. Some of the basic experiments involved isolating DNA from cabbage or how bacteria transfer genes to plants, more advanced experiments enabled the students to analyze whether or not the genome of a provided maize sample was genetically modified. Each experimental unit was accompanied by relevant theoretical instruction on the molecular mechanisms of gene expression and biotechnology as well as ethical discussions regarding the benefits and risks of generating genetically modified organisms (“GMOs”). You can only check out the details of the HannoverGEN program in the Wayback Machine Internet archive because the award-winning educational program and the associated website were shut down in 2013 at the behest of German anti-GMO activist groups, environmental activists, Greenpeace, the Niedersachsen Green Party and the German organic food industry.

Why did these activists and organic food industry lobbyists oppose a government-funded educational program which improved the molecular biology knowledge and expertise of high school students? A press release entitled “Keine Akzeptanzbeschaffung für Agro-Gentechnik an Schulen!” (“No Acceptance for Agricultural Gene Technology at Schools“) in 2012 by an alliance representing farmers growing natural or organic crops accompanied by the publication of a study with the same title (PDF), funded by this group as well as its anti-GMO partners, gives us some clues. They feared that the high school students might become too accepting of using biotechnology in agriculture and that the curriculum did not sufficiently highlight all the potential dangers of GMOs. By allowing the ethical discussions that were part of the HannoverGEN curriculum to not only discuss the risks but also mention the benefits of genetically modifying crops, students might walk away with the idea that GMOs may be a good thing. Taxpayer money should not be used to foster special interests such as those of the agricultural industry that may want to use GMOs, according to this group.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“People for them were just sand, the fertilizer of history.”
~ Chernobyl interviewee VM Ivanov

For a few years, if you were on Twitter and you used the word “inconceivable” in a tweet, you would almost immediately receive an odd, unsolicited response. Hailing from the account of someone named @iaminigomontoya, it would announce “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Whether you were just musing to the world in general, or engaging in the vague dissatisfaction of what passes for conversation on Twitter, this Inigo Montoya fellow would be summoned, like some digital djinn, merely by invoking this one word.

Now, those of us who possessed the correct slice of pop culture knowledge immediately recognized Inigo Montoya as one of the characters of the film “The Princess Bride”. Splendidly played by Mandy Patinkin, Montoya was a swashbuckling Spaniard, an expert swordsman and a drunk. Allied to the criminal mastermind Vizzini, played by Wallace Shawn, Montoya had to listen to Vizzini mumble “inconceivable” every time events in the film turned against him. Montoya was eventually exasperated enough to respond with the above phrase. Like many other quotes from the 1987 film, it is a bit of a staple, and has since been promoted to the hallowed status of meme for the Internet age.

Of course, it's fairly obvious that no human being could be so vigilant (let alone interested) in monitoring Twitter for every instance of “inconceivable” as it arises. What we have here is a bot: a few lines of code that sifts through some subset of Twitter messages, on the lookout for some pattern or other. Once the word is picked up, @iaminigomontoya does its thing. Now, and through absolutely no fault of their own, there will always be a substantial number of people not in on the joke. These unfortunates, assuming that they have just been trolled by some unreasonable fellow human being, will engage further, such as the guy who responded “Do you always begin conversations this way?”

So here we have an interesting example of contemporary digital life. In the (fairly) transparent world of Twitter, we can witness people talking to software in the belief that it is in fact other people, while the more informed among us already understand that this is not the case. Ironically, it is only thanks to the lumpy and arbitrary distribution of pop culture knowledge that we may at all have a chance to tell the difference, at least without finding ourselves involuntarily engaged in a somewhat embarassing mini-Turing Test. But these days, we pick up our street smarts where we can.

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

It is little surprise that geometry goes back thousands of years. Right up there with being able to communicate with your fellow tribe members and count how many fish you have caught, you need to be able to measure off farm fields and build proper foundations for your home. It is an invaluable skill to be able to accurately work with lengths, angles and the like. When Euclid came on the scene 2200+ years ago geometry was already a well developed, sophisticated, and central part of the sciences.

Euclid wrote the book on geometry. Euclid's Elements was the textbook in geometry for over 2000 years. The Elements only covered Euclidean geometry. That is, the geometry of good ol' flat space in two and three dimensions. The sort of space where straight lines never meet. And that was plenty good for a millennia or two of surveying land, building bridges, mapping the London Underground, and whatnot.

The London Underground [1].

As we saw here at 3QD, it took until the 19th century for people to finally open their mind to the fact that you can and should do geometry in non-flat space. If you're going to circumnavigate the Earth, then it matters quite a bit that it is a sphere. You can calculate distances, angles, and areas on a sphere, but Euclid isn't going to give you the right answer. If you want your calculations to be accurate you'd better use spherical geometry.

Nowadays we live in the age of Global Positioning Systems and interplanetary spacecraft. If you want to your phone's GPS to be accurate to within a few meters or land a spacecraft on an asteroid which is 2.5 miles across and whizzing through space at 34,000 miles per hour, then Einstein tells us we better take into account the bends and curves of spacetime. That is, we can and should do our calculations using Riemannian geometry.

It doesn't take much, then, to convince the most hard-nosed skeptic that even “exotic” geometries are pretty darn useful.

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

* Located in the Dorsoduro section of Venice, the Gallerie dell'Accademia hold a collection of pre-19^th century Venetian art.

[detail of “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” Gentile Bellini. c. 1500]

Introduction:

What if I walked through the doors of Europe (I am an immigrant, but not there; the doors swing open easily) casting aside much of my education, the narrow ways in which I’d been schooled to think about culture, history and art? What if I wandered through France and Italy not in a posture of submission and not as a student of Western Civilization? I know Europe well, even if I’ve hardly been there. I know how greedy (how desperate) it is for affirmation of its superiority to all other places. There is so much that is particular and beautiful there, no different from any place else with its own particular beauty.

What if I walked through the galleries of the Accademia letting my attention land where it wanted? This summer when I saw the painting, “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” I wondered what the canals were like in the 15^th century; today no one swims or bathes in the water. But I didn’t spend much time reading about Gentile Bellini and the symbolism of the “miracle” he depicted. Instead this image made me think of the bodies of migrants and refugees that were in the waters off the Italian coasts. I’ve long been trained to look for beauty and to prostrate myself in the pursuit of knowledge. But I noticed when I had left the galleries that all the photos I had taken were of details, and that when I had looked at the paintings I had looked through them, reaching for something else: a correspondence.

*

[detail of “The Marriage of St. Monica,” Antonio Vivarini. c. 1441]

Why anyone might love Lila, the brilliant friend in Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, is because she is a brutal girl with a voracious intellect– no saint. She won’t be loved by a man.

Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Try to see it this way: You’re up in the attic of your own body, there where the thoughts are stored. The vaulted ceiling of your cranium slopes gently down to the two windows through which you view the world and let the sun shine in. Left and right, two speakers pump in sounds from somewhere else. And down below those two front windows, is the front door where you let the cat out, through that orifice which allows a few of those thoughts to wander out into the ether as articulation. There are no bars on your windows, and no locks on the door, but make no mistake, you are in solitary confinement. You’ll never get out of there. And no one will join you up there in that attic, ever.

Solitude is not for the faint of heart. That said, we all experience solitude nearly all the time. Whether we enjoy it or not is another question. Even if we’re never alone for a minute, even if we talk our heads off, or spend hours interacting with others, we are trapped inside our heads. We’re alone up there, in solitary, imprisoned by the cranium and our singular perspective. (Social interaction kindly provides the illusion that we are not alone.)

Take a look around and it’s surprising how much space there is to store things. Somewhere near the back are shelves piled high with memories, experiences, thoughts, knowledge, dreams and music. Behind these shelves is the operating system. We don’t go there. It just hums along of its own accord, allowing us to function in blissful ignorance of its machinations.

Many phrenological illustrations portray the brain as a tightly packed oval of small cubicles, each with its own function—a corporate flagship, or musty old factory, with every cogwheel doing its part to keep the enterprise afloat. It’s very crowded in those pictures, claustrophobic.

Not my view at all. There’s infinite space up there, plenty of room to have an alchemist’s laboratory where thoughts are put together from different elements in the cellular database. I don’t know how you see your brain, but I see mine as a spacious atrium with good natural light from above (no eureka lightbulbs). In the center, there’s a long old refectory table where I work and play. At one end there’s music, at the other, painting. In the middle, where the light shines brightest, is where I craft my ideas and observations from the contents of the infinite number of drawers and cupboards that line the room. This is the point of departure for travels far and wide across the geography of the imagination.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

The history of the Japanese calendar stretches very far back into Japanese history- so far back, indeed, that we find ourselves in ancient China.

As was true of many facets of the ancient Chinese civilization–from its writing system to ceramics and medicine– the Chinese calendar was remarkably advanced and far superior to anything held by its neighbors of the time.

An ancient lunar-solar calendar, it had months based on the phases of the moon (each month began with the new moon), and the seasons were kept track of by observing the movement of the sun against 24 solar points, called “the twenty-four sekki” (24節気). Using these 24 sekki as a meteorological guide, important seasonal marking points– such as the solstices and equinoxes– could be accurately understood so that additional months could thereby be inserted when necessary.

It was high technology in the ancient world and the calendar was adopted throughout East Asia–from Japan and Korea to tropical Vietnam, the same calendar was utilized so that the time of “Frost Falling” or “Big Snow” was observed, whether the people in those lands had ever seen snow or not! In Japan, in particular, the calendar has infused the seasons with poetry and shared meaning. I don't know if it's because of the poetry inherent in the names themselves or the pageantry of images and festivals that are embedded in the calendar but it is a way of looking at the world that is deeply affecting.

Sure, anyone can step outside and appreciate the great splendor or nature; anyone with eyes to see and a heart to feel can be moved by “scattering flowers and fallen leaves” (飛花落葉) and yet…. as with all festivals, somehow the most moving aspect of aspect of things is in the shared details. I always loved the way we lived according to the calendar out in the country in Japan. It is something I miss terribly.

This was really brought to mind for me yesterday when a friend, Patrick Donnelly posted this video below on Facebook of a deer stepping up toward the altar of a Catholic church in France. Other friends said it was a church in Canada, which seems more likely maybe, but the video that he linked to was labelled, “France, the Church of St. Eustace.”

Read more »