Andrew Butterfield at the NYRB:

In the rooms of works from the 1540s and 1550s, the desperate ache of spiritual longing intensifies. Ever an artist, Michelangelo now began to make art about his disenchantment with art. This is especially clear in one of his intensely poignant sonnets on view here. “The alluring fantasies of the world,” it begins, “have robbed from me the time allotted for contemplating God.” The poem ends, “Make me hate all that the world values, and all its beauties I honor and adore, so that before death I grasp eternal life.” Another poem, not in the exhibition, expresses his disillusionment in even more stinging words. While carving the fierce and tragic Pietà now in the Florentine Cathedral museum, Michelangelo wrote, “In great slavery, with such weariness, and with false concepts and great danger to the soul, sculpting here things divine.” Given his anxious discontent, it is perhaps no wonder he later attacked the statue with a hammer and abandoned it.

Some of the last figure drawings in the exhibition date from just a few years before Michelangelo’s death and depict the Crucifixion. Softly drawn in black chalk with weak and wavering lines, these sorrowful images look like they are made of shimmering smoke. They seem to depict an unattainable phantasm, at once eternal and impermanent, and beyond the reach of human understanding.

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From DilDev's Blog:

He dueled him for many a long minute, and then trapping him at the end of a gantry, removed his hand from his wrist. Luke was surprised, but said not a word beyond his cry of pain. After a silence of several minutes, Vader came towards him in an agitated manner, and thus began,

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to offer you a place at my side to throw down the Emperor and reign over this galaxy.”

Luke’s astonishment was beyond expression. He stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This Vader considered sufficient encouragement, and the avowal of all that he felt immediately followed. He spoke well, but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed, and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of ambition.

“You do not yet realize your importance, and only now have begun to discover your power. Join me and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.”

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Gregory F. Tague in the ASEBL Journal:

Stephen Asma’s The Evolution of Imagination is a required addition to the library of academics interested in evolutionary studies. The well-organized book is thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and fortuitously illustrated by the author, who is also an accomplished jazz musician and philosopher. Asma is also fluent in the culture and philosophy of Asian countries, which impact directly on his main points and discussion, especially concerning creativity, self, meditation, mindfulness, and morality. No doubt this is a book I will refer to in the future, and I recommend it to philosophers of biology and neuroscience. I’d also recommend this book to scientists who wish to see how philosophy and the creative mind accommodate their research. Artists who are curious about the nature of their creativity will also learn much from this book. Stephen Asma’s beautifully-written scholarly study of the evolution of imagination is a powerful new approach to the adaptation of creative improvisation.

Broad areas Asma covers in terms of imaginative creativity include culture, storytelling, consciousness, and ethics. Lev Shestov said that all things are possible. Stephen Asma says that all things are possible because of the human imagination. What he sees as a mistake is how philosophers characterize imagination as cognition and not as action. Rather than ambiguous concepts and universals, Asma homes in on the particulars of sensation and emotion. What does it feel like to imagine oneself as…? There is an adaptive advantage to imaginative, playful what ifs. The imagination is physical sense that prompts one to improvise creatively. In evolutionary terms, then, the imagination helped us survive and reproduce in unprecedented ways. Improvisation especially helped us, says Asma, thrive in its inventive environment, but less as a computational and more as an emotional action. To be precise, imagination is not necessarily useful as noun; it’s more effective a gerund – imagining or the act of making.

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Jeffrey Tayler in Quillette:

Editor’s note: As we enter 2018, brave women are protesting Islamic modesty culture and laws in Iran. Jeffrey Tayler has documented women’s protests against modesty culture in Europe for years. What follows is an interview conducted by Tayler with Femen’s leader, Inna Shevchenko, in 2017.

A female activist has just sawed down a giant Christian cross on the central square of the capital city of Ukraine, in protest against the prison sentence meted out to Pussy Riot band members for the “punk prayer” they had performed in a Moscow cathedral earlier that year. What fate awaits her when she flees, personally threatened by her country’s president for her audacious deed, to France, the self-proclaimed “homeland of human rights?” Upon her arrival in Paris, do orchestras greet her with rousing renditions of La Marseillaise? Do accolades of support pour in from the French media? Does she settle, finally, into secure environs, certain, for the first time in her young but politically active life, that she can pursue unhindered her feminist struggle for human rights and the propagation of atheism? And, in the country that enshrines laïcité (secularism) in Article 1 of its constitution, does she find her staunchly godless views lauded?

Quite the contrary! The now twenty-seven-year-old Inna Shevchenko, the leader of the international topless protest movement Femen, had, in August 2012, barely taken up residence in the attic of France’s historic Théâtre du Lavoir (which would become Femen’s headquarters), when she found herself and her activists under threat.

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Nigel Warburton in Five Books:

First on your list you’ve got a historical book, The Infidel and the Professor, about David Hume and Adam Smith. Why are you excited about this book?

I love Hume as a writer. He had a fascinating life that is pretty well documented considering he lived in the 18th century—probably because he was a prolific letter writer and many of his letters have survived. The odd thing about this book is that it’s about the friendship between Hume and Adam Smith of which there isn’t that much surviving evidence, in terms of letters. Smith was keen to destroy lots of personal writing, unfinished drafts and all kinds of manuscripts—and it was done pretty efficiently.

So this book is largely a speculative reconstruction based on published books and the little that is known about their friendship, which lasted for 25 years. Hume was 12 years older than Adam Smith, and something of a hero of his.

Apparently, Smith first read David Hume’s Treatise when he was a student at Balliol in Oxford. The authorities confiscated it, because it was too seditious. The reason was Hume’s ‘irreligion,’ his antipathy towards religion—what we would probably now call his atheism.

Some people claim that Hume was merely an agnostic, to be consistent with his philosophy: he was a mitigated sceptic. He didn’t think that there was absolute proof that God didn’t exist, though the balance of evidence was clearly against it. But, actually, in his posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he tears apart most of the classic arguments for God’s existence, so it’s pretty clear that Hume, if he wasn’t an atheist, was so close to it that we would probably call him one.

Interestingly Adam Smith, as he emerges from this book, probably shared many of Hume’s anti-religious beliefs, but kept much, much quieter about it. As a result, he was able to become a professor at Glasgow University—a professor of logic.

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Simon Barnes in New Statesman:

Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” But Ludo, mind if I ask how much time you’ve actually spent with lions? Thought not. Because that’s rubbish, at least in the sense that humans and lions couldn’t possibly have common ground for a conversation. Wittgenstein can beat me in any logico-philosophical contest of his or anyone else’s choosing, but he hasn’t spent as much time as I have hanging out in the bush with lions. It was a few weeks ago in the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. Six lionesses had just slain an antelope and were avidly devouring it. From where I was, a quarter of a mile off, all I could see of this meal was a companionable rosette of tawny fur. Near me, a lone nomad male lion was also watching. He had picked up an injury and had been unable to hunt for a few days. He was very hungry; you could count the ribs. He had no pride of his own; he wasn’t yet big enough, or strong enough, or confident enough to attempt a takeover. He had to kill for himself and he couldn’t. He was watching a vision of everything he wanted in the world: food, the blessed intimacies of pride life and the company of those six sexy lionesses. He wanted more than anything to join them. But something very powerful stopped him from doing so. They wouldn’t have welcomed him. They would have chased him off; it would have ended in violence; it was no good. But he couldn’t stop himself watching. He made a series of retreats, each time stopping and staring back longingly. Eventually, like Andrew Lincoln fighting the pangs of his unrequited love for Keira Knightley in Love Actually, he pulled himself together and forced himself to leave the world of longing and get back to reality. He walked into the river and swam decisively across: enough! Had he stopped to talk about that experience, I would have understood. So would we all. Loneliness, longing, hunger, despair, desire: are these things so remote from our own experience?

…For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism. Mary Midgley, the ethical philosopher, wrote about mahouts, elephant riders, and how, if they failed to take into account “the basic everyday feelings – about whether their elephant is pleased, annoyed, frightened, excited, tired, sore, suspicious or angry – they would not only be out of business, they would often simply be dead”. Anthropomorphise or die. Anyone who works with horses knows that. Peter Wohlleben had a hit with his book The Hidden Life of Trees. In this, he described the fungal connections between tree and tree, which he interpreted as highways of communication and wittily called “the wood-wide web”. He made trees the sort of living thing that we humans can empathise with, rather than pieces of rural furniture.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

Of the many small humiliations heaped on a young oncologist in his final year of fellowship, perhaps this one carried the oddest bite: A 2-year-old black-and-white cat named Oscar was apparently better than most doctors at predicting when a terminally ill patient was about to die. The story appeared, astonishingly, in The New England Journal of Medicine in the summer of 2007. Adopted as a kitten by the medical staff, Oscar reigned over one floor of the Steere House nursing home in Rhode Island. When the cat would sniff the air, crane his neck and curl up next to a man or woman, it was a sure sign of impending demise. The doctors would call the families to come in for their last visit. Over the course of several years, the cat had curled up next to 50 patients. Every one of them died shortly thereafter. No one knows how the cat acquired his formidable death-sniffing skills. Perhaps Oscar’s nose learned to detect some unique whiff of death — chemicals released by dying cells, say. Perhaps there were other inscrutable signs. I didn’t quite believe it at first, but Oscar’s acumen was corroborated by other physicians who witnessed the prophetic cat in action. As the author of the article wrote: “No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.” The story carried a particular resonance for me that summer, for I had been treating S., a 32-year-old plumber with esophageal cancer. He had responded well to chemotherapy and radiation, and we had surgically resected his esophagus, leaving no detectable trace of malignancy in his body. One afternoon, a few weeks after his treatment had been completed, I cautiously broached the topic of end-of-life care. We were going for a cure, of course, I told S., but there was always the small possibility of a relapse. He had a young wife and two children, and a mother who had brought him weekly to the chemo suite. Perhaps, I suggested, he might have a frank conversation with his family about his goals?

But S. demurred. He was regaining strength week by week. The conversation was bound to be “a bummah,” as he put it in his distinct Boston accent. His spirits were up. The cancer was out. Why rain on his celebration? I agreed reluctantly; it was unlikely that the cancer would return. When the relapse appeared, it was a full-on deluge. Two months after he left the hospital, S. returned to see me with sprays of metastasis in his liver, his lungs and, unusually, in his bones. The pain from these lesions was so terrifying that only the highest doses of painkilling drugs would treat it, and S. spent the last weeks of his life in a state bordering on coma, unable to register the presence of his family around his bed. His mother pleaded with me at first to give him more chemo, then accused me of misleading the family about S.’s prognosis. I held my tongue in shame: Doctors, I knew, have an abysmal track record of predicting which of our patients are going to die. Death is our ultimate black box.

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