by Joseph Shieber

One of the pleasures of reading Amartya Sen’s new memoir, Home in the World, is stumbling upon little anecdotes that provide new perspectives on, or an opportunity for a deepening engagement with, major intellectual figures.

One such occasion for me was Sen’s discussion of the influence of the economist Piero Sraffa, one of Sen’s academic mentors at Cambridge in the 1950s, on the later thought of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

That Sraffa was influential on Wittgenstein is undeniable. In his preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes the path that led him to repudiate his earlier philosophical positions, as elucidated in his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and to arrive at the positions that he develops in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein notes that, “since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book. I was helped to realize these mistakes—to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate—by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey … . Even more than to this … criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts. I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.” (Philosophical Investigations, viii)

Though Wittgenstein doesn’t elaborate on the nature of Sraffa’s contributions, Sen locates Sraffa’s influence on Wittgenstein in Sraffa’s insistence that Wittgenstein’s earlier reductionist theory of meaning (more specifically, the picture theory of meaning of the Tractatus) was inadequate to capture the complexities of human language use. Sraffa emphasized the complex social arrangements that sustained and gave meaning to language, social arrangements that Wittgenstein attempted to capture with his notion of “language games” in the Philosophical Investigations. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Suppose that we could all be good for just one day. No one would be tempted away from doing the right thing and towards their own selfish interests or illicit urges. No one would be afraid of retribution. We would be free of all internal and external obstacles to being good. What would happen?

Some good things would happen and would last beyond one day. For example, dictatorships would collapse into rubble. If no one would do evil or allow evil to be done for just one day then the thugs would stay home (or join in) while the people took back their country.

Some other nice things might get done. People might take the day off work and spend it doing good deeds like picking up the garbage in their neighbourhood. This wouldn’t last since the effects of those deeds wouldn’t last (it is easier to dismantle something evil and build something good). But even in their own right these good deeds probably wouldn’t amount to very much. This is not only because there is only so much that can be done in one day, but also because most important things require cooperation and coordination to achieve. We wouldn’t know which of the many possible good things to try to do, in what order, or to what extent. Should we give our life savings to Oxfam? Should we go adopt a cat from the shelter? Should we volunteer to teach English to recent immigrants? Where should we start and when should we stop? Merely acting on the intention to be good is not enough to actually do much good. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Dick Edelstein

Hello, my name is David Coronado. The grave where your grandfather is buried is being exhumed. I think you can come to collect his remains and say a proper goodbye to him.

The above quote from a recent article in the Spanish newspaper El País illustrates how David Coronado approached relatives of people executed in 1940 by the forces of General Franco’s regime. The bodies of their family members had been buried in a common grave in Paterna, a townland near Valencia. Coronado was working with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), an NGO founded by journalist Emilio Silva following the exhumation in the year 2000 of a common grave containing the bodies of thirteen Republicans. Silva’s grandfather was one of those buried in the grave, and relatives of other victims asked him to help them recover the remains of their loved ones. Thus, Spain joined the vanguard of the current movement for the recovery of historical memory, a worldwide movement whose general aims have become a topical issue during the past two decades.

A longtime Spanish friend, Concha Catalan, told me her family’s Civil War story:

My family experienced trauma too. My grandfather was imprisoned by both sides during the Civil War. After the war, he was sent by the regime to various prisons and later to one of General Franco’s colonias militarizadas penitenciarias [penal colonies], where he worked as an engineer directing a crew of fellow prisoners forcibly assigned to public works tasks. His absence and suffering had a lasting effect on my family.

Concha is one of the founders of Innovation & Human Rights, a Spanish NGO that focuses its efforts on facilitating public access to archival data relating to Civil War casualties and victims of reprisal. Concha, who had worked and trained as an investigative journalist, met co-founder Guillermo Blasco at a hackathon in Barcelona, an event that brought together journalists and computer experts to share skills and resources and develop solutions to specific problems involving data and information technology. Blasco, a proficient coder, took an interest Concha’s work as an open data activist in the field of human rights, and their subsequent collaboration resulted in the founding of Innovation & Human Rights. Read more »

Photo from a few days ago of the moonrise above Plose in Brixen, South Tyrol, and a streetlamp near me which looks like a sunrise.

by Derek Neal

According to the website Rotten Tomatoes, there are four types of movies: good-good movies, good-bad movies, bad-good movies, and bad-bad movies. These types can be identified using the Rotten Tomatoes score for each movie, particularly the relationship between the critics’ score and the audience’s score. Let me explain. Rotten Tomatoes is a website that collects movie reviews and assigns them a rating of either “fresh” (if the review is positive) or “rotten” (if the review is negative). It then calculates the percentage of fresh reviews and assigns this as a score to the movie. If the score is 60% or greater, the film itself is considered fresh, whereas if the score is lower than 60%, the film is rotten. This is a useful way of rating a movie, but there’s a problem here, too. Let’s imagine every reviewer gives a movie three out of four stars, indicating a good film but not a great one. These reviews would all be classified as fresh, and the film would receive a misleadingly high score of 100% (The Terminator has a 100% rating, for example, while The Godfather does not). Let’s imagine another film receives all two out of four-star reviews. These would be classified as rotten, and the film would receive a rating of 0%, indicating one of the worst movies of all time. But the movie wouldn’t really be that bad.

In addition to the critics’ score, there is also the audience’s score, which simply calculates the ratings of the website’s users to decide whether a movie is fresh or rotten. This is based on hundreds to thousands of reviews as opposed to the 40 or 50 that make up the critics’ score, and in its relationship to the critics’ score it can give us valuable insight into the characteristics of a movie. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

Is loneliness a choice? Is love?

Such timeless questions resonate particularly a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic as we continue to weigh the risks and rewards of companionship, of intimacy, and calculate our capacity for solitude. Those quandaries propel the bittersweet romantic, sometimes droll meditation I’m Your Man, a new German film directed by Maria Schrader from a script she wrote with Jan Schomberg off a short story by Emma Braslavsky.

Alma (Marren Eggert) is an anthropologist pressured into participating in an evaluation of humanoid, robotic, made-to-order mates. Hers is a dapper, dignified database named Tom (Dan Stevens), who can rumba, recite Rilke, or cite a just-published journal article written by Brazilian cuneiform experts. Alma’s tastes, atop the crowd-sourced desires of millions of other women, dictate his algorithms, which are fine-tuned as he interacts with her. Out of the box, he comes on a little strong. “You’re a very beautiful woman, Alma,” he says upon first meeting her. “Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into.” But he’s a quick study and soon tones it down. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Presidency College had a good Department of Economics and Political Science. I’d say that the teaching standard at my time there would compare quite favorably with the standard I found later when teaching undergraduate classes in Berkeley. I remember in my first lecture in Berkeley in a large undergraduate class I was using some bit of calculus. After my class a female student came to see me to complain about the use of calculus in class. I told her that I was not using any advanced calculus, so if she brushed up her high school-level calculus she should have no difficulty in following the class. She said that in her high school in Carmel, a California coastal town, there was the option to take either calculus or yoga, and she had chosen the latter. I told her, unhelpfully, that this was a choice unheard-of in the land of yoga, India, and, I thought to myself, certainly in Presidency College.

One outstanding teacher I had there was Bhabatosh Datta. I can say that if I have to count four or five best Economics teachers anywhere in the world, I’d include him in the list. He not merely had an excellent expository style, more importantly he inspired us, even as undergraduates, to aspire to reach the frontier of the subject. I remember once rushing to the Library to take out a front-ranking research journal (Quarterly Journal of Economics) to read up some new article that he referred to in class. This is somewhat rare at the undergraduate level in most parts of the world. Of course, I did not understand half the article without taking his help. As the poet Robert Browning said, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp; by pushing us this way Datta wanted to see us achieve more. Read more »