Daniel C. Dennett in Philosophy Now:

In a paper published in Synthese (#53) in 1982, ‘Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’, Richard Rorty wrote an enthusiastic account of the revolutionary ‘Ryle-Dennett tradition’. Was I really as radical a revolutionary as he said I was? I responded mischievously, perhaps rudely:

“Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have to read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English, I am tempted by Rorty’s performance on this occasion to enunciate a useful hermeneutical principle, the Rorty Factor:

Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742.

After all, if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably done the same or better for Heidegger – which means I can save myself the trouble of reading Heidegger; I can just read [Rorty’s book] Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979) and come out about 40% ahead while enjoying my reading at the same time.”

Rorty took this in good spirits and continued his amiable practice of highlighting the connections he saw between analytic philosophers’ arguments and the grand march of isms that constitute Western philosophy. Part of his optimistic genius was seeing how other people’s hard work in the trenches might be seen as major steps of genuine philosophical progress. This collection of previously unpublished works, most of them lectures delivered on multiple occasions, shows his power, his insight, his constructive spirit throughout. It is indeed enjoyable and enlightening philosophical reading, although I now believe that philosophers really shouldn’t rely on Rorty and other like-minded scholars of the field to frame our projects.

More here.

Yasmin Tayag in The Atlantic:

My breakthrough infection started with a scratchy throat just a few days before Thanksgiving. Because I’m vaccinated, and had just tested negative for COVID-19 two days earlier, I initially brushed off the symptoms as merely a cold. Just to be sure, I got checked again a few days later. Positive. The result felt like a betrayal after 18 months of reporting on the pandemic. And as I walked home from the testing center, I realized that I had no clue what to do next.

I had so many questions: How would I isolate myself in a shared apartment? And why for 10 days, like the doctor at the testing site had advised? Should I get tested again?

More here.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen in Public Books:

We know by now that authoritarian populists have handled the Covid-19 pandemic badly. Both Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro presided over spiraling death rates, fueled by a disregard for medical science and neglect of public health imperatives.

But India’s Narendra Modi appeared to buck this trend. After the first wave of the pandemic dissipated in September 2020, both national and international media echoed the government narrative that India, with Modi at its helm, had vanquished the coronavirus.

This public image, however, was revealed to be a mirage when a deadly second wave ripped through the country from late March to early June 2021. Millions of lives were lost. And it was a direct consequence of the failure of Modi and his party—the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—to expand medical infrastructure and roll out vaccinations effectively.

The BJP government, in short, chose to privilege Modi’s appearance as a strongman and heroic protector of the nation.

More here.

VOICE ABOVE WATER from Dana Frankoff on Vimeo.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

by Maya Angelou

From Harvard Magazine:

Harvard Medical School professor of neurology Rudolph Tanzi discusses how lifestyle choices can help maintain brain health during a person’s lifespan. Topics include Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia, the role of genetics and environment in health, and the importance of sleep, exercise, and diet in controlling neuroinflammation.

Jonathan Shaw: And how much of age-related cognitive decline is attributable to genetics, and how much to things that we could control potentially?

Rudolph Tanzi: It’s interesting, you know, this is what I wrote about in “Super Genes.” And I actually did congressional testimony on it, based on the books that I wrote, which was kind of interesting. And what I told them was, look, if you look at age-related diseases, like heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc., you see a similar pattern. About 5 percent of the genes involved have very hard-hitting mutations—mutations that guarantee the disease, and usually with early onset. And usually those disease genes where you can’t do anything about them—they’re you know, they’re the rare ones—also tell you about the events that pathologically happen earliest in the disease. So, for example, you know, Brown and Goldstein won the Nobel Prize for finding a family with a rare mutation that gave them high cholesterol. And based on that, they proposed cholesterol had something to do with heart disease. And the first genes we found, you know, when I was a student at Harvard, for my doctoral thesis, I found the first Alzheimer’s gene. I named it amyloid precursor protein, APP, because it makes amyloid. And the mutations in that gene cause a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s with certainty, by making too much amyloid in the brain. And just like cholesterol, now we know amyloid is something that occurs in the brain a decade or two or three before symptoms. That’s when you have to hit it, just like cholesterol, you can’t wait to need to bypass to hit it. You have to hit it earlier. So it’s very analogous. Now, if you look at the other genetics of age-related diseases, the other 95 percent, you have genes with variations and mutations that predispose you to the disease, others that actually protect you from the disease, but none of them with certainty, at least not within a normal lifespan. So, you know, if you look at the early-onset Alzheimer genes we found that, you know, have mutations that guarantee the disease by 60 years old. Well, when lifespan was 50, those didn’t guarantee disease because you didn’t live long enough. And so some of the mutations we know now that predispose you to increased risk for late-onset Alzheimer’s, like the APOE4 variant is most common, you know, maybe when lifespan is 120 years old, that will be called completely penetrant. It’s going to guarantee the disease because you live long enough. So whenever you think about, does a gene mutation guarantee a disease? You have to think about how long you live, because some might just take longer to give you the disease. But based on how long we live right now, only 5 percent of Alzheimer’s genes guarantee the disease, 95 percent only predispose, which means lifestyle has a lot to do with avoiding this disease, which is why I wrote my books, which is why we have the McCance Center, because we want to teach people how to do their best to try to avoid this disease with lifestyle.

More here.

Anil Seth in Nautilus:

I have a childhood memory of looking in the bathroom mirror, and for the first time realizing that my experience at that precise moment—the experience of being me—would at some point come to an end, and that “I” would die. I must have been about 8 or 9 years old, and like all early memories this one too is unreliable. But perhaps it was at this moment that I also realized that if my consciousness could end, then it must depend in some way on the stuff I was made of—on the physical materiality of my body and my brain. It seems to me that I’ve been grappling with this mystery, in one way or another, ever since.

Consciousness won’t be solved in the same way that the human genome was decoded, or the reality of climate change established. Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single Eureka-like insight—a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about scientific progress. A science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. I say wetware to underline brains are not just computers made of meat. They are chemical machines as much as they are electrical networks. Every brain that has ever existed has been part of a living body, embedded in and interacting with its environment—an environment which in many cases contains other embodied brains. Explaining the properties of consciousness in terms of biophysical mechanisms requires understanding brains—and conscious minds—as embodied and embedded systems.

This way of thinking leads us to a new conception of what it is to be a self—that aspect of consciousness which for each of us is probably the most meaningful. An influential tradition, dating back at least as far as Descartes, held that non-human animals lacked conscious selfhood because they did not have rational minds to guide their behavior. They were “beast machines”: flesh automatons without the ability to reflect on their own existence.

More here.