On the first English translation of Wittgenstein’s early private notebooks

Kieran Setiya in the Boston Review:

The month is May 1916. In southern Galicia, now Ukraine, on the Eastern Front of World War I, a twenty-seven-year-old Austrian volunteers for duty in an observation post exposed to enemy gunfire. He keeps a notebook of his hopes and fears, written in a simple cipher from his childhood—the letter “z” stands for “a,” “y” for “b,” and so on—with philosophical remarks, uncoded, on the facing pages. The latter concern the nature of logic and are peppered with logical symbols. From April 15: “Every simple proposition can be brought into the form ɸx.”

In June Russia launches the “Brusilov Offensive,” one of the most lethal military campaigns of the war. The young man’s notebook goes empty for a month. Then, on July 4, he begins to write, in the uncoded pages, remarks that are not logical, but spiritual. “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” he asks. “That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. . . . I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will; I am completely powerless.”

From this point on, distinctions blur. The cipher seeks connections; the philosophy leaps from logic to life’s meaning and back. “Yes,” he writes on August 2, “my work has broadened out from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.” In the end, there is no code. Nothing is hidden—though “What cannot be said, cannot be said!”

More here.

Laos farmers turn to game theory in bid to outsmart rats

Ian Neubauer in Al Jazeera:

In wealthier countries, rodenticides like bromadiolone that prevent blood from clotting are used to combat plagues of rats and mice. But they also poison non-target species, soil, water and sometimes the farmers who apply them, and can be prohibitively expensive.

But a team of researchers from the National University of Laos and Australia’s Monash University have discovered a much simpler, cheaper and environmentally friendly solution that utilises existing indigenous rodent hunting tools and know-how: an economic game that pools together the efforts of villagers, and rewards those who kill or capture the most rats.

More here.

The West thinks that Russians, suffering from sanctions, will end up abandoning Putin – but history indicates they won’t

Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager and Evgeniya Pyatovskaya in The Conversation:

We are international critical cultural scholars with extensive experience in various geopolitical contexts – the U.S., European Union and post-Soviet countries. We believe that those who think that sanctions will turn Russia and Russians around and end the war know very little about the country, its history and its people.

Russians are used to turmoil and instability. They endured cruel social experiments during the 20th century, and the early 21st, performed upon them by their own political leadership. Except for the rare example of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian leadership during that period was never democratic.

More here.

Statue celebrates ‘Mothers of Gynecology’ at Black women’s birthing conference

Cristella Guerra on NPR:

Birth professionals from around the country gathered in Montgomery, Ala., to heal, to learn and to honor the lives and sacrifices of three women: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey, the Mothers of Gynecology. These towering mothers built of scrap metal were the cornerstone of a two-day conference in late February centered on Black maternal health inside Old Ship A.M.E Zion Church.

“There’s so much that people don’t know about,” says Dr. Veronica Maria Pimentel, an obstetrician gynecologist based in Hartford, Ct., who began a petition two years ago asking those in her field to recognize the contributions of Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey. “The history is told from the point of view of those in power and those who were in power were men and those who were in power were also white,” she says. “And we’re talking about women, we’re talking specifically about Black women, and we’re talking about enslaved Black women. So it is important for us to go back and look at this history because the history informs what we’re doing today when we talk about inequalities in health care.”

More here.

p53: an anticancer protein’s chequered past and promising future

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

When scientists first came across p53 in 1979, it was an intriguing but not Earth-shattering discovery. Six groups independently discovered a cellular protein with a molecular weight of roughly 53 kilodaltons — hence the name. It seemed that p53 was interacting with a tumour-inducing virus called simian virus 40, and researchers soon showed that healthy cells forced to express this newly cloned gene encoding p53 quickly became cancerous1.

But the truth was more complicated. As more researchers began to study p53, it became apparent that the tumour-causing versions of the gene were actually mutated. The unmutated, or wild-type, version of the gene, which was cloned from humans and mice in the 1980s, exerted the exact opposite effect: the gene acted as a potent inhibitor of tumorigenesis2. Scientists had even got its size wrong; p53’s true molecular weight is closer to 44 kilodaltons. In the three decades since researchers came to this realization, p53’s biological significance has become ever more apparent. The protein coordinates a wide range of essential cellular functions, and its evolutionary history dates back to some of the earliest multicellular life on Earth.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Winter Rye

On an evening of broccoli
And Billy Collins,
My mind drifts back to May,

When the pale-green Bermuda
Replaced the winter rye, and my father
Dutifully attended to his guests.

He poured the white wine and laughed
At little jokes, so nervous in their delivery,
And consoled her group of friends.

And so finally she was, as they say,
Put to rest, and it was quietly sound, enough so
That I found myself watching him carefully

Watching him smile at each and every guest,
Such dignity amid the Chardonnay,
Such grace among the last of the winter rye.

by Richard Fenwick
from
Anon Seven Poetry Magazine, Edinburgh Scotland

Aldous Harding’s Music Is Strange, Disorientating, Familiar

Ellen Pierson-Hagger at The New Statesman:

Across three albums between 2014 and 2019, Harding, who lived for a time in Cardiff, but is now based in a small town back in New Zealand, has released a collection of songs that could most easily be considered contemporary folk. She sings and plays guitar, there are drums and keys, the arrangements are typically sparse, and the songs are melody-focused. More interesting is her vocal elasticity – the way her tone shifts on the 2017 track “Party” from a creaky, pleading squeal to a delicate whisper – and her brilliant and peculiar lyrics: “Looks like a date is set/Show the ferret to the egg/I’m not getting led along,” she sang on “The Barrel”, which, with more than 39 million Spotify streams, is her biggest hit.

There are real oddities in Harding’s music, as there are in her stage presence. But more immediately striking is the warmth and veracity of her sound and lyrics. 

more here.

Your Rights: Disappearing

by Michael Liss

Judge [Ketanji Brown] Jackson is an extraordinary person with an extraordinary American story[,] … [as well as] impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law…, but I am unable to consent to the nomination. —Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE)

At least Ben was polite about it. The rest of Judge Jackson’s hearing was absolutely awful. If you watched or read or otherwise dared approach the seething caldron of toxicity created by the law firm of Cotton, Cruz, Graham & Hawley (no fee unless a Democrat is smeared) you’ve probably had more than enough, so I’ll try to be brief before getting to more substantive matters.

 

First, as to KBJ’s chances, the jury is still out. Sasse’s fan dance means the Judiciary Committee will split 11-11, so a parliamentary maneuver will be required to move her nomination to a vote by the Senate as a whole. She just got Joe Manchin on board (leaving Sinema as the only possible Democratic holdout), and she might, maybe, get a vote or two from a Republican.

We should acknowledge that standing up and out of the latrine that Cotton & Co. just dug is a little difficult for many Republicans, even the ones who are about to retire. I mean, who could possibly say yes to a smut-peddling, criminal-coddling, CRT hugger who doesn’t even have a grasp of basic anatomy? The country should be grateful that Republicans finally were able to unearth the truth (having erroneously aided in confirming her to the federal bench twice before). Good grief. It wasn’t always like this. Read more »

Rethinking Scholarship

by Eric J. Weiner

Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career. –C. Wright Mills

In 2001, I felt lucky to get a tenure-track job in the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS) at Montclair State University (MSU) in New Jersey. Not only was the university a short jaunt from New York City, but the leadership in CEHS, in partnership with the University’s Office of the President, had instituted a faculty reward system for tenure and promotion that used Ernest Boyer’s four-pronged system of scholarship to guide its evaluation of faculty work. The Center of Pedagogy (CoP) oversaw all aspects of Boyer’s progressive model of faculty development across departments, schools and colleges as well as provided support for matters concerning pedagogy, curriculum, community-university partnerships, and learning. The move to adopt Boyer’s faculty reward system showed the University’s commitment to support the diversification of its faculty and student-body by broadening how it defined and evaluated scholarship. Given the University’s history as a normal school and the College’s deepening relationship to the work of John Goodlad, the move to embrace and build upon Boyer’s model had both intellectual as well as ideological coherence.

Writing for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Boyer’s work arises out of a frustration with the narrow way scholarship is traditionally conceptualized and rewarded within the modern university. In Scholarship Reconsidered (1990) he writes, “We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full range of academic work.” He argues for a faculty reward system that considers the scholarship of the professoriate as having four overlapping functions: Scholarship of Discovery; Scholarship of Integration; Scholarship of Application; and Scholarship of Teaching. He rejects the idea that there should be a hierarchy of scholarship in the academy while acknowledging that Discovery and Integration–when produced for publication in peer review academic journals–have historically been recognized as the most legitimate forms of intellectual work. Read more »

Monday Poem

—on scanning the news feed this morning:

Stasis—a collateral effect of nuclear power

We face the conundrum of dealing with Tony Soprano.
Tony, you know, will stop at nothing while you,
being disinclined to fire a nuclear warhead
(when Tony has some too)
are left with the fist of cutting off his credit.

This is the truth of modern war and diplomacy:
to take the chance that your enemy
actually cares about something other than himself.
We’re at the threshold of mob rule or Armageddon.
It’s a tough choice for a rational mind
because you understand it may be your last.

It’s a horrendous choice for a president. Hell,
it’s a horrendous choice for anyone who cares about anyone.
But it may not be for Tony. We just don’t know. So now,
maybe that old philosophical question has an answer:
How many choices can dance on the head of a pin,
just one?

Jim Culleny
3/21/22

The Impossibility of History

by Akim Reinhardt

A Prologue to Prologue | National ArchivesIs the Past Prolog? I’m not convinced. I say this as a professional historian.

The main problem, of course, is that there are many pasts. They are defined by temporality, by subjectivity, and by the limits of knowledge.

The past is ten seconds ago. Ten minutes, ten days, ten weeks, ten years, ten centuries. Which past is prolog to which present?

There is no one past. There are countless pasts. Mine. Yours. The billions, or at least millions, of people who were alive at any given moment. The great, great majority of them never meeting or even knowing of each other, having no discernible influence on each other. Humans can be worldly, but never really universal. Whose past is prolog to whom?

Yet even the shared pasts are contested. Because the past is no different than the present in at least one important aspect: it is experienced subjectively. Like the classic Akira Kurosawa film Roshomon, or the countless sitcom shows that borrowed its premise for a chicanery-riddled episode of mutual misunderstanding, there is no one version. Each person had their own. Their own vantage point, their own experiences, their own filters and agendas, their own limits and baggage, their own abilities and inabilities to understand what they see, feel, hear, and hear of. And even under the most favorable circumstances, every person does what every person must do: interpret.

There is a science of life, but life itself is no science. We need to invent and give meaning to what we do and experience. It is an unavoidable feature of the human condition. Our perceptions and understandings of human affairs are subjective. What contested past is prolog to what contested present? Read more »

Erasmus in the 21st century

by Jeroen Bouterse

He had a visceral aversion to war, was strongly in favor of social distancing in times of pandemic, and believed it would be a good thing if the Germans turned down their heaters a notch or two.[1] Of these still sympathetic opinions, the last was admittedly informed by his discomfort with wood stoves. Erasmus did comment on fuel markets once: echoing a friend’s joke, he claimed to be annoyed by heretics for being burned at such a scale that it drove up wood prices.[2]

It was one of the many occasions in which he spoke with dry irony about things that disturbed him deeply. Erasmus found his own way of talking about violence and war, and the other horrors that humans inflict upon each other. At the deepest level, his analysis was that war is bad. He was not, confirms his biographer Sandra Langereis, a very strong political thinker. An individualist rather than a sociologist, he tended to see war as a moral evil, and blame it on the foolishness and wrongheadedness of rulers. The people found cities; the mighty raze them to the ground.

Perhaps this is a good time to read Erasmus. Read more »

The Buddhist Self

by Varun Gauri

When modern Buddhists and mindfulness practitioners say the ultimate cause of stress and suffering is the craving for permanence, especially the misguided craving for a permanent “self,” which “self” are they talking about?

In his interesting and provocative book Why I Am Not a Buddhist, Evan Thompson explores the possibilities: (1) The pre-reflective self, elemental to consciousness, is related to the fact that we cannot perceive an object without being aware that we are perceiving it. For example, I cannot notice a sunset without the knowledge that I am aware of the sunset. (2) I experience an imagined center of agency and locus of being. This is the sense, and the legal fiction, that someone is in charge in there, a CEO or author of our actions and thoughts. (3) Many of us believe in a non-material essence or soul. (4) I have an awareness of being embodied, the understanding that what happens to my arm also happens to me. (5) There is a social self that exists in relationships to others. I am continually monitoring where I stand in relation to parents, friends, families, colleagues, nations, and others. Am I loved, known, cared for? (6) Cognitive psychologist discuss the generalized ability to reflect on our own experience — the faculty for meta-awareness that is the source of introspection and planning. (7) Following from that capacity for meta-cognition, I am aware of  “an extended self,” which emerges from an historical past and is thrown into time (there was something before me and there will be something after). This self has a kind of gnawing awareness of an unknown future, or rather, a future uncertain but for my certain death. This is the self that has to go places, that has an autobiography and that spins a narrative identity. It is the self that existentialists discuss, the one that establishes a stance —  courageous, fearful, indifferent — toward our impending demise.  Read more »

Plato’s “Symposium”: The Lost Epilogue (A Fragment)

by Rafaël Newman

For John Duffy (November 5, 1963—March 3, 2022)

Anselm Feuerbach, “The Symposium” (1871-74), Alte und Neue Nationalgalerie

…great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said that Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others went away—he himself fell asleep, and was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and when he awoke, the others were either asleep, or had gone away; there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them, compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist in tragedy was an artist in comedy also. To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument. And first of all Aristophanes dropped off, then, when the day was already dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to sleep, rose to depart; Aristodemus, as his manner was, following him. At the Lyceum he took a bath, and passed the day as usual. Read more »

Before

by Bill Murray

Anticipating war in Europe, 2022.

Thursday, 13 January

If an attack is imminent, Kyiv’s air raid sirens will alert residents to tune in to emergency service announcements. Cars equipped with loudspeakers will also patrol the streets to announce important information.

The Kyiv City Council has posted an interactive online map, which shows the locations of the roughly 5,000 official locations where residents can shelter from a military attack. Of that number, 514 shelters are purpose-built facilities dating back to the Cold War where people can remain for days on end.

Each citizen should prepare an “emergency suitcase” ahead of time. This should be a backpack with a capacity of at least 25 liters, a little more than 6.5 gallons, containing “clothing, hygiene items, medicines, tools, personal protective equipment, and food.” The service also recommends carrying important documents and cash in the backpack.

Friday, 14 January

“Sweden, which is not part of NATO, has among other things noticed a number of landing craft from Russia’s northern navy which have been entering the Baltic Sea,” the AP reported. The next day … all three Russian Baltic Fleet Ropucha-class heavy landing ships departed Baltiysk (a port in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad). These can each land 25 armored personnel carriers. Read more »