Yascha Mounk and Martha Nussbaum in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: Before we get properly into the different subjects we’ll explore today, what actually is a moral philosophy? And what is the strange enterprise of ethics, and of trying to think about how one should act in the world?

Martha Nussbaum: I’ll first say what most people think it is (I have a rather different view). The general idea started with Socrates, who thought most people don’t pause to think and they don’t summon their beliefs into explicitness and therefore are guided by custom, convention, and authority, and have never stopped to sort out what they really think. So what most people who teach moral philosophy do is just try to conduct that kind of Socratic inquiry, get people to be more critical, more conscious, and, therefore, to discuss with others more in that spirit of critical awareness, rather than just saying, “Oh, I think this.”

But I also think that in a pluralistic culture, where people get their ethical views from many different sources, some religious and some secular, we have to be very careful about not pronouncing and not steering in one direction rather than another. And, therefore, I think ethics has got quite narrow constraints. But political philosophy has to try to get to principles that could guide the whole society…

More here.

Asher Elbein in Quanta:

Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism — has fascinated scholars and generated countless scientific and philosophical debates. And over the past 150 years, botanists have successfully unraveled many of the key molecular pathways that underpin how plants sense light and act on that information.

Yet a critical mystery has endured. Animals use eyes — a complex organ of lenses and photoreceptors — to gain a detailed picture of the world around them, including the direction of light. Plants, biologists have established, possess a powerful suite of molecular tools for measuring illumination. But in the absence of obvious physical sensing organs like lenses, how do plants work out the precise direction from which light is coming?

Now, a team of European researchers has hit upon an answer.

More here.

Costica Bradatan in the TLS:

On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry David Thoreau built a small wooden cabin, which he would call home for two years, two months and two days. From this base he began a philosophical project of “deliberate” living, intending to “earn [a] living by the labor of my hands only”. Though an ostensibly radical undertaking, this experiment was not a break with his past, but the logical culmination of years of searching and groping. Since graduating from Harvard in 1837 Thoreau had tried out many ways of earning his keep, and fortunately proved competent in almost everything he set his mind to. Asked once to describe his professional situation, he responded: “I don’t know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not … I am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (I mean a house-painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and sometimes a poetaster”.

From this position, with any number of routes before him, yet none decided on, Thoreau was particularly well placed to consider questions about the nature, purpose and fundamental meaning of work.

More here.

Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times:

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery.

To support the idea, Democrats invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist Danny Glover.

Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: a 23-year-old philosophy major at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes.

In the hearing, Mr. Hughes, looking very much his age, testified to the House subcommittee that not paying reparations after the Civil War was “one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated.”

But, he continued, they should not be paid now. “There’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today,” he said, pointing to endemic problems that affect Black Americans, such as poor schools, dangerous neighborhoods and a punitive criminal justice system.

More here.

David Quammen in Anthropocene Magazine:

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved.

The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to offspring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

One of the most disorienting results of these developments is a new challenge to the concept of “species.” Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance. And the notion of species is especially insecure in the realm of bacteria and archaea.  But the discovery that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, even in the lineages of animals and plants, has brought the categorical reality of a species into greater question than ever. That’s even true for us humans—we are composite individuals, mosaics.

More here.

Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s Magazine:

Toward the end of the Obama presidency, the work of James Baldwin began to enjoy a renaissance that was both much overdue and comfortless. Baldwin stands as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, and any celebration of his work is more than welcome. But it was less a reveling than a panic. The eight years of the first black president were giving way to some of the most blatant and vitriolic displays of racism in decades, while the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others too numerous to list sparked a movement in defense of black lives. In Baldwin, people found a voice from the past so relevant that he seemed prophetic.

More than any other writer, Baldwin has become the model for black public-intellectual work. The role of the public intellectual is to proffer new ideas, encourage deep thinking, challenge norms, and model forms of debate that enrich our discourse. For black intellectuals, that work has revolved around the persistence of white supremacy. Black abolitionists, ministers, and poets theorized freedom and exposed the hypocrisy of American democracy throughout the period of slavery. After emancipation, black colleges began training generations of scholars, writers, and artists who broadened black intellectual life. They helped build movements toward racial justice during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whether through pathbreaking journalism, research, or activism.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)

Your Music

—for my brother, Tom

Graveside at each family burial you play
the requiems, your French horn raised
by your fist inside it, chest and shoulders
in an arc toward the sky, your breath controlled
enough for music stronger than grief.

How the bell of the horn reflects our faces,
our imagined permanence shimmering in the brass.
How the music rises through our still figures,
hauling forward the nets of memory,
gathering speed over these marked fields.

Music needs no rest, no shelter.
In concert I have heard yours move
like wind lifting up the sides of an hour,
like spring heat off snow.

Carol Varner, 1998
from Poet’s Seat Poetry, 2017

Bas van Fraassen makes the case in iai News:

When physicists present to each other at conferences they are all about mathematical models.  The participants are deeply immersed in the abstract mathematical modelling.  When on the other hand they present to the public it sounds all very understandable, about particles, waves, fields, and strings, quantum leaps and gravity.  That is very helpful for mobilizing the imagination and an intuitive grasp on how phenomena or experiments look through theory-tinted glasses.  But typically, it is also told as the one true story of the universe, its furniture and its workings.  Is that how we should take it?

When physicists evaluate new models, hypotheses, or theories they are also immersed in theory.  It goes like this: the theory says “I’ve designed a test you can do, a test based on how I represent the phenomena, and what I count as measurement procedures. Take me up on it, see if I pass!  Put me to the question, bring it on!”  And it is great news when the measurement results come in and the theory is borne out.  That is empirical support for the theory.  What precisely should we take away from this, seeing here the scientists’ own criteria of success in practice?

During the past hundred years or so philosophers of science have become more and more compartmentalized and specialized, but when it comes to general issues of science philosophers still divide roughly into empiricists and realists.

More here.

Rob Lucas in Sidecar:

There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to its more sober initiates. On the left, the critical reflex to see this as yet another turn of the neoliberal screw, or to point out the labour and resource extraction that underpin it, falls somewhat flat in the face of a machine that can, at last, interpret natural-language instructions fairly accurately, and fluently turn out text and images in response. Not long ago, such things seemed impossible. The appropriate response to these wonders is not dismissal but dread, and it is perhaps there that we should start, for this magic is overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few often idiosyncratic people at the social apex of an unstable world power. It would obviously be foolhardy to entrust such people with the reified intelligence of humanity at large, but that is where we are.

Here in the UK, tech-addled university managers are currently advocating for overstretched teaching staff to turn to generative AI for the production of teaching materials. More than half of undergraduates are already using the same technology to help them write essays, and various AI platforms are being trialled for the automation of marking. Followed through to their logical conclusion, these developments would amount to a repurposing of the education system as a training process for privately owned machine learning models: students, teachers, lecturers all converted into a kind of outsourced administrator or technician, tending to the learning of a black-boxed ‘intelligence’ that does not belong to them.

More here.

Tim Sahay interviews Ravinder Kaur, author of Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st Century India, in Polycrisis:

TIM SAHAY: Your book, Brand New Nation, looks at how countries were plugging into the liberal global economy of the 1990s to attract investment capital, and far from diminishing the importance of nation-states, rejuvenated ethno-nationalism. You’ve argued that in the Indian case, the “liberal” economy and “illiberal” hypernationalism of Modi’s BJP are not separate phenomena, but two strands of Hindutva’s vision. How would you characterize these connections?

RAVINDER KAUR: I begin my book in the 1990s, arguing that the last three decades of economic reforms basically transformed the nation into a commodity. I traced the ways in which India, the post colony, turned itself into an “emerging market.” Contrary to the understanding of globalization as a process imposed from the outside and resisted by local groups, I argue that economic “LPG” reforms—liberalization, privatization, globalization—were embraced by the policy elite in India. Initially, there was some political pushback against it, both within the BJP and Congress, but by the turn of the century, any resistance to them had disappeared.

This great transformation activated a seemingly unlikely alliance between global capitalism and hypernationalism, a foundation on which twenty-first century Hindu nationalism would begin taking shape.

More here.

Over at Ones and Tooze:

The attacks by Houthi militants on cargo ships in and around the Red Sea is posing a serious threat to global trade—serious enough to prompt American-led air strikes on the group in Yemen. Thirty percent of all global containers pass through the Red Sea Strait. Adam and Cameron discuss the economic implications.

Olivia Laing at The Guardian:

How Thomas Hardy would have hated this book. In his 70s, this most secretive of men burned old letters, diaries and manuscripts on a bonfire in his garden. His paranoia had been stoked by the publication of a critical biography. “Too personal, and in bad taste, even supposing it were true, which it is not!” he wrote indignantly in the margin.

His solution was to seize control of the narrative with a sleight of hand designed to make it seem as if he wasn’t there at all. He wrote his own life story in the third person, to be published as a posthumous biography purportedly authored by his second wife, Florence. In it he made his position clear: “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

The choreographer’s collaborations were top-notch: the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; the composer Samuel Barber; and the designer Halston. Learning how she drew inspiration from so many disparate cultures (Greek, Indigenous, biblical) — with occasional gross insensitivity — one begins to realize that the term “modern dance,” like “classical music,” is if not a misnomer, then a massive oversimplification.

Critics could be “uncomprehending and denunciatory”; the public, “baffled but moved in some way they do not understand.” But Graham early on achieved one of the clearest marks of success: She was parodied. (By Fanny Brice, no less. And who can forget Robin Williams’s rapid-fire tour of American dance forms in “The Birdcage”?) Should she have gotten a piece of the Pulitzer that the composer Aaron Copland picked up for their ballet, “Appalachian Spring”? You bet your bottom Barbie.

more here.

Laura Thornton in Time Magazine:

For two decades in Asia and the former Soviet Union, I worked for democracy-promotion organizations, a central aim of which was bolstering democratic political parties. I trained them on internal party structure, platform development, constituent outreach, and, of course, candidate selection. With typical American hubris and pride, I often nudged parties toward the inclusive American primary system as a model for selecting candidates. “Primaries are the most inclusive and, theoretically, democratic,” I’d think to myself. “They allow everyday citizens to choose candidates rather than limiting this decision to party leaders.”

Expanding candidate selection to include more stakeholders made perfect sense. In the countries where I worked, a small group of party leaders selected candidates without transparency or competition, frequently based on the candidate’s financial contributions. This opaque process failed to provide nominees who were representative of or accountable to the public, stifling the competition of ideas and values. Unsurprisingly, in turn, the public disdained parties and politics.

More here.

Packing the Kitchen Utensils

How many years since we used
the potato masher, the apple peeler,
its stainless-steel blade and crank
tucked in the back of the bottom
kitchen drawer among the balled
clot of discarded rubber bands?
And the egg slicer, never touched,
its grille and clean wires taut
as the silver foil outlines
of the invitations we mailed out
years ago? We bought these
utensils ourselves: hardly anyone
came to a gay wedding back then.
Which of you is the bride? someone
scrawled beneath the box checked
“decline.” At least they answered,
you said. Husband, I lift two nesting
spoons from the cutlery drawer,
wrap them in a grocery circular.
Though their silver oval faces
are tarnished with wear, on the handles
you can still make out the brand,
the words Lifetime Guarantee.

by Steve Bellin-Oka
from Split This Rock

From the Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica:

Ragtime, propulsively syncopated musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the predominant style of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime evolved in the playing of honky-tonk pianists along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers in the last decades of the 19th century. It was influenced by minstrel-show songs, African American banjo styles, and syncopated (off-beat) dance rhythms of the cakewalk, and also elements of European music. Ragtime found its characteristic expression in formally structured piano compositions. The regularly accented left-hand beat, in 4/4 or 2/4 time, was opposed in the right hand by a fast, bouncingly syncopated melody that gave the music its powerful forward impetus.

Scott Joplin, called the “King of Ragtime,” published the most successful of the early rags, “The Maple Leaf Rag,” in 1899. Joplin, who considered ragtime a permanent and serious branch of classical music, composed hundreds of short pieces, a set of études, and operas in the style. Other important performers were, in St. Louis, Louis Chauvin and Thomas M. Turpin (father of St. Louis ragtime) and, in New Orleans, Tony Jackson.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)