by Yohan J. John

Attitudes toward science in the public sphere occupy an interesting spectrum. At one extreme there are the cheerleaders — those who seem to think that science is the disembodied spirit of progress itself, and will usher us into a brave new world of technological transcendence, in which we will merge with machines and upload our minds to the cloud. At the other extreme there is decidedly less exuberance. Science in its destructive avatar is often called scientism, and is seen as a hegemonic threat to religions and to the humanities, an imperial colonizer of the mind itself.

The successes of science give the impression that it has no limitations, either in outer space or inner space. But this attitude attributes to science somewhat magical powers. The discourse surrounding science might benefit from an awareness that its successes are closely tied to its limitations. The relationship between scientists and the rest of society needs mutual understanding and constructive criticism, rather than a volatile mix of reverence, fear, and mistrust. The veil of the temple of knowledge must be torn in two — or at least lifted up from time-to-time.

To this end, it might be illuminating to see scientific ideas as tools forged in workshops, rather than spells divined by wizards in ivory towers. The tool metaphor also reminds us that science is not merely an outgrowth of western philosophy — it is also the result of the painstaking work of “miners, midwives and low mechanicks” whose names rarely feature in the annals of Great Men. [1]

So what sort of toolbox is science? I'd like to argue that it's a set of lenses. These lenses allow us to magnify and clarify our perceptions of natural phenomena, setting the stage for deeper understanding. The lenses of science reveal the symmetries of nature, so we might call them the Symmetry Spectacles. The Symmetry Spectacles are normally worn by mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but I think that even laypeople interested in science might find that the world looks quite interesting when viewed through them.

So what is symmetry? Most people have an intuitive sense of what symmetry is. Symmetry connotes evenness, or balanced sameness. An asymmetrical object is skewed, off-balance, and uneven. It is easy to grasp that a scalene triangle is asymmetrical, whereas an isosceles triangle is symmetrical. To many people an equilateral triangle seems even more symmetrical than an isosceles triangle. The goal of a formal approach is to make explicit our intuitions about symmetry. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists define symmetry as follows:

Symmetry is immunity to a possible change.

How can we apply this notion of symmetry to the scalene, isosceles and equilateral triangles?

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by Debra Morris

Imagine flipping through a copy of the academic journal Sociology and Social Research. One article in particular—”Our Schizoid Culture”—catches your eye. The author is well-known: a professor of sociology, soon-to-be editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review, and, in something of a blow to “two cultures” thinking, future poetry editor for the Humanist magazine. Certainly you could quibble with a number of statements, and some of them seem so wide-ranging as to be inarguable, but in general you share the author's dismay at the “great deal of irrational, contradictory behavior” within contemporary American culture. You agree: “When an individual exhibits similar symptoms, the psychiatrist calls him neurotic, or if he lacks ‘insight' into his difficulties, psychotic.” This is what accounts for, and in your mind fully justifies, the article's tone: honest, emphatic, no-nonsense, but also deeply attuned to ordinary pain and suffering—quite unlike the academic caviling to which you're accustomed. Yes, someone needs to say it: in many domains of life our culture is so confused, so riven, as to be quite, well, unwell. Really, all politics aside, it would be hard to argue with any of this:

We praise competition, but practice merger and monopoly…. We praise business organization but condemn and prevent labor organization…. We give heavier and more certain sentences to bank robbers than to bank wreckers. We boast of business ethics but we give power and prestige to business [disruptors]…. Everybody is equal before the law, except … women, immigrants, poor people.… We ridicule politicians in general but honor all officeholders in particular and most of us would like to be elected to something ourselves. We think of voting as the basis of democracy, but … seldom find more than fifty per cent of eligible voters actually registering their ‘will.'… Democracy is one of our most cherished ideals, but we speak of upper and lower classes, ‘look down on' many useful occupations, trace our genealogies…. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we are full of racial, religious, economic, and numerous other prejudices and invidious distinctions. We value equality, but tolerate greater inequality of wealth and income than has ever existed in any other society…. We drape nude statues and suppress noble books…. We try to foster participative recreation, but most of it is passive, much of it vicious, and almost all of it flagrantly commercialized…. This is the age of science, but there is more belief in miracles, spirits, occultism, and providences than one would think possible…. Our scientific system produces a specialism that gives great prestige and great technical skill, but not always great wisdom…. The very triumphs of science produce an irrational, magic-minded faith in science….

Realize, now, that the article was written in 1935. The author was Read Bain, professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio. As a founding editor of the American Sociological Review, he would become embroiled in early disputes between the “scientists” and “humanists” in his own discipline. He was thus involved in theorizing—and, in that spontaneous way of so many early- to mid-20^th-century American academics—practicing in the mode of a “public intellectual,” that figure who today, apparently, is nowhere to be found.[i] In terms of Bain's analysis as synopsized above, and even more to the point, in terms of the social critique it so earnestly propounds, what struck me when first reading it was how contemporary it sounded and how apt its reproaches were.

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by Lisa Lieberman

As a break from the seriously depressing topics I’ve been writing about lately, and in honor of Bastille Day, I offer this tribute to French gangster films.

First off, you need the fedora. The gangster accessory de rigueur, it was already iconic by the time Paul Muni popularized the look in Scarface (1932). Al Capone, Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly were all photographed wearing one. Baby Face Nelson was astute enough to recognize the souvenir value of his trademark fedora, bartering it for food and a place to hide after a botched bank job.

By the time Bogey donned one to play ‘Bugs' Fenner alongside Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots (1936), it was a bit passé. Robinson, you will note, sports a derby, signaling his authority over his fedora-wearing lackeys. (That's Bogey on the right, with the gun.)

Leave it to the French to reinvent the gangster look and give it panache. In Pépé le Moko (1937), Jean Gabin wears the hat, but he adds a gallic touch: a silk scarf. Gabin's character has style—something his American counterparts lacked—but more importantly, he's got heart. Love will be his undoing, and we're not talking about a fling with some cheap, two-timing dame. We're talking epic love, the kind of love that inspires poetry and songs. Ah, l'amour.

Director Julien Duvivier gives us a tragic hero in the classical tradition who is the victim of fate. Pépé is wanted in France for various crimes. He's been hiding out in the Casbah of Algiers for two years, sheltered by the local inhabitants who will take any opportunity to defy the colonial authorities. He may be king of the Algerian underworld, but exile has turned bitter for Pépé, whose longing for Paris recalls Ovid's lament in the Tristia: “Say that I died when I lost my native land.” Here we see him looking mournfully out over the rooftops of the Casbah to the sea, toward France and freedom, both of which elude him.

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HISTORY’S MOST PERSECUTED MINORITY IS INSENSITIVE TO THE ASPIRATIONS OF WORLD’S MOST DISPOSSESSED TRIBE

by Rafiq Kathwari

My sister-in-law and I sat in the back seat of the Volkswagen as my older brother drove

in desperate rain through red lights to Maimonides. “Kicking,” she said, putting my

hand over her round belly. Shy, I lowered my gaze to her flip-flops on the car floor. She

gave birth to a son in Brooklyn eight years to the day JFK was shot in Dallas. A new

alien in New York, I babysat my cute nephew in a stark rental on Park Avenue in

Yorkville, with a view of Gimbels, now a long extinct department store. His dad rode the

IRT to work on Pine Street; his mom was a salesperson in Herald Square at Korvettes

another extinct store. The boy and I both discovered Big Bird on a Zenith console, my

first TV exposure at age 22. Our Park Avenue closets were stocked with handmade

Numdah rugs Grandfather had shipped from our ancestral home, Kashmir, hoping we’d

become rich fast carpeting America from sea to shining sea. I watched him dunk hoops

in Perturbia, his long hair swishing to Metallica, “Soldier boy, made of clay.” He hunted

jackrabbits at the family farm upstate, where he signed up at the local NRA, his dad’s

rifle on the boy’s shoulder. He scaled a peak one summer in Kashmir, the knotty dispute

forever a passionate subject at the dining table, sweetened often by ice cream after the

dishes were washed, and reruns of All In The Family wrapped up Prime Time. He

praised Allah at the Islamic Center Sunday School on California Road to which I once

gave a brand name vacuum cleaner that failed to suck up the holier-than-thou Talibs.

Allah alone knows what seeds they sowed in his receptive mind for he made his little

sister weep, shaming her for wearing leotards to her ballet class. She loved ballet classes,

and she always looked up to her big brother. He persuaded his dad to stop serving liquor

to guests, and he made his parents proud calling out the Call to Prayer at an annual apple

picking at the farm, an odd religious intrusion that on a crisp Fall day made me feel sad,

because I like my cider with a splash of vodka.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Denying the existence of the material world never goes down well. No matter how clever and compelling the arguments, most of us want to insist that matter exists – and as our insistence becomes more vehement, we start pounding tables, as if that will impress our interlocutors.

Time and again over the years, I have tried selling idealism to students through George Berkeley's arguments. “You know, all you ever experience are perspectives of the world, right? So what idea can you possibly have of a world existing in itself, independently of any perspective? None, of course. So why not dispense with it, and just believe in perspectives that are coordinated with one another?” No dice. They are unmoved.

And I have also tried the more Greco-Germanic route. “You know, the more we strive to understand the physical world around us, the more we end up expressing the world in mathematical structures and relations. So why not think of the world as a set of mathematical structures, and forget about the alleged 'matter' that is supposed to instantiate those structures?” Again, blank stares (thought perhaps it is because I used the word “instantiate”).

In any case, most of us feel a deep need to assert the reality of the material world. Indeed, some of us sneer at the idea of trying to go without it. “Good luck crossing the street,” some may advise a would-be idealist. “The cars might not share your philosophy.” But I wonder – what is behind this deep need? What does the idea of “matter” do for us to earn such dedication on our part?

The more I have thought about it, the more I am drawn to an “obstaclean” theory of matter. To put the theory as simply as possible: matter is ultimately stuff that gets in our way. Material objects are obstacles, pure and simple. We might want this or that, and so we embark upon some plan, but then – wham! Something gets in our way. We didn't plan for that, and we certainly didn't want it. It's there independently, on its own. That's what matter does. That's what matter is. It is the sh*t that gets in our way.

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by D.E. Wittkower, Evan Selinger and Lucinda Rush

Some time has passed since Nicholas Kristof published his controversial Op-Ed “Professors, We Need You!“, and the time is ripe for us to approach the issue afresh. After briefly revisiting the controversy, we’ll offer some thoughts about how to promote public engagement by changing academic cultures and incentives.

When Kristof’s Op-Ed came out back in February, it provoked widespread discussion about whether academics—particularly in the social sciences and humanities—are socially relevant. Much of the heat stemmed from Kristof’s biting central claim: “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.”

Rebuttals to Kristof came swiftly and appeared in different venues.

The New York Times itself published critical responses that highlighted the existence of socially relevant academic contributions in lots of places, including “use inspired research” and “blogs, TED talks, congressional and expert-witness testimony, support of social movements, advice to foundations, consultation with museums, summer programs for schoolteachers and work with prisoners.”

This crucial point that a wider net needs to be cast for defining ‘engagement’ was expressed elsewhere, too. Undeniably, counter-examples abound, including in high profile fora. “Kristof need only open the pages of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Boston Review, The American Conservative, Dissent, The American Prospect.” Indeed, a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that there’s actually robust public academic engagement occurring. “Spend a few hours reading news and opinion pieces, surfing interesting blogs, or dipping into conference-based hashtags on Twitter, and you will find academic voices speaking out—everywhere.”

Shortly after Kristof’s piece ran, the hashtag #EngagedAcademics gained traction on Twitter. Its creator Chuck Pearson lamented that when Kristof wrote about academics he was referring to “research one schools,” and perpetuating an argument predicated upon undue, elitist assumptions: “It still assumes that academics are those pipe-smoking, office-dwelling, masses-disdaining figures from another place. In other words—as the New York Times is so prone to do, when talking about higher education—it assumes that regional universities and state colleges don’t exist. It assumes that teaching-centered liberal arts colleges don’t exist. It assumes that most church-affiliated schools don’t exist. Good heavens, don’t even speak of the community colleges. And it assumes that everyone who could possibly serve as a public intellectual is a FULLPROF or is on the path to FULLPROF status. Non-tenure-track instructors? Visiting professors? God forbid, adjuncts?”

Finally, beyond the questions over whether Kristof was missing all the action happening right in front of him, some worried that asking academics to be more relevant might very well be a tacit invitation to requesting they avoid rocking the boat with controversial assertions: “. . . if ‘relevance’ means becoming mouthpieces of our new ruling class, then Kristof can keep it.”

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by Charlie Huenemann

In 1671, in some letters exchanged with the French mathematician Pierre de Carcavy, Leibniz mentioned his plans to create a calculating machine. Apparently, he had been inspired by a pedometer, probably thinking that if machines could count, they could then calculate. Within a couple of years, he hired a craftsman build a wooden prototype of his machine, and he packed it along in a trip to London in 1673.

He presented the machine to the Royal Society, but his presentation failed. The machine was supposed to not only add and subtract, but multiply, divide, and even extract square and cube roots. But it just didn't work, though everyone was faintly impressed by the attempt. Well, almost everyone. Robert Hooke made close examination of the machine and asked detailed questions of its inventor. Afterward he set about both disparaging Leibniz's attempt to his friends and making a copy of the machine himself and showing it off.

Leibniz went back home, improved his design, and hired a better craftsman. Then, after two decades of tinkering, adjustments, and debugging, he finally had something to show: the Stepped Reckoner.

A little over a year ago, Stephen Wolfram visited the Leibniz Archive in Hanover and saw the Stepped Reckoner for himself, as well as Leibniz's cramped and ingenious pages of calculations and designs. Wolfram notes that the most interesting “idea before its time” element in the device is Leibniz's appreciation for binary arithmetic. Really, the central idea of modern computing is right there, enshrined in beautifully sculpted gears, with a crank on the side.

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Again

My father, at the kitchen table,
in a rare expression of mystery,
said, I think life is a cycle
But he was not a mystical man to me,
nose to the grindstone he ground
day after day, pressed
by incessant work, bound
to contingencies
like Sisyphus to his stone
linearly, but uphill
in his black boots and socks
his blue shirt and pants
cinched with a black belt,
sometimes a fedora,
often a smile through
cigarette-clinched lips,
he trucked on (unbeknownst to me,
and despite his flat trajectory)
mulling over vicissitudes,
contemplating repetitions,
weighing the properties of circles,
as does any common philosopher
hoping to unravel the hiddeness
under blood and bone,
coming to the conclusion
that to begin again
was the only thing that made sense
to him
.

by Jim Culleny
7/1/14

by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Last week I ran into a faintly familiar face and looked at him quizzically as he said, “You asked a good question yesterday. At the talk.” I thanked him, we muttered names; I don't think I heard his name, and I don't think he caught mine. We exchanged a sentence in a bakery of some repute and then went our opposite ways. I felt suitably flattered; the feeling lasted for an hour.

One could argue that the politics of this encounter lie in prolonging its affect without ever completing its narrative. After all, they tell me that the beauty of the fleeting encounter lies in its imminent disappearance. All narratives as we well know, are already rigged, and the novel, as we are told again and again, has been long dead. (Don't believe any of it). This man that I will never see again, this woman who I will not call. Futures, possibilities, rumours, closures, openings, continuations, none need ever bother except to open oneself to these delicious punctuations. But still, aren't some chance encounters also the beginning of long fantasies? And hence I think about the politics of the chance encounter. A glance here, a smile there, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment participating in no pre-determined destiny and yet one that has the possibility of solidifying into fate (never ill-fatedness).

In her beautiful book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant calls this a “situation”, “a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life.” In Berlant's words, this is “a state of animated and animating suspension that forces itself on consciousness, a sense of the emergence of something in the present that may become an event.” I therefore understand vaguely that one shared stop in a present continuous time-frame adds to the je ne sais quoi of daily life, staving the disenchantments of modernity, holding at bay my certain knowledge that nothing will happen today. After all, how would we live life if we were to actually believe that nothing will happen today? So the chance encounter punctuates such hope, delivering small bits of evidence that guarantee the possibility of that event, the one event that will deliver us all.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

The contemporary animal rights movement owes a great intellectual debt to Peter Singer's pathbreaking book ‘Animal Liberation' (1975). In that book Singer made a break with the dominant moral argument for treating animals well, the Kantian line that mistreating animals is a bad – inhumane – thing for humans to do. In its place, Singer advanced a utilitarian case against harming animals, such as by using them for food or experiments, in terms of respecting their right to have their suffering counted equally with that of humans.

Singer's book has had an enormous influence, directly and indirectly, on how many people see the moral status of animals. I include myself among them. But nevertheless I am not sure it is a good book. Despite its rhetorical effectiveness and despite going through multiple revised editions, Singer's official argument is far from compelling. And this is a problem for the animal rights movement. For if Singer's utilitarian account is only a kind of sentimentalism in academic drag then the intellectual respectability it has granted the animal rights movement is a sham. Singer's utilitarianism can't do the job it is supposed to do – it can neither justify the normative conclusions of the book nor meet the minimalist standard of internal coherence. Furthermore, the domination of Singer's flawed argument in the intellectual self-understanding of the animal rights movement may be crowding out other more relevant ethical accounts, most obviously those that directly engage with sentimentalism rather than being embarrassed by it.

In this essay I will focus on the utilitarian case for vegetarianism. Singer argues for the moral recognition of the suffering of animals in the livestock industry and exhorts his readers to end it by not eating meat. But both the form and content of his argument are open to strong challenges.

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by Carl Pierer

It is a good situation for European students in Scotland. We get to study at excellent universities with outstanding research. We do not pay any tuition fees. The institutions are well funded. As part of the EU, access and living is easy. What more could we wish for?

The campaign against Independence for Scotland usually raises worries that this, our, privileged situation might be put at risk by a yes vote. Leaving the United Kingdom might mean that universities in Scotland will lose access to UK-wide research funds. English, Welsh and Northern Irish students would have the status of European students, probably making it illegal for the universities in Scotland to charge them the fees they charge now. Supporters of Independence retort that they have plans for how to cope with these problems. With both sides presenting disagreeing “evidence” for their cause, it is difficult to estimate which hypothetical promise is more likely to be kept. The argument offering the most economic route wins the battle for plausibility.

However, facts about higher education in an independent Scotland would require Scotland to be independent. The issues at hand, the impossibility of a transnational research fund to name just one, cannot be decided upfront. Therefore, this article is not in the business of arguing for either case. Rather, it sketches a framework for a less economised higher education in an independent Scotland.

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by Prashant Keshavmurthy

If there is a literary history of the modern warrior then Matthew Murphy's A Beckoning War should be its latest chapter and, surely, its finest. Told in the third-person, the novel narrates “the Allied advance through the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in September 1944” almost wholly through the perspective of Captain Jim McFarlane of the Canadian Fifth Armored Division.

In the face of his wife Marianne's objections – they have been married less than a year – Jim volunteers to go to war out of a citizenly sense of duty to the Allied cause. The voluntary character of this decision places the novel in a modern tradition of war novels all of whose protagonists enter the fray out of a sense of righteous duty. Among these is Paul Bäumer of Eric Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest Hemmingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemmingway's famously bleak recreations of machinegun slaughter are the ancestors of Murphy's dense descriptions of war machines and wounding.

As both these canonical examples attest, the modern war novel has been an anti-war novel. I prefer to identify Jim McFarlane, not as a soldier, but – despite the archaism of the term – as a warrior. Doing so places Jim in an older lineage of epic heroes (Beowulf, Tristan and Faraydun and Rustam come to mind) each of whom chooses to go to war with an enemy of his people. In so doing, he battles monsters (Beowulf with Grendel; Tristan with Morold; Faraydun and Rustam with a variety of demons) by destroying whose gigantic bodies he defines himself as his people's ideal and marks out a land as his people's homeland. This, at any rate, is the epic norm.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

After the road trip to the Turkey-Georgia border (see Part 1), I returned along with my friend Serhat to Erzurum on the third day. Serhat flew back to Istanbul that same evening. My plan was to travel solo to the town of Kars next morning by bus, spend two full days there before returning by flight to Istanbul. All this was in July 2013.

1.The minibus from Erzurum to Kars

Kars is at the far northeastern end of Turkey, about 3 hours by bus from Erzurum, close to the Armenian and Georgian borders. This is the same town where Orhan Pamuk's Snow is set. In the opening section of the novel, the protagonist Ka takes a bus from Erzurum to Kars; the bus runs into a raging winter storm.

I had a more basic problem. I thought that finding a bus would be a simple task. In the morning I took a taxi to the gleaming and modern Otogar, the bus station, about 14 km from Erzurum Center. But after a frustrating hour of enquiries, I had made no progress. I expected buses to Kars to be frequent. But no one seemed to know where to find one; the private companies – there were no government buses – said they did not have service to Kars that day. I roamed around the well maintained bus station, asking at least ten people, moving in circles, not making any progress, gradually feeling amused at my travel predicament. The language barrier was a huge issue: I realized that even very basic English words and phrases weren't working.

Not knowing how to proceed, I returned to Erzurum Center, and spent some time in an internet café pondering my options. The café owner wanted to help; we used Google Translate to carry on a rudimentary conversation. He let me use his cell phone to call Serhat. Something was eventually arranged, I wasn't sure what; I simply waited. Ten minutes later, a car with a young man and a boy – both from a bus company – arrived to pick me up from the café. They were going to lead me to the bus to Kars. I rushed out with my baggage and left my personal diary next to the computer.

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by Peter Unger

On June 16^th, an interview of me appeared on this site that, initially, was supposed to be largely concerned with what’s in my brand new book, Empty Ideas, to be published officially, by the Oxford University Press, on July 14^th. Well, as actually happened, most of the discussion ended up being about other things, providing little idea as to what’s actually in the book itself, and what it might mean for the importance of – or the unimportance of – a very great deal of mainstream analytic philosophy. In this brief piece, I’d like to do something to help rectify that.

First off, I should tell readers that Amazon.com has done a pretty good job with the first swatches of the book: there, you can see what looks to be more than 40 of the book’s first 56 pages. In just a few moments, the relevance of that will be made quite striking.

A central thesis of the book, perhaps its most central thesis, is this: Contrary to what has been supposed by Anglophone academic philosophers, during the last five decades, there has been offered hardly any new thoughts whose truth, or whose untruth, makes or means any difference as to how anything ever is as concern concrete reality, except for ever so many perfectly parochial thoughts, ideas about nothing much more than which words are used by which people, and how various of these people use these words of theirs — and nothing any deeper than that. (And, if it be required that the newly offered non-parochial thoughts be credible idea – at least more credible than their negations, or their denials, then what’s been relevantly placed on offer, in all these years, goes from hardly anything to nothing at all.) Rather, even while brilliant thinkers have offered thoughts meant to cut lots of concrete mustard, what’s been newly placed on offer, with any credibility, are just so many thoughts empty of import for concrete reality, that is, just so many concretely empty ideas. And, each of these concretely empty ideas owes its emptiness to its being analytic, in a useful sense of that term, so, what’s more, each of the offered thoughts are thoughts that, at least when correct, are just so many analytically empty ideas, each on a par with, in that way, the thought that someone can remember her old college days only if she went to college.

All that is spelled out, at least pretty well, I think, in pages of the book that Amazon offers for your free inspection, especially in the freely available pages comprising almost all of chapter 1.

(And, should those pages leave you a little shy of a firm grasp of what I mean to convey, your grasp should be pretty firm, indeed, if you also read the next pages Amazon provides freely, pages comprising most of chapter 2 of Empty Ideas. For good measure, on Amazon you’ll also get, for free, a good running start on what’s in chapter 3 of the book.) As is my hope, many of those reading these words, will jump over there – right now – and get a good look at that material, doing that before proceeding with any more of this present short piece.

In line with all that material, and at all events, in the rest of this brief piece, I’ll aim to add just a bit more, providing some central material from the next chapter in the book, chapter 4. While this won’t do anything even remotely close to giving an adequate idea of all that goes on in Empty Ideas, a book comprising 9 dense chapters, it may well, I think, convey the flavor of what goes on in about half the book.

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by Grace Boey

Two weeks ago, 3 Quarks Daily ran an interview I did with Peter Unger, professor of philosophy at New York University. The candid conversation touched on several things, including Peter’s newest book Empty Ideas, and the value of philosophy. The piece caused quite a stir within the philosophical community, and generated a significant amount of online commentary — from sources more and less academic alike.

The aim of this follow-up piece is twofold. First, judging from some of the commentary, a brief clarification’s in order regarding the scope and nature of the book and interview (though Peter does much of that himself in his own piece today). Second, the interview has provoked a healthy online debate on the value of philosophical education and philosophy in general; as a young person just starting out in the field, I aim to add a little to this discussion.

About that interview…

One aim of the interview was, of course, for Peter and I to discuss his book. As the conversation turned out, the interview ended up covering a great deal of interesting things — but not representing the many specific and subtle arguments Peter makes in Empty Ideas. A better description of the interview might be that some of it makes for part of a terribly informal prologue (or epilogue) to the book. I encourage interested readers to take a look at Peter’s guest column today on 3 Quarks Daily — A Taste of Some Empty Ideas — to get a better feel of, and engage with, the book.

Next: much of the internet commentary invoked the value of philosophical fields such as moral and social philosophy. While I think this is a great debate, which I'll address shortly, it’s important to note the scope of Peter’s general critique: that is, mainstream Anglophone analytic philosophy. As he expresses in Empty Ideas, normative domains are off the hook:

I do not mean to say much about what’s been going on lately in absolutely every area of terribly respectable philosophical activity. To help you appreciate the range of my argumentation, I say that it’s aimed at what’s recently and currently regarded as analytic philosophy’s core: Certainly metaphysics, and also the most general and metaphysical-seeming parts of, or aspects of, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology. By contrast, my argumentation won’t concern anything that’s deeply normative, or fully evaluative, or anything of the ilk.

On the value of philosophy

Now that that's been taken care of: one debate that the interview addressed obliquely, or at any rate happened to spark off online, was about the value (or non-value) of philosophical study in general. My own reflections, as someone who's just graduated with an MA in philosophy, will be a take on this issue. As a young person just starting out, should I quit while I still can, or should I stay? Will I have anything to offer if I choose the latter?

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Future Self

I imagine my inner working
will be more playful then than now,
less attention to survival paid,
finally getting to the sparkling black hole of day,
a moment of arrival: of at-once knowing and
unknowing Tao
.

I was told by a monk who’d kept silence for years
of when his inner dialog disappeared,
when his chattering selves came to accord
and all that buzzing skull talk
finished, fading, trailed off like
the tail of a fifties forty-five
spiral to infinity as if an engineer
were dialing down the gain,
spinning duality to mum mutuality:
the end of fire and rain
.

and what then, I said,
what was it like?

nothing to be said,
he said,

nothing
to be like
.
.

by Jim Culleny
6/28/14