David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton in Prospect (UK):

A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.

Philosophers have always been informed by scientific research, history and psychology. Indeed, most of the giants of pre-20th century philosophy combined empirical and conceptual studies. Some drew on the research of others, while René Descartes and John Locke performed their own experiments; this was a time when science had not entirely split from philosophy. David Hume mixed reason with experience, including psychological and historical observations alongside more abstract reasoning—A Treatise of Human Nature was subtitled “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Methods of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.”

But for many philosophers today the idea of experimental philosophy still grates. Conceptual analysis has been a dominant strain of Anglo-American philosophy in the past 100 years. Philosophy of this kind considers not so much how things are, but rather how we think about them: the way we carve up the world, the frontiers of meaning, of what makes sense. But for the x-phi fan, empirical research is not a mere prop to philosophy, it is philosophy.

Under the x-phi banner it’s possible to distinguish three types of activity. The first uses new brain-scanning technology, for which philosophers teaming up with neuroscientists, like Katja Wiech, to look for patterns of neuronal activity when subjects are presented with philosophical problems. In the second type, philosophers devise questionnaires to discover people’s intuitions and go out in the street with the trusty clipboard. In the third, they conduct field experiments, observing how people behave in particular situations, often without their knowledge. All three aim to test the philosophers’ assumption that they know from introspection what people are likely to say or believe. The traditional philosophical assertion, “we have strong intuitions that…” or “we can all agree that…” now have to be tested against the evidence.

Stefano Allievi in Reset DOC:

It might not have been Kennedy's Ich bin ein Berliner, but it could have the same political consequences. And we may not see it from Europe, but for the tired and disenchanted Arab and Muslim world, exasperated by a long history of humiliations and defeats now strengthened by the war in Gaza, the interview President Obama released to al-Arabiya is more than a breath of fresh air: it's a sign of change and political turnover, something we weren't ready to expect from the United States. Obama's challenge was tougher than Kennedy's: Kennedy was addressing Europe, particularly an affected and defeated Germany, waiting for the speech of the Messiah as well as for the fundamental material aid the Americans were already providing to. Obama, instead, is speaking to an Arab world less and less pro-American and more and more criticizing, in which older resentments outcropped and exploded during Bush's era, who fed those resentments and never really understood Islam. Obama's words foresee a mild turnover: we'll see where these words will lead to. When the President stated that “people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions”, he informed clearly that there's already a plan of action in the White House.

Probably the plan will be presented in the longed speech going to come from a Muslim capital, within the first hundred of days of the mandate. We are already aware of the new policy: end of overweening unilateralism (and, for what concerns the Muslim world, a blatantly pro-Israelis policy), Guantanamo's closure, troops withdrawal from Iraq, serious commitment for the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; even a different attitude towards Iran, according a scheme that looks forward to deal with the enemies, instead of demonizing them. Obama has confirmed that Israel will remain a strong ally of the Us, since the contrary would have been astonishing. But Obama spoke about 'strong ally' and not 'close' ally. He didn't speak about the Western bulwark in the Middle East, as in the rhetoric of the past years. Meanwhile, Israelis Minister of Defense Barak suspended his visit in the United States. This could be seen as a break to get ready and to reflect upon the change in the US administration attitude. It has surely more to do with this than with the death of an Israelis soldier in a Hamas 'attack given as justification.

Michel Rocard in Project Syndicate:

Ever since mankind began to map the world, the north and south poles have fascinated us, both poetically and scientifically. But, save for a few whalers and explorers, not many people ever went to have a closer look. The serene stillness of the Arctic and Antarctic was a perfect match for human indifference. The onset of global warming, however, has changed everything.

Of course, that old indifference was not universal. In a rare spurt of collective political intelligence, and in order to prevent any risk of international conflict, an international treaty was signed in 1959 to govern Antarctica. This treaty dedicated Antarctica to exclusively peaceful aims. It recognized the existing territorial claims, declared them “frozen,” and forbade all physical assertions of sovereignty on the land of Antarctica.

The nature and content of that treaty were purely diplomatic. Only after its ratification did the first environmental issues arise. These were added to a revised treaty in 1972 by a convention on seal protection, followed, in 1980, by a convention on wildlife preservation. Most importantly, a protocol signed in Madrid in 1991, dealt with protecting the Antarctic environment.

As French Prime Minister, together with Australia’s then Prime Minister Robert Hawke, I was responsible for proposing the Madrid protocol, which transformed the Antarctic into a natural reserve dedicated to peace and science for 50 years, renewable by tacit agreement. It was not an easy success. We had to reject first a convention on the exploitation of mineral resources that had already been negotiated and signed in Wellington in 1988, thus risking reopening very uncertain negotiations. We were bluffing, but our bluff worked.

The Evil Monkey in Neurotopia:

Ok, the serotonin theory of depression may not be wrong. But it is definitely incomplete. One might ask why we use serotonergic drugs to treat depression if the theory behind it is wrong. A good question, but to this I say: because it worked.

(I love the Zoloft depressed marshmallow. He's so cute!)

The original antidepressants, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors and tricyclic antidepressants, were originally used to treat other diseases, such as tuberculosis and psychosis, and found to be effective for depression as a sideline. Did people know how they worked? Nope, but they appeared to work (though only in a subset of the population), and so they came into use. Some people might get up in arms about this, and yell about how we shouldn't use drugs unless we know how they work. But if we spent our lives doing that, no one would have ever made asprin. Or morphine. Heck, no one would have patented Ritalin. We know THAT Ritalin works, and we know what Ritalin does in the brain, but do we know why Ritalin calms down people with ADHD when it's really a stimulant? Not really, no. But it's still out there, because it works.

“Yes,” he says with a smile, “there’s been a lot of Range Rovers catching fire lately.” Then he explains. For the past few years, some large number of Icelanders engaged in the same disastrous speculation. With local interest rates at 15.5 percent and the krona rising, they decided the smart thing to do, when they wanted to buy something they couldn’t afford, was to borrow not kronur but yen and Swiss francs. They paid 3 percent interest on the yen and in the bargain made a bundle on the currency trade, as the krona kept rising. “The fishing guys pretty much discovered the trade and made it huge,” says Magnus. “But they made so much money on it that the financial stuff eventually overwhelmed the fish.” They made so much money on it that the trade spread from the fishing guys to their friends. It must have seemed like a no-brainer: buy these ever more valuable houses and cars with money you are, in effect, paid to borrow. But, in October, after the krona collapsed, the yen and Swiss francs they must repay are many times more expensive. Now many Icelanders—especially young Icelanders—own $500,000 houses with $1.5 million mortgages, and $35,000 Range Rovers with $100,000 in loans against them. To the Range Rover problem there are two immediate solutions. One is to put it on a boat, ship it to Europe, and try to sell it for a currency that still has value. The other is set it on fire and collect the insurance: Boom!

more from this great piece at Vanity Fair here.

Unlike the big climate shifts of the geological past the one that is presently under way is a result of human activity. Despite a determined rearguard action by so-called sceptical environmentalists, there is no reasonable doubt that greenhouse gases released by industrialisation, together with the destruction of forest for farming and more recently bio-fuels, are at the back of global warming today. Possibly cosmic factors may also be at work – sunspot cycles, or whatever. But a mass of scientific evidence points to humanly produced carbon emissions over the past couple of hundred years as being the primary cause of the current process of global warming. Humans started this process, and it is easy to conclude that humans can stop it. That has long been the Green refrain, now echoed by politicians in all parties. James Lovelock takes a different view: the planet is not a mechanism that humans can use as they please, winding it up like a clock and then winding it back when it seems to be running too quickly.

more from Literary Review here.

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charkes Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.
The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

From The Telegraph:

When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett”. The best joke is kept till last: “stop beckett”. Much of Beckett’s career now looks like a set of painful and playful variations on the idea “stop beckett”, as he tried to come to terms with the sprawling mess of the world, while recognising that he would clutter it up even further with his descriptions of it.

His response to this paradox? To do more with less. To write works that shrink on the page but expand in the mind. To put words in their place. Beckett’s style took time to develop – a lifetime, in fact – but his early letters offer fascinating glimpses of its first stirrings, and this monumental edition gives Beckett’s own perspective on the years when he found his feet in the world and his voice as a writer.

Waiting for Godot opens with Estragon trying to take his boot off before giving up with a muttered “Nothing to be done”, and as a young man Beckett certainly seems to have got plenty of practice in getting nothing done. Like a weirdly inverted diary, his letters are a litany of what he has failed to do: “Nothing anyhow is so attractive as abstention”, “Nothing seems to come off”, “I can’t write anything at all”. Even his occasional dreams of escape – his more speculative career plans included working in Moscow under the film director Sergei Eisenstein and training as a pilot – end up with him rooted in the same place, writing sentences that snarl him up like a web.

More here.

Michael Shermer in The Scientific American:

On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the “inside man” in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I co-hosted called Exploring the Unknown (type “Shermer, con games” into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan (the “outside man”) moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.

I objected on moral grounds, insisting that we ask around first, which Dan agreed to do only after I put the cash in an envelope and secretly switched it for an envelope with magazine pages stuffed in it. Before he left on his moral crusade, however, Dan insisted that we each give him some collateral (“How do I know you two won't just take off with the money while I'm gone?”). I enthusiastically offered $50 and suggested that the pigeon do the same. He hesitated, so I handed him the sealed envelope full of what he believed was the cash (but was actually magazine pages), which he then tucked safely into his pocket as he willingly handed over to Dan his entire wallet, credit cards and ID. A few minutes after Dan left, I acted agitated and took off in search of him, leaving the pigeon standing on the street corner with a phony envelope and no wallet!

More here.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso in openDemocracy:

Sergio's entire life was dedicated to the ideals of human rights and humanitarian work. For him freedom and human dignity were the foundation of peace and justice. Sergio was courageous and compassionate. Bold but also pragmatic. Often at the frontlines but always taking the side of the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. Uncompromising in his principles but with a gift for listening to and learning from those he worked with. He had the capacity to combine a maximum flexibility in dealing with the complexities of real life situations with a strong commitment to basic values. This allowed him to stand unequivocally on the side of the victims while talking to all the parties involved. Perhaps this is as close as one can get to being a practitioner of what I would call the art of politics: this combination of vision and pragmatism, flexibility in the means and consistency on the goals.

From Cambodia to Bosnia, Rwanda to Kosovo, East Timor to Iraq, Sergio came to grips with some of the most dreadful conflicts of the last decades. Time and again he was confronted with life and death questions for which there were no easy answers. How to balance the obligation to protect the victims with the denunciation of human rights violations? What kinds of compromise are or are not acceptable to minimize human suffering? At what point pragmatism becomes complacency in the face of the unacceptable? When is dialogue no longer an option and the aggressor has to be engaged despite the risk that, in the short term, the level of violence may increase? How to define this moment in which, faced with massive human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, it is legitimate to use force in the pursuit of peace?

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

In Arab Comment:

They are dying by the day. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih.

If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.

A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?”

Suffice it to add that Salih had an unbounded energy for waging struggles on behalf of the truth—the truth not only of usually unrecorded social suffering, but also the truth about the institutional obduracy that lurks beneath the surface of things, and a persistent endeavor of his last years the callous posturing of so-called realistic, or pragmatic writers.

Power never phased or impressed Si Tayeb, as he was often called: he took on its many contemporary forms with undaunted courage. When the 2005-Cairo Third Arab Novel Conference sought to salvage something of the reputation of its much coveted prize by awarding it to Salih, the decision raised eyebrows. The recipients of the same prize had been Saudi novelist Abdul-Rahman Munif, Sonallah Ibrahim who turned it down, and Gamal El-Ghitani, who belongs to Ibrahim’s defiant generation, declined to be named for the award. “With all due respect Tayeb Salih is an outstanding novelist,” he chimed in, “his winning of the prize does not whitewash the event.”

The Economist revisits Barrington Moore:

In 1966 Barrington Moore, an American historian, pithily summarised decades of scholarly opinion in his formula, “no bourgeoisie, no democracy”.

But that view has been changing. Moore’s academic successors increasingly see the middle class as marginal to establishing a democracy. Some of them think that the poor are more influential, others that the main actors are particular individuals, not social groups. In much of the post-communist and developing worlds, the giddy hopes for liberal democracy that grew up after the Berlin Wall came down have given way to a period of disappointment and democratic stagnation. Despite the huge growth in the middle class, the number of elected democracies worldwide, as tracked by Freedom House, an American advocacy group, has been flat since the mid-1990s.

China’s 800m-strong new middle class has conspicuously failed to rise up against its rulers.

Russia’s smaller, weaker middle class seems to have colluded in the reversal of hard-won but fragile freedoms: hence the popularity (across all classes) of Mr Putin. In both countries, middle-class fear of instability seems to have trumped democratic impulses. Their middle classes have also provided some particularly ugly manifestations of aggressive nationalism: for example, during the controversy over the Olympic torch for last year’s Beijing Games, and in Russia’s war on Georgia.

For a particular type of cinephile from my generation—those of us born in the early ’60s and raised on a strict diet of left-leaning, somewhat Eurocentric art and culture—the physical act of seeking out and consuming great or hallowed or mythical films was as obsessive as our need to experience these films, when and if we found them. When I say physical, I’m talking about the rumors traded among cinephiles, the stories and the clues. We wrote letters to long-forgotten crew members of neglected masterpieces and arranged meetings in difficult-to-pronounce European cities still shrouded behind the Iron Curtain. We sent money orders or contraband to shady PO boxes in hopes of hitting the mother lode. (That’s how I got my hands on Bergman’s Merry Widow script, crafted as a showcase for Barbra Streisand and set aside when it could not be financed.) Did Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-forty-minute version of Out 1, noli me tangere, supposedly screened at Le Havre in 1971, really exist? Could sequences from the abandoned version of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the one starring Jason Robards and Mick Jagger (before Robards had a massive heart attack and Klaus Kinski replaced him), be bought on black-market videotape?

more from The Believer here.

The Turkish model of laïcité is unique in that the state continues to direct religious affairs: the thousands of Muslim clerics who serve in mosques are educated in state-sponsored institutions of higher learning. In the last three decades, however, this peculiar Turkish model has become destabilized, and the sociological firewalls that the Turkish republic tried to erect between state and religion have turned out not to be as thick as the Kemalist revolutionaries imagined. The ensuing difficulties are nicely suggested by a question recently posed by Jürgen Habermas: “How should we see ourselves as members of a post-secular society and what must we reciprocally expect from one another in order to ensure that in firmly entrenched nation states, social relations remain civil despite the growth of a plurality of cultures and religious world views?” Habermas asks this question with an eye to the conflict between European societies and their Muslim residents and citizens. In Turkey, where the majority of the population is Muslim but where a modern constitutional understanding of citizenship and civil rights is institutionalized, the question requires a nuanced response. I will try to respond by reexamining the “headscarf ban” and the legislative struggles surrounding it.

more from Dissent here.

ON HIS DEATHBED in 1851, at the home of his mistress, the great English painter J. M. W. Turner is said to have offered an enviably neat summary of his life’s work and beliefs. Having produced hundreds of oil paintings and watercolors over the previous six decades – a corpus of landscapes that would redefine European art – Turner simply declared: “The sun is God.” In the century after Turner’s death, landscape painting became the great engine of modern artistic creativity. Artists did in fact live by chasing the sun, capturing the way it felt in the world in ever more pioneering ways. Turner’s pale and radiant scenes changed the way artists painted light; his main rival, John Constable, was similarly influential with his moody evocations of shifting weather. The French painters who followed – Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas – successively pushed the boundaries of artistic innovation, and created landscapes that still count today among the great works of art, bridging both serious and popular tastes. In our own time, landscape painting retains an unquestionable popular appeal. As civilization pulls us further and further from nature, it’s no surprise that we cherish glimpses of arcadia. Landscapes have become nearly ubiquitous: in living rooms and waiting rooms; on fine china and restaurant walls; at adult ed and on PBS; in regular blockbuster exhibitions and on the resulting sweatshirts, mugs, and even refrigerator magnets. There is one place, however, where landscapes have almost disappeared: serious contemporary painting.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Crutches
Nikki Giovanni

it's not the crutches we decry
it's the need to move forward
though we haven't the strength

women aren't allowed to need
so they develop rituals
since we all know working hands idle
the devil
women aren't supposed to be strong
so they develop social smiles
and secret drinking problems
and female lovers whom they never touch
except in dreams

men are supposed to be strong
so they have heart attacks
and develop other women
who don't know their weaknesses
and hide their fears
behind male lovers
whom they religiously touch
each saturday morning on the basketball court
it's considered a sign of health doncha know
that they take such good care
of their bodies

i'm trying to say something about the human condition
maybe i should try again

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire. Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine baby wrapped inside. A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine. As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

More here.

Adeela Suleman. Assembled Bondage. 2008

Metal sculpture.

More here, here and here.

Owen Edwards in Smithsonian Magazine:

At the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), a display of six unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) demonstrates what happens when the little airplanes of my childhood get serious. Take the five-pound, 45-inch wingspan AeroVironment RQ-14A “Dragon Eye.” Launched by hand, or with a bungee cord, the tiny scout plane is controlled by GPS coordinates entered into its guidance system with a standard laptop computer. Once aloft on its mission—to transmit video images of territory lying ahead of a marine infantry or transport unit—the little scout is completely autonomous.

“The video is received in special eyeglasses worn by one of the two marines who operate the plane,” says NASM curator Dik Daso. “Taking the pilot out of the plane [in reconnaissance missions] has been a concern for a long time,” says Daso, a former Air Force reconnaissance pilot. “All sorts of cosmic stuff can be done when the person is out of the vehicle. You can design things that are really stealthy.”

The pilotless Dragon Eye keeps marines from having to move into what may be hostile territory without knowing what's ahead. Two tiny video cameras in the nose cone—one positioned to look down, the other to look to the side—give an accurate view of what's on the ground, precise enough for mortar fire to be directed at perceived threats.

More here.