What motivated you to write a book on the history of Russian philosophy?

I came to Russian philosophy via German literature, when I was fired by the use Thomas Mann made of the ‘Russian’ element. That led to an interest in the Russian intellectual tradition in its own right. Tracing the German philosophical sources for characteristic Russian attitudes and the metamorphosis of German aesthetic idealism in Russia opened up a whole field in the history of ideas. But I’d like to distinguish between ‘philosophy’ and ‘thought’ in the Russian context. For the best part of two centuries the subject studied in Russia and the West was ‘Russian social and political thought’, which effectively meant the utilitarian and egalitarian, activist tradition leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. In my lifetime, which coincided with the Cold War, the Soviet Union insisted this was the only body of Russian thought that mattered; that alternatives had ceased to exist after 1917. Most Western scholars and university departments followed suit, because the most urgent political question in the world was how Communism was born and how Russia came to be Soviet. I formed a different view because was lucky enough to study with the nephew of one of Russia’s last significant religious philosophers, Semyon Frank, who died in 1950. My subject was born thirty years ago when I traced the work of Frank and his contemporaries back to their nineteenth-century inspiration in two great Russian-style philosophers, Aleksei Khomiakov and Vladimir Solovyov.

more from Philosophy Now here.

In his two philosophical masterpieces—the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method, 1637) and Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1642)—René Descartes affected an autobiographical mode. He aimed to “delineate my life as in a picture” and urged the reader to treat his text as a personal story—even a kind of fable—of a man who, though educated in one of “the most celebrated schools of Europe,” found himself beset with doubts and uncertainties from which he managed to extricate himself. Initially, the self-portrait strikingly anticipates that of Goethe’s Faust, who, having mastered philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine, and even theology, sees himself, at the end of his studies, as “a poor fool . . . no wiser than I was before.” Descartes’s Narrator, realizing that he must seek within, then describes his meditative itinerary, which leads to the discovery of the “true method by which to arrive at the knowledge of whatever lay within the compass of my powers.”

How close to Descartes as a person is this philosophical fable’s Narrator? The philosophy itself is not a fable—or at least it has to be judged by the same criteria to which any philosophical claim is subject. I am speaking rather of the portrait that Descartes paints of himself as a seeker of truths beyond rational doubt.

more from Bookforum here.

Reuters in Yahoo News:

Ginger can kill ovarian cancer cells while the compound that makes peppers hot can shrink pancreatic tumors, researchers told a conference on Tuesday. Their studies add to a growing body of evidence that at least some popular spices might slow or prevent the growth of cancer. The study on ginger was done using cells in a lab dish, which is a long way from finding that it works in actual cancer patients, but it is the first step to testing the idea. Dr. Rebecca Liu, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues tested ginger powder dissolved in solution by putting it on ovarian cancer cell cultures. It killed the ovarian cancer cells in two different ways — through a self-destruction process called apoptosis and through autophagy in which cells digest themselves, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.

A second study found that capsaicin, which makes chili peppers hot, fed to mice caused apoptosis death in pancreatic cancer cells, said Sanjay Srivastava of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

More here. (Thanks to Kirsten)

From Science:

Living to a ripe old age takes more than a healthy lifestyle: you’ve got to have the right combination of genes. The question is, which ones? Scientists now have several promising candidates thanks to the discovery of a gene variation in humans that appears to increase lifespan and lower the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The finding could eventually lead to the development of life-extending drugs.

Studies of worms and fruit flies show that variations, or polymorphisms, in a single gene can affect how long these creatures live. Scientists think humans carry tens or even hundreds of related polymorphisms. But they’re tough to identify –researchers have found only a few since the mid-1990s. In 2003, Nir Barzilai and Gil Atzmon, who study aging at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, discovered that people with a certain polymorphism of the cholesterol-influencing gene CETP lived longer than those without it. Now the researchers have identified another part of the longevity code.

More here.

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

A thick afternoon fog enveloped the trees and streetlights of The Hague, a placid city built along canals, a city of art galleries, clothing boutiques, Vermeers and Eschers. It is not for these old European boulevards, however, that The Hague figures in the minds of men and women in places as far apart as Uganda, Sarajevo and now Sudan. Rather, it symbolizes the possibility of some justice in the world, when the state has collapsed or turned into an instrument of terror. The Hague has long been home to the International Court of Justice (or World Court), a legal arm of the United Nations, which adjudicates disputes between states. During the Balkan wars, a tribunal was set up here for Yugoslavia; it has since brought cases against 161 individuals. It was trying Slobodan Milosevic — the first genocide case brought against a former head of state — until his unexpected death last month. And now the International Criminal Court has begun its investigations into the mass murders and crimes against humanity that have been committed, and are still taking place, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

In “Why?” (Princeton; $24.95), the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. In the tradition of the legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reëxamine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.

In Tilly’s view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions—conventionally accepted explanations.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at the Discovery Channel:

Testosterone-fueled boys created most prehistoric cave art, according to a recently published book by one of the world’s leading authorities on cave art.

The theory contradicts the idea that adult, tribal shaman spiritual leaders and healers produced virtually all cave art.

It also explains why many of the images drawn in caves during the Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, somewhat mirror today’s artwork and graffiti that are produced by adolescent males.

“Today, boys draw the testosterone subjects of a hot automobile, fighter jet, Jedi armor, sports, direct missile hit, etc.— all of the things they associate with the Adrenalin of success,” said R. Dale Guthrie, author of “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.”

More here.

David P. Barash in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Noting the role of the Royal Air Force in saving his country during the Battle of Britain, Winston Churchill observed that never had so many owed so much to so few. We owe a great deal — indeed, literally everything — to evolution, and yet never have so many said and written so much about something they understood so poorly. Not that evolution is all that difficult to understand. Rather, so many people have such strong feelings about it, often connected to so many regrettable stock phrases, that clear thought has often been obscured. This is especially unfortunate in today’s intellectual — or, more to the point, anti-intellectual — climate, with the Bush administration persistently seeking to trump science with ideology.

Notwithstanding recent victories of science over so-called intelligent design in Pennsylvania and Utah, this particular struggle is not likely to end soon. The following catalog of misconceptions, along with responses, is therefore offered for scholars who may well find themselves confronting voices whose amplitude and frequency exceed their wisdom…

More here.

In Paik’s art and ideas, technology is an enabling rather than determining factor in a dynamic remix—offering the opportunity to expand beyond the artificial boundaries established by the art world, and to function outside the categories used by critics and art historians to package the interpretation of art. Paik was a master of working within institutions, surprising everyone by getting them to cooperate and support his projects. But he was also an activist who sought to change the ways museums and foundations worked, producing a momentum of support for younger artists—even while, true to his Fluxus roots, he was not interested in establishing a “school of video art.” He truly enjoyed challenging himself and finding energy in all forms of music and creative expression. Wanting to never be bored, he felt that change and surprise facilitated the making of art, whose greatest power is to give us new ways to observe and understand the world around us. Paik did just that.

more from Artforum here.

Critics are not often enthusiasts. There is a sense of keeping cool or detached, and even a phrase to describe it: critical distance. Sontag had the opposite impulse: critical intimacy. She claims in the introduction to Against Interpretation that she can write only about what truly engages her—“passionate interest” is her formulation. What it comes down to is that she criticizes what she loves—which made her work and her life a matter of such great intensity. As Craig Seligman wrote in his remembrance of her, “The greatness was in her cool, hardheaded essays on aesthetic matters; as an aesthete defending the senses against the intellect, the new against the established, silence against noise, she was magnificently coldblooded. But she was hotblooded and hotheaded when she turned to politics.” Sontag was hot, sharp, passionate about her subjects, though the prose in her essays is always careful, deliberate, and calm.

more from The Believer here.

From Science:

Here’s the long and short of it: A lens that electronically switches its focus from far to near may someday provide an alternative to traditional bifocal lenses.

The natural lens in your eye is supposed to bend light rays and focus them on the retina at the back of the eye. If the eye is misshapen or not strong enough to do the job itself, glasses help bend the light rays through a process called refraction–the same one that makes a stick appear to kink when one end is submerged in water. Just how much a given lens bends light depends on its precise shape and curvature. Bifocals are essentially two lenses ground into a single piece of glass or plastic. In contrast, the new electronic lens is flat and focuses light through a phenomenon known as diffraction, in which light waves overlap either peak-to-trough to cancel one another out, or peak-to-peak to reinforce one another.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Play hooky, disappear for the weekend, have a fling, binge-shop like a Wall Street divorcée. Spontaneity can be a healthy defiance of routine, an expression of starved desire, some psychologists say. Yet for scientists who study mental illness and addiction, impulsive behavior — the tendency to act or react with little thought — has emerged as an all-purpose plague.

In recent years, studies have linked impulsiveness to higher risks of smoking, drinking and drug abuse. People who attempt suicide score highly on measures of impulsivity, as do adolescents with eating problems. Aggression, compulsive gambling, severe personality disorders and attention deficit problems are all associated with high impulsiveness, a problem that affects an estimated 9 percent of Americans, according to a nationwide mental health survey completed last year.

More here.

“The France team that won the 1998 World Cup was hailed as a symbol of a new harmonious multiracial nation. But now the country is racked by riots and football has become a racial battleground. Andrew Hussey, in Paris, speaks to the heroes of the World Cup-winning team and traces how the dream of 98 became a nightmare of violence and fear.”

From The Observer:

It is now less than eight years since Didier Deschamps, the stand-in captain of the France football team, held the World Cup before an exultant crowd in the Stade de France. But the triumph of his team, such a symbol of progressive multiculturalism, seems already to belong to another era. This much was clear to me on a cold night in early March this year in the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris. I was there to watch Paris Saint-Germain take on Olympique de Marseille, in the so-called Derby de France, which is traditionally the biggest and most hard-fought event in the French footballing calendar.

There is a long history of rivalry and, more latterly, violence between their supporters, who between them represent the two polarities of French life: the hard-headed metropolitan arrogance of Paris and the freewheeling, exhibitionism of the Mediterranean south.

More here.  [Thanks to Mark Blyth.]

“She loves hip-hop, decorating her jeans and pillow fights. So how does she manage as Mrs Rushdie?”

Giles Hattersley in the London Times:

It might have been the way she slumped into her seat like an overgrown teenager, or the second time she said “dude”. Whenever it was, at some point I began to ask myself the same question that bitchy members of the London literati did two years ago: why on earth did Salman Rushdie marry her? She may be beautiful, have an arts degree from Clark, the American liberal college, and speak five languages (Hindi, Tamil, Italian, Spanish and English), but something about Padma Lakshmi makes it hard to take her seriously.

“So, dear,” The Sun once asked, “what first attracted you to the millionaire novelist Salman Rushdie?” Probably because of such remarks Lakshmi rarely grants interviews, but she is in London and keen to promote her British acting debut in ITV’s Sharpe’s Challenge — in which she happens to be very good.

It is also half-term for her stepson Milan, Rushdie’s eight-year-old from his third marriage. Despite her husband’s unhappy memories of the capital (years of living under a fatwa), the couple still spend about four months a year here. Usually they reside in Manhattan.

We meet in a members’ bar near her Notting Hill flat. She arrives late to a collective turning of heads. Looking bored in a vest and jeans, her beauty is still transcendent although her voice does rather spoil the effect. She is a nasal valley girl…

More here.

Dear Readers,

Alas, we did not win in either of the categories that we were finalists in. Best Group Blog was won by Shakespeare’s Sister with FireDogLake as runner up, while the Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition was won by Echidne of the Snakes with Bag News Notes the runner up.

Our sincerest congratulations to them, and to all the other winners. Please do click on the above links and check them out.

We feel honored to have made it into the top ten finalists in each category that we were nominated it, and we’ll be back next year to CRUSH everyone else, dammit! (And if that doesn’t work, maybe we’ll start our own %*&*@&%@$ awards. Yeah… that’s the ticket!)

Seriously though, thanks so much to everyone who took the time to vote for us. We really do appreciate it a lot, and please do keep visiting and telling others about 3QD, will you?

For more details and the winners of all the other categories, click here.

Katsushika Hokusai. Mt.Fuji from Umezawa. From the series “Thirty-six views of Mt.Fuji”, 1827.

More on this famed, extremely talented, and prolific Japanese artist here and here.

About a current Hokusai exhibition here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way…

HIV is also a retrovirus, meaning that it inserts its genes into our own. But it is not a live-in virus. It primarily infects one class of white blood cells, and then spreads to other people through shared needles, sex, and other forms of contact. HIV leads to the collapse of the immune system, otherwise known as AIDS. Growing evidence suggests that it does so not by killing cells directly, as once thought, but by chronically overactivating the immune system. As the immune cells divide madly, they eventually start malfunctioning and even committing suicide.

In an opinion piece in PLOS Pathogens, Viktor Muller and Rob J. De Boer point out that most of HIV’s cousins, which infect other primates, don’t do anything of the sort. I’ve reproduced a tree they put together, showing the relationship of HIV-like viruses in apes and monkeys. (Go here for a closer view.) HIV, marked in red, is not a single lineage of viruses. One form, HIV-2, jumped from sooty mangabey monkeys into people several times. The more common form, HIV-1, descends from chimpanzee viruses, which have moved into humans many more times. As the tree shows, lots of primates get infected by their own HIV relatives, and this appears to have been going on for millions of years. But if you look at sooty mangabeys or some other monkey, you generally find abundant amounts of the virus without any sign of an overactive immune system. It’s not that the virus carried by sooty mangabeys is weak. Scientists have injected it into other monkeys, and it has triggered a strong immune response. The blue arrows on the tree mark the rise of new virus strains in macaques that came from sooty mangabeys. This shift appears to have happened at primate research centers in the past few decades. In their new hosts, these viruses cause lots of nasty symptoms.

More here.

“How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.”

Michael Kinsley in Slate:

CNN says it is just thrilled by the transformation of Lou Dobbs—formerly a mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with corporate CEOs—into a raving populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It’s like watching one of those “makeover” shows that turn nerds into fops or bathrooms into ballrooms. According to the New York Times, this demonstrates “that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of the day’s events,” but “a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic.” Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, made the same point in a recent New Yorker profile of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Cable, Lemann wrote, “is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise personalities.”

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, told the Times that Lou Dobbs’ license to emote is “sui generis” among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not true. Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN’s rising star. His career was made when he exploded in self-righteous anger while interviewing Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina and gave her an emotional tongue-lashing over the inadequacy of the relief effort. Klein said Cooper has “that magical something … a refreshing way of being the anti-anchor … getting involved the way you might.” In short, he’s acting like a human being, albeit a somewhat overwrought one. And now on CNN and elsewhere you can see other anchors struggling to act like human beings, with varying degrees of success.

More here.

From Time Magazine:

As the divisive national debate on immigration heats up–security, identity and wealth all at issue–every side can agree on just one thing: the system is broken Read the Cover Story

The cover package also includes:

	What It Means for Your Wallet Immigration tends to benefit the overall economy–but not everyone gains
	How Kennedy Got His Way
	The Proposals

“He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?”

Gavin Borchert in Seattle Weekly:

It’s Mozart’s 250th birthday, and almost as prevalent as concerts of his music are complaints by critics that everyone plays Mozart all the time anyway. How do you keep standard repertory fresh and bring in audiences in such a situation? With Mozart’s birth (1756) and death (1791) both celebrated every 50 years, we’ve barely had time to get over the 1991 party.

Any music festival’s first responsibility in programming, I suppose, is to justify itself—to convince concertgoers that saturation bombing of Composer X (or Period Y or Geographic Region Z) is warranted. Among a somewhat halfhearted collection of standard-repertory symphonies and concertos, the Seattle Symphony’s January Mozart festival took an oddly funereal tone with a performance of his Requiem. No doubt, there were some concertgoers puzzled that it was his birth, not his death, that was being observed—not to mention that the SSO plays the work every year anyway, and it’s only half by Mozart.

More here.