by Tim Sommers

In honor of “Reading Hume Today,” a conference honoring professor Elizabeth Radcliffe and her work on Hume, here at my new home, the College of William and Mary, I thought I would read Hume today and revisit the topic of my very first 3 Quarks Daily article over five years ago, “Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics.” (I also highly recommend Massimo Pigliucci’s essay responding to that piece.) However, if you just can’t wait to find out why Hume was in favor of gossip you can scroll down to the last few paragraphs.

What I want to talk about, and find endlessly interesting, is why David Hume, the fourth greatest philosopher of all time, thought morality must be subjective. Every time I return to it, I manage somehow to be surprised by his argument. In particular, what’s striking (to me) is that his argument is based on motivation. Morality must be subjective, he says, otherwise it couldn’t motivate us to action.

In Book II, Part III, Section III of his Treatise on Human Nature (subtitled, “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects”), Hume sought to put an end “to talk of the combat of passion and reason.” “Reason is, and ought only be,” he famously proclaimed, “the slave of the passions”. He makes a number of striking claims in this section that epitomize this view. Perhaps, most shockingly he says, “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”

Here’s his line of reasoning, I think. (As befits the fourth greatest philosopher of all time there are many, many other readings of Hume.) Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

The most fundamental example of a function is a polynomial. Everyone sees polynomials in school. These are the functions whose rules involve taking the input to powers, perhaps multiplying by numbers, and perhaps doing some additions and subtractions. For example,

Here the input variable is x. When you input x= 2 or x=1 or x=-1, you get p(2)=3, p(1)=2, and p(-1)=6 as outputs.

You may recall that a zero (or root) of a polynomial is the name for an input that happens to give you zero as an output. For example, the polynomial x² – 4x + 3 has zeros x=1 and x=3. On the other hand, the polynomial p(x) doesn’t seem to have any zeros.

Many applications in and out of math come down to the question of finding the zeros of a polynomial. Several years ago, we talked here at 3QD about how certain geometric constructions from Ancient Greece are impossible with ruler and compass, but become possible using origami. Under the hood, this came down to understanding the zeros of certain polynomials. Important parts of number theory and geometry are essentially about the problem of understanding the zeros of polynomials. Read more »

Matsumi Kanemitsu. For The Dream, 1988.

More here and here.

by Chris Horner

Imagine you are put in regular close contact with someone who regularly makes your life difficult. This could be at work, or a flat share, anything. They leave you to finish the chores they start, invade your space, and generally act in an inconsiderate way. You’d like to put some space between them and you, but you can’t. Perhaps you’ve some choice words for them which you are preparing to share, but holding back your exasperation you try to point out to the person the problems they are causing. When you start to do that, this person responds by disclosing that they have a condition that, according to them, makes them act in this way. For our purposes this could be anything: ADHD, autism, PTSD, neurosis stemming from childhood neglect, bipolar – anything (to be clear: I am not suggesting that any of these are necessarily connected to antisocial behaviour; let’s also assume that they aren’t inventing the diagnosis, and that the condition is real). [1]

How does this change your feelings about the situation, if at all? Perhaps you try to talk through the situation to find a way to work with this person to mitigate the antisocial behaviour. But it continues. You might find a way of leaving the situation, or of getting outside assistance. You might check that there has been a legitimate medical diagnosis, all sorts of things. Suppose the condition has been diagnosed by a qualified person. So they do have this condition. Again: what has changed? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by O. Del Fabbro

Of 969 days in captivity, Stanislav Aseyev spent 875 days in complete isolation in a modern concentration camp in Russian occupied Donetsk. In his memoir, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Aseyev aims to write about this personal experience.[1]

Torture is, according to Aseyev, a complex system of measures. The goal is not necessarily to hurt the victim physically, but to destroy their individuality. Indeed, Aseyev is victim to a mixture of physical and psychological torture, simply because body and mind cannot be separated from one another. After electrical shocks, or beatings with the PR-73 (a standard Soviet-police rubber baton), Aseyev’s tormentors ask him seemingly weird questions such as his belief in God, if he’s ever jumped with a parachute and how many times he masturbates per day. Every once in a while, he is asked questions about his actual charges: espionage. The goal, of course, is to disorient the victim, to potentially make him lie only to be able to punish him even more. Aseyev is released from prison in December 2019.

Even though Aseyev speaks only about his personal experience, his case is one of many. It is representative for Russia’s cruel warfare against Ukraine, the terror that started even before the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ever since, we have seen the mass graves in Bucha, have watched videos of the mercenary Wagner Group executing its own members with a sledgehammer, read about the castration of an Ukrainian POW by Russian soldiers and the sexual abuse and rape of women and men, children and elderly. We witnessed how thousands of Ukrainian children were shipped to Russian territory and indoctrinated with Russian propaganda.

Russian cruelty seems to dwell from an endless well, even affecting nature, that is the biodiversity of ecosystems, as the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam has shown. These examples might be singular events, but taken together, they show the systematic cruelty hiding behind Russian warfare. Lastly, Russians are not just cruel to their enemy, they are also active within their own ranks, for example when Russian soldiers executed their comrades, who were fleeing from the frontline. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey 

On the bus my mind just keeps running

And I’d love for it to slow down. It does when I’m writing because the thoughts can’t happen four times a second. They go as fast as my fingers do, and my fingers are clunky on this little glass screen, they have to go back and polish up the thoughts so that they’re readable, so that they make sense. My mind doesn’t do that by itself, it just jumps from jump to jump to jump. But it’s hard to type on the phone and so I just sit and think 

I miss [redacted] but it was right to say goodbye because I’m not ready to spend more time with them I need a psychologist to diagnose my adhd and a therapist to rewire my brain and ketamine therapy is something I should look into I’m gonna be so tired at work today I have to be a self starter I’ll tell my coworkers I’m kinda sick so they don’t expect too much of me I’ll close my eyes and open them when the bus stops again I forgot to spritz the plants today I should write a story called all our husbands are gay, all our wives are lesbian and it would be humorous but probably insensitive, cut to a random memory from my trip to Greece when I walked around the ruins of a temple with James, spliced with the time I was walking a dog and failed it because it pulled on the leash and I let go and it ran across the street + got bit. I get bored and check my apps, I deleted an app and now I spend too much time on social media and I can’t read War and Peace because my brain is tired, I can’t write well on the bus, can I? That’s language that limits you, E, you often let language limit you , using language which further locks me to its statement; I often let language limit me because it was once said about me by me and it clicks in my head that way 

Do I have to do backflips and say that language does not limit me in order to harness its power in a productive way?

It all feels so overwhelming but in reality there are only a few things I need to do

Find an apartment find a therapist and a psychologist find a graduate program to apply and find a graduate program that will accept me and find a spot in a career I have no energy for right now because I’ve just been stuck because you’ve been giving yourself away to other things and other people Read more »

Sculpture in a pool at the outdoor deck of the Tower Garden restaurant in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Brooks Riley

Ems, 17 June 1880

“This morning I took a long walk with Papa . . . judging by this morning, a more awfull profusion, diffusion, infusion and confusion of colours it is difficult to imagine . . . the Britishers especially excell in this art and their colours are put together as they might be on the dirty palette of an inexperienced painter.. . .”

Count Harry Kessler was born to write it all down. In this excerpt from his second ever diary entry, written at the German spa town of Bad Ems where Kaiser Wilhelm also summered, the 12-year-old French-born German boy has a high old time stretching the limits of the English language, in preparation for matriculation at a prestigious British boys’ school. An incipient snob and precociously intelligent, Kessler offers us a nutshell preview of the diabolical pleasure with which he will mash words, sounds and images for the next 57 years—savaging inanity wherever he sees it—but more importantly, promoting and nurturing great artists and thinkers along the way, including Rilke, Beckmann, Seurat, Grosz, Maillol, van der Velde, Max Reinhardt, Gordon Craig, von Hofmannsthal, Stravinsky, Rodin, Kurt Weill, Strauss, Nijinsky, Munch, Walther Rathenau and many others.

“. . . the promenade is a crowd of dresses so short and tight one might take them for underpetticoats or so long and loose you could mistake them for dressinggowns, of cloaks most certainly copied from the assyrian bas reliefs or from the cloaks found with the mummies in the pyramyds (with which they have a strong resemblance,), . . . of projecting stomacks, of very flatt and long feet, of red faces and other accomplishments. . .”

Nota: In coming to Ems we had 19 trunks and 18 parcels in the whole 37 things, Rien que çà!

Harry takes a walk with his Papa, but he won’t tell us what they talked about. What matters to Harry is reporting what he saw on that walk and how he saw it—as journalist, critic, satirist, diarist and outsider. His nota, thrown in for fairness, adds his own family to those guilty of excess.

In this opening salvo, we learn that beyond the omniscience of his observations, Kessler is not terribly interested in writing about himself. The less he tells us, the more we want to know about him. The less he tells us, the more we will start to feel  that we know him, warts and all, as the mists around his persona slowly begin to lift. It is this indistinct but discernible sum of a man who will become as fascinating as the many famous people he writes about during his whirlwind European lifetime. At ease in five languages (two of them dead), he manages to combine a phenomenal intellect with the social ease that made him a lively addition to any dinner party. Read more »

by Joseph Carter Milholland

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost
my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of
myself, and what remains is bestial.

– Cassio (Othello, Act 2, Scene 3)

So far, my focus in this series of essays (see part 1 here and part 2 here) has been how we write and talk about the literary canon. The canon is a rather abstract subject, but when we talk about how the canon has changed, we are wont to talk about something even more abstract: a writer’s reputation. 

“Reputation” – read enough literary essays, and you’ll see that word appear again and again. “In recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now,” a writer in the New Yorker explains. “A century after his birth, and more than half a century after his death, Wilde continues to enjoy a reputation that can hardly be justified by his mere literary achievement,” alleges another writer in the New Republic. “In the 32 years since Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate (not counting writers from other countries who became American citizens), Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure,” a third writer in Slate asserts. 

Reading all this concern over reputation can be a bit dispiriting; the literary critic who records the minute changes in a writer’s reputation begins to look drearily like that of a day trader obsessing over the small variations in corporate shares (only, the literary critic makes a lot less money). What, after all, does reputation have to do with serious literary criticism? If a writer is good, why bother at all about their reputation?  Read more »