by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

As the January 6th hearings continue and Americans watch new, seemingly undeniable video evidence of insurrection and quibble about whether one could reach the steering wheel of the Presidential SUV from the back seat, the ideas of Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science who coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to explain scientific revolutions remain prescient as ever, even as we approach his 100th birthday.

According to Kuhn in his most famous work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, scientists generally think and work in a state of what he called normal science. Under normal scientific conditions, all research occurs within a paradigm. Paradigms, he explained, do four interrelated things.

First, they define the terms that describe the universe, like atom or force. Second, they determine what counts as legitimate questions. (“What is the mass of the electron?” might be fair, for example, but not “Do electrons have polka-dots?”) Third, they set limits on which tools you can use to answer those questions. (Reading a voltmeter is perfectly acceptable, but reading tea leaves is out.) And fourth, they determine what counts as an acceptable answer to those questions. (Just to pick one: you don’t get to use negative lengths.)

Normal science is puzzle solving. The paradigm frames riddles and gives us the rules we need to follow in order to solve them. If you solve an approved riddle, you get to publish your answer, becoming a member of the community of normal scientists. The paradigm gives members of the scientific community their union cards, essentially, so the last thing they want to do is to question the rules of that paradigm. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

I knew it was coming, yet I was still surprised when it hit my classroom. 

“We shouldn’t be looking at this.”

Students have complained about my course before, certain that they should not be expected to read anything so difficult in a high school philosophy course. The effect of this grumbling can be seen in the watering down of some English courses deciphering Hunger Games instead of Hamlet.  I enjoyed that popular trilogy, and I’m no Shakespeare stan, but I do assert that it’s vital to develop more complex reading skills and close reading habits  in our teenagers with works that demand consideration of each word before they walk out of high school. Too many in our society are losing their ability to sustain attention to the end of a magazine article and grasp the nuances of an ambitious claim to the point of believing radical headlines and letting noxious chants sway their voting habits. So I firmly stand my ground, luring them to continue with the potential reward of being able to impress their friends and destroy their enemies with their enhanced reading superpowers.  

But this semester brought out that other quibble. 

A few students were adamant that I shouldn’t be getting them to read philosophers who are sexist or racist or homophobic. 

But that’s almost all of them! Read more »

by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I think a lot about the fate of human civilization these days.

The subject worries me because, after a half-century of studying the destructive forces at work in the systems of civilization, my gut feeling is that it is no better than a toss-up whether, in the coming generations or centuries, humankind will get its act together well enough to prevent our civilization from destroying itself

(Or, if not destroy itself utterly, at least inflict profoundly catastrophic damage– through some catastrophic nuclear war, or through some ruinous degradation of the systems of Life-on-Earth.)

And I worry because it doesn’t seem that humankind, taken as a whole, is giving this uncertainty about the human future – which could hardly be more consequential — nearly the kind of attention it deserves.

(Deserves– when so much of what we hold sacred is under serious threat — from human well-being, to the beauties of this living planet, to our aspirations for a human world ruled by Justice and the spirit of “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men”).

Upon reflection, that deficiency of attention is not so surprising: our history had no reason to equip us – to a depth commensurate with the stakes – with the capacity to connect our minds and our motivational core with this kind of challenge. Read more »

Lorenza Böttner. Face Art, 1983.

Digital C print.

” … Born in Chile, Böttner lost both arms in an accident at the age of eight. Institutionalized in Germany, where she moved with her mother for treatment, she rejected prosthetics intended to compensate for her supposed disability. In art school, she started presenting as female and assumed the name Lorenza. Although her career spanned just sixteen years, Böttner created hundreds of individual works, painting with her feet and mouth and using dance, photography, street performance, drawing, and installation to celebrate the complexity of embodiment and gender expression. Casting herself as a ballerina, a mother, a young man with glass arms, a Greek statue, Böttner’s work is irreverent and hedonistic, filled with the artist’s joy in her own body.”

More here and here.

Thanks to Laura Raicovich for making me aware of this amazing person!

by Jim Britell

Wise words from 50 years of managing political and environmental campaigns, and doing staff work in all kinds of settings from a Cabinet secretary’s front office to local planning boards.

10 proverbs on Politics

When someone says, “I’m not getting down to their level,” don’t expect anything at any level.

A forum in which truth is not a defense is a political proceeding.

The best guide to a president’s values are their golf partners.

Most American generals would gladly sacrifice their life for their country, just not their careers.

The first step in making change is to transform the “utterly impossible” into the “highly improbable”.

People often call things “perfect storms” to obfuscate human agency and blame.

Fascists fear most their moderate followers.

To get a progressive to abandon a sensible policy, attack it as racist or sexist.

Idealism is the craving for political processes other than the ones you have.

America is devolving from the best country in the world to the least worst. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri and Ayesha Khan

Much has been written about the U.S. Supreme Court’s last term.  The conservative majority is in a hurry to undo decades of jurisprudence.  But what is the Court substituting in its place?

In its recent decision, West Virginia vs Environmental Protection Agency, the Court declared that the Clean Air Act of 1970 did not authorize the EPA to establish a carbon dioxide emissions trading system.  And in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court held that a high school could not prohibit a football coach from taking a knee in prayer at midfield after games.  In the former decision, the Court relied on the “major questions” doctrine; and in the latter decision, the Court relied on a “historical test.”

These may seem like disparate decisions, covering entirely unrelated circumstances.  But what unites them is that, in both cases, the Court failed to tell us what its test means.  The U.S. Congress, state legislatures, public school districts, police departments, and federal agencies are all subject to the U.S. Constitution.  When the Court announces tests and doesn’t tell those institutions what those tests mean, not only has the Court failed to do its job, but the institutions are left to guess.  Even worse, amorphous and ill-defined tests leave the Justices free to rely on their personal, religious, and political viewpoints in the decisions in question as well as in cases that come before them in the future. Read more »

by Michael Liss

In interpreting what is meant by the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to ‘liberty,’ we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy.

–Justice Samuel Alito

Elections have consequences. Sometimes those consequences may be unintended, but they are always there. Elections have consequences. You can’t say it too many times because too many voters don’t act if they believe it. They should. Elections have consequences.

The rule was ignored by President Obama and Democrats in 2014, which led to a disastrous Midterm that flipped control of the Senate to Mitch McConnell and his band of Merrick Garland stonewallers.

It was ignored when too many Republican POTUS hopefuls crammed into the 2016 primary, giving Donald Trump an opportunity to run one of the most brilliant games of political snooker ever, putting to death their personal ambitions one by one, and capturing an entire political party.

It was ignored when too many Democrats wrung their hands over the highly qualified but easily disliked Hillary Clinton and just couldn’t bring themselves to get to the polls because, well, how bad could Trump be, he’s a businessman, and Hillary Clinton is…Hillary Clinton.

It was ignored by Trump and Republicans in 2018, when Trumpian overreach and bombast led to the Democrats’ winning 40 seats and taking back the House, with enough cushion to leave control of the future January 6 Committee in the hands of Nancy Pelosi.

It was ignored by Trump a second time (although he likely didn’t care) when his blistering approach to his loss in Georgia helped Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff become Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, giving working control of the Senate back to the Democrats. Read more »

Snail sitting on a chair in my backyard in June, 2022.

by Bill Benzon

11th Street Lilies: That’s a kind of photograph that exemplifies an urban pastoral sensibility. Loosely speaking it depicts an urban setting, but one that evokes a pastoral mood. In this case the photograph is dominated by the lilies in the foreground, which are in a flowerbed in a median strip running for several blocks on 11th street in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I currently live. It is a residential area, with two and three-story row houses and one or three small low-rise apartment buildings. While the flower bed is obvious enough when you walk the street, it dominates this photograph because I chose to make it so.

* * * * *

It was in graduate school, I believe, that I heard someone refer to Hart Crane as a poet of the “urban pastoral,” referring, I believe to his collection “The Bridge” – which I’ve not read. That was the first time I heard the phrase, “urban pastoral,” and it has stuck in my mind. But the phrase disappeared from view until 2004 when I began wandering my Jersey City neighborhood, camera in hand, in search of wild graffiti.

I photographed the graffiti, of course – lots of it – but that’s not all. I photographed other things as well, close-ups of bees and flowers, panoramas of this or that neighborhood view, of the Manhattan skyline from Jersey City, and – cliche of cliches – sunrises and sunsets. Thus on October, 1, 2007, ago I blogged “This Jersey City My Prison,” in which I set Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” amid photographs taken in Jersey City. I have since reset the poem with photos I’ve taken in Hoboken. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I recently started a new job. The process of looking and interviewing for this job was unlike any other I’ve been through because I now live on the Caribbean island of Grenada. I moved here during the height of the pandemic when everyone was working from home. When I told my plans to the company I was working for then, their only comment was that I needed to stay domiciled in the US, which I have. But now that we’ve all gone back to some kind of post-COVID normalcy (even if variants are still coming at us hard and fast), I wasn’t sure how to approach a new company with my slightly unusual living situation. My initial thoughts were that I get through a first interview before bringing it up, but that seemed not only disingenuous but also pointless; they were going to have a problem with it, or they weren’t. Putting off the reveal was just a waste of everyone’s time. And so, I mostly led with this news. Amazingly, no one cared. 

I work in sales in the technology start-up space, and I realize that this niche of corporate life is perhaps not representative. However, it’s still interesting that not one of the companies I interviewed with even took a beat over my location. The company I finally accepted an offer from, BusinessOptix, is split between the UK and Kansas in the US. The client I’ll be managing is mainly in New York City, so as long as I was in the same time zone as them and could get back to NYC quickly, it wasn’t an issue. 

In a couple of weeks, I’m running a workshop in New York where I’ll meet some of my new colleagues for the first time. This is a meeting I’ve been pushing for, because, as much as I am a huge advocate (and beneficiary) of remote work, there are also times when you just need to be in the same room as people sitting across a table for a bunch of hours, then breaking bread and drinking some wine together. I’m far from the only person trying to find that perfect balance of in-person and virtual. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the early 1990’s I was a visiting fellow at St Catherine’s College and an academic visitor at Nuffield College in Oxford. At Nuffield College at that time two friends from my Cambridge student days were Fellows, Jim Mirrlees and Christopher Bliss. (I think Jim was mostly away during my visit, and graciously asked me to use his large office at Nuffield). The other person I used to see there off and on was Tony Atkinson who became the Warden of Nuffield shortly afterward. I knew Tony since our student days in Cambridge. Like me he also moved from one Cambridge to the other, to MIT, roughly around the same time. Both of us were heavily influenced by our teacher James Meade, though Tony never did a Ph.D. (as used to be the old British tradition—neither James Meade nor Joan Robinson had a Ph.D.) Tony did not follow Meade in the latter’s work on international trade, as I did, but in other respects he broadly followed on the footsteps of Meade, apart from sharing Meade’s personal characteristics of modesty, decency and a positive vision of the future. Tony was certainly among the best economists of my generation, with pioneering work on inequality, poverty, public policies, redistributive taxation, and welfare. He was also an advocate of Universal Basic Income. I had co-authored a chapter for the Handbook of Income Distribution that he co-edited with François Bourguignon, a French development economist friend of mine.

Among Meade’s international trade students one of the most famous was Max Corden (who grew up in Australia after fleeing Nazi Germany), also a very decent cordial man, who was a Fellow at Nuffield College, but had left for US some years before my visit. I had known Max since his earlier Oxford days. Whenever we met we shared our experience and memories of our common teacher, James Meade. Max was of the opinion that whatever people later discovered to be important in international trade theory was somewhere in the dense prose of Meade’s two big volumes on international trade, published in the early 1950’s. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Computers are not alive. Hopefully, we can agree on that. It’s a place to start.

But if anyone succeeds at creating a program that exhibits true artificial general intelligence, wouldn’t such a program, despite not being alive in the biological sense, deserve some kind of moral consideration? Or, at least, if we loaded the AI into a robot body, especially one capable of experiencing pain-like discomfort, wouldn’t it be wrong to use it as a slave? (Ironically, the word “robot” comes from a 1921 Czech play, R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”) by Karel Čapek, and specifically from “robata,” which is just the Czech word for “slave.”)

But if an AI exhibited certain characteristics, like human-level intelligence, we would consider it, I hope, a person in the moral sense, despite its not being alive. On the other hand, presumably streptococcus or human sperm, while clearly alive are not persons. If that’s right, then being alive, in the biological sense, is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a person in the moral sense.

If friendly, intelligent aliens showed up to help us out with global warming, they would probably be alive, unless they were robots. And they would, of course, not be human (unless they seeded the Earth long ago with their DNA and they are us). But if they are intelligent, able to communicate, and act with admirable intentions, they would deserve to be treated as “persons” in the moral sense, surely? Similarly, if we succeed at decoding dolphin language, or find that some other nonhuman animal exhibits intelligence on par with human intelligence, shouldn’t we think of them as persons? Non-human persons, sure, but persons nonetheless.

Since whether you are human or alive does not settle the question of your personhood, we are going to need some other criteria. But, first, what do we mean by personhood in the moral sense? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

At the end of April heartbreaking news spread through my area of mathematics. Georgia Benkart had unexpectedly passed away. I first met Georgia when I was a graduate student, we’d seen each other at numerous conferences and other events, shared a few dinners, and I considered her a friend. Still, I was a little surprised at how much her passing affected me. I wasn’t the only one moved by the sad news. People expressed their sorrow in phone calls, emails, and in social media. The University of Wisconsin — Madison math department collected a sampling of folks’ remembrances on their webpage.

Be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.  — Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Georgia earned her PhD in 1974 and spent her entire career at UW — Madison. She wrote 130+ research papers and still had multiple ongoing projects and collaborations. Her work was remarkable for its breadth, depth, and elegance. Based on her results alone Georgia had a sizeable impact on mathematics. Indeed a recent article in the American Mathematical Society’s main publication was devoted to some of the gems from Georgia’s work. It gets rather technical at times, but I recommend at least skimming through to get the feeling for her research. Read more »

Habiballah of Sava. Concourse of The Birds, ca. 1600

More here.

by Christopher Horner

Kant on Beauty

Immanuel Kant is perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times. His Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788) famously investigated the the limits to human knowledge and the nature (as he saw it) of true morality respectively. But in 1790 he turns his attention to judgment, to what it is and what that implies, and what he says in The Critique of Judgment is interesting. Whether one agrees with him or not, what he has to say remains among the most suggestive and fascinating contributions to the question of what a judgment is. He discusses the way in which we find purpose and meaning in the world, the ‘sublime’ and much more, but my focus here is just on what he has to say about the judgment of beauty in nature and art, and to what extent we can find it convincing. Read more »

by David Oates

We sit in David Biespiel’s Republic Café: all of us together in the public space of democracy. It appeared in 2019, as American fascism made its perennial strut, less disguised than usual. At that point we’d endured two years of it. Lies spewed from the Leader’s mouth like flies from an open sewer, his followers enacting Hannah Arendt’s crisp formulation:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist. (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, p. 474)

It felt to me that Republic Café was the book we were waiting for, offering confirmation that I wasn’t crazy – that our politics really were (and are) that bad. And as a book of poetry, its honest eloquence offered evidence that good sense and good will were everywhere around us, too. I was joining an invisible multitude. Not a mob. A quiet quorum. A universal café.

Or we join with John Sibley Williams in the twilight of The Drowning House. A new book, two years after Biespiel’s. And once again comes that recognition: Yes, this is it. This is what it feels like.

Every poem is a crisis. It stands between the self and the world, between pleasure and pain, privacy and exposure, simplicity and extravagance. It attempts to make one small thing – a line, a moment, a metaphor – beautiful and coherent. When it fails, we hate it. (Hatred of poetry is a topic all unto itself!

It always fails eventually. But when it succeeds, we become believers.  At least a little, briefly. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric Bies

In 1895, Ernest Hartley Coleridge published a volume of selections from his grandfather’s notebooks. Anima Poetae, the first such selection to be assembled, granted readers passage into the fantastic interior of the man, poet, and uncommon philosopher George Saintsbury would one day declare worthy of Aristotle and Longinus. Simply open the book onto any of its three hundred thrilling pages, and there shall be revealed the soul of the great Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Most fascinating among these revelations, perhaps, is the record of the poet’s reading. We learn, for instance, of his fondness for Milton and Swift—of his unfondness for Darwin and Hume. We learn that he puzzled (as Ezra Pound a century hence) over Duns Scotus and the Trinity, and that he was gobsmacked with the Germans: names like Kant, Fichte, and Schiller propagate like cacti. At one point we catch him privately praising the letters of Dorothy Wordsworth (“the best reading in the world”). Strikingly modern, we find he was a reader of dreams, too—his own often fitful, plaguing the waking hours—and even made some of them up:

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hands when he awoke – Ay! and what then?

In the early nineteen-tens, the American scholar Jonathan Livingston Lowes undertook to mine the fullest possible spread of the notebooks. Combing through the archives of the British  Museum and the Bristol Library, he herded his systematic record of the poet’s reading into one of the first great studies of the imagination. Upon its release in 1927, The Road to Xanadu drew admiration from every quarter. Readers could not help but to boggle at the rigor of its scholarship—painstaking literary detective work of the most rewarding type, as when Charles Olson crept through Melville’s marginalia and located all of that Shakespeare in Moby-Dick—much of which established the first key links between the books Coleridge perused and the poems he composed. Read more »