by John Schwenkler

This is the third in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. The first two parts can be found here and here.

Several years ago I taught an undergraduate course that I gave the unfortunately profound-sounding title “Know Thyself: A Philosophical Investigation of Self-Knowledge”. In it, we mainly read a range of texts that explored in different ways the topics of self-knowledge and self-discovery, illuminating the way that it can be an achievement to know oneself in the face of the manifold barriers to doing this.

What made this course different from the ones I was used to teaching was that our readings were drawn principally from literary fiction and non-fiction rather than traditional philosophical writings. It was, however, entirely in keeping with the sort of teaching I was accustomed to in that the overarching focus of the course was entirely theoretical—a fact that came to my attention when one of my students observed that she’d expected that the course would have something to do with the practical task of achieving self-knowledge, rather than the abstract question of what self-knowledge is. When I heard this question, I laughed inside—what a bizarre idea, and indeed a dangerous one, to try in a philosophy course to figure out who one is!

But of course it was my position, not hers, that counts as the bizarre one if one considers the nature of philosophy against the background of its history. Socrates, for example, took up general questions about the nature of knowledge, justice, piety, and so on as part of a life that aimed at improving the lives of his fellow Athenians. Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics with the remark that a philosopher should come to ethical theorizing “not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use”. René Descartes summed up his philosophical project in a short work titled The Discourse on Method, which describes a moral and intellectual code that he undertook to follow in order to use his reason rightly. And so on. For these philosophers, the idea that philosophy was an abstract discipline that could be approached without an eye toward real-life consequences would have been truly unfathomable. It’s only in the context of the modern university, where philosophy is conceived alongside mathematics, biology, psychology, and so on as one among many academic subjects, that self-knowledge could be seen as a philosopher’s subject-matter rather than her essential task. Read more »

Zanele Muholi. Ntozakhe II, Parktown, Johannesburg. 2016. 

Gelatin silver print.

More here, here, here, and here.

by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) 

The following is the continuation of an interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. 

Interviewer: Have you ever experienced something annoying that got transformed by hermitude into something at least harmless if not good?

Hermit: Right. Sure. I used to be annoyed by wind, now I like the thing. Used to prefer summer to winter, now that has reversed. Rain will ruin a hermit picnic as quickly as it will a regular person’s, but usually with nice enough after effects. Perhaps my best example at the moment is what happened when I started sleeping with very minimal heat in winter, just above freezing. It was miserable at first, but I got used to it. The thing what amazed me most is that I lost weight (the opposite of what I was used to during winter) burning calories to keep warm, alongside consuming far less fuel for heating my living space. An apparent win-win. So obvious, but it never had crossed my mind.

Interviewer:  What’s so great about wind, and after-rain from the hermit point of view? And what does it mean to “get used to” almost freezing?

Hermit: Only the obvious things. The wind cools and makes difficult the movement of flying insects in the warmer months, and is easily dealt with in winter by dressing appropriately. The rain, you know, rainbows, plants love it, etc..

And I’ve so far kept my space just above freezing for the sake of the liquids. Tried dipping below once, determined I lose more liquids that way as they burst their containers, also destroyed my water filters on that one. There is likely a physiological process which allows one to get used to the cold, but I think it is as much a mental acclimatization. Easier to get used to the cold than the heat, in my experience. In the end, so long as your fingers still work, all is well. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For Eva, mère & fille; and for Tom

Yesterday was James Joyce’s birthday. His one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh. Or would have been, if he hadn’t died, in Zurich, in January 1941, but were instead swelling the ranks of the current generation of supercentenarians, their increasing longevity bedeviling the demographics departments of local life insurers. Joyce is buried in Fluntern Cemetery on Mount Zurich, his grave marked by a wry-looking seated effigy, like a jocular, unaccommodated Lincoln Memorial; he is further commemorated in the eccentric orthography of the names of the city’s two rivers, the Limmat and the Sihl, in a plaque mounted on the point at which they diverge downstream from the Swiss National Museum, where the letter “i” in both names has been replaced with a “j”.

As it happens, February 2 is also my Aunt Eva’s birthday. A native of Montreal, my mother’s sister now lives in that city again, after a peripatetic career spent in the service of Canadian diplomacy, among other pursuits, in London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Vientiane, Paris, Bangkok and Beijing. The family gathered not long ago, in a disconcertingly Kon Tiki-themed chalet in rural Ontario, to celebrate a significant edition of Eva’s birthday: in advance, at New Year’s, since that was when most members of our large extended family could take time off. And so on that occasion we were also all presented by Eva’s eldest, eponymous daughter with that year’s family calendar.

My cousin Eva and her husband have been assembling and self-publishing the calendar annually, at or around Christmas, for some time now, and its arrival by post marks the beginning of the year for many of us now resident in places far from the family’s base in eastern Canada. Each year’s calendar is typically given a theme, which determines the visual element at the head of each month – recent themes have included revolutions, architectural features of European capitals, and the family’s Jewish ancestry, the last with facsimiles of antique portraits of various great-grandparents; this year’s theme is birth practices around the world. But what particularly distinguishes this project, gives it its pleasantly idiosyncratic aspect, is the mingling of the dates of birth of our family members, printed on the appropriate days of the year, with the birth anniversaries of historical personalities and the dates of significant events. Read more »

Dr. Robert A. Gatenby is the pioneer of Integrative Mathematical Oncology making Moffitt Cancer Center the only one in the world that has completely integrated mathematical modeling and computer simulations into basic science and clinical research. His goal is to use mathematics to examine the physiology of a tumor, including factors such as phenotypic evolution, intracellular communication pathways and interactions with the microenvironment including therapies. He is currently the chair of the Moffitt Cancer Center Department of Diagnostic Imaging and Intervention Radiology with over 400 publications to his name.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Michael Liss

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends. —George Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, during the Coal Strike of 1902.

Whenever I read yet another article about intramural warfare in the Democratic Party over which candidate will be progressive enough for the Progressive wing, I think about that quote.

Know your enemy, know yourself. Do contemporary Progressive politicians really know either? The “old” Progressivism, which reached its zenith in the period between 1896 to 1916, was primarily a social and political reform movement. Faced with the excesses of the unbridled capitalism of the Gilded Age that had preceded it, it did not look first toward redistribution. Rather, it took aim at the pervasive rot that was created as immense wealth was being made in businesses like mining, railroads, shipping, steel, meatpacking, and finance, often at the expense of the working man, the farmer, and the small businessman. From this, it drew its moral force.

We should acknowledge that those fortunes were the product of the efforts of real visionaries, larger-than-life figures like Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, James J. Hill, the Armour and Swift families, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Talent aside, though, their successes were enhanced by the sharpest, most predatory tactics, of the type described in Ida Tarbell’s The History of The Standard Oil Company, a 19 part series in McClure’s Magazine, which chronicled the rise of Standard Oil. Business was not for the faint of heart, and the most successful businessmen were monopolists who went from strength to strength, squeezing every competitor, and every last dollar, out of every transaction.

No matter how entrepreneurial the businessman, no matter how rich the oilfield, no matter how coldly efficient the operator, it couldn’t have been done without grease. Corruption was literally everywhere. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Banners waved, the converted preached and hawkers peddled hats, buttons, “Impeach This” sweatshirts and dodgy conspiracy theories. The sky hung sullen, frozen in the shade of dull cutlery. A big screen kept those outside Drake University’s Knapp Center apprised of the slow boil inside.

Fire safety officials began to turn away an overflow crowd two hours before the start of Donald Trump’s Iowa MAGA rally last Thursday. The Presidential interloper came to crash the Democrats’ caucuses, and MAGA fans glowed with an intensity rather like coyotes circling the Democrat’s family pet.

Welcome to Des Moines, where unmarked satellite trucks troll snowy streets, coffee houses and hotel lobbies are broadcast-ready, and legions of reporters and crew and a few political tourists have swept up and besieged an entire town.

The candidates still standing are punch-drunk. Former Congressman John Delaney called it quits as flakes fell across the capital Friday morning. Even without Delaney, a relentless event-holder, the Des Moines Register’s candidate tracker listed 64 events over the campaign’s final weekend.

Saturday, while Pete Buttigieg worked the National Cattle Congress Electric Park Ballroom out in Waterloo, candidates Yang, Klobuchar and Steyer held rallies in brew pubs, and Joe Biden harangued a community center. And that was all before noon. By then, Buttigieg was on to his second event, at the coliseum in Oelwein. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

First off, let me just get this out of the way: we share too much data about ourselves knowingly with companies and they collect, use and share even more than most of us are aware of (read through those lengthy privacy notices recently?). And unless you live in Europe with its pretty extensive GDPR rules, or California with its new data privacy laws, odds are, the government isn’t going to do much to regulate that anytime soon. And we all sort of know this, and tell ourselves that it’s the price we have to pay, “The rise of surveillance capitalism over the last two decades went largely unchallenged. ‘Digital’ was fast, we were told, and stragglers would be left behind. It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion. In Wonderland, we celebrated the new digital services as free, but now we see that the surveillance capitalists behind those services regard us as the free commodity.”

This is all even true of my boyfriend, who deludes himself with the belief that because he’s not on Facebook, Twitter etc., he has some privacy, but doesn’t acknowledge that by having an Amazon account and using Pinterest, he’s already lost that battle. Indeed, he has a mobile phone and an iPad, so he probably would have lost that battle without an Amazon account. When I mention this to him, and tell him what I’m going to be writing about here, he does say something very wise, “why do they send me adverts after I’ve bought it online?”

And this question goes to the heart of what is irritating me today: I may have lost the battle over data privacy, but why is it so hard for these companies to at least do something with my data that benefits me, and them? And so, I come to the Sephora Syndrome. Read more »

Man working on a project to lay fast optical-fibre internet cable in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in November, 2019.

by Bill Benzon

I’ve been binging on TwoSet Violin for the last month or so. Of course the duo is not, as my title suggests, in the business of music education. But you will learn, or be reminded of, a great deal about (mostly) classical music by listening to them. They are, rather, musical comedians – or is it comedic musicians? Whatever it is, it’s not musical comedy, which is a theatrical genre. Brett Yang and Eddie Chen met and became friends while they were still in high school in Australia. They started posting videos to YouTube in 2013, gave up their orchestral jobs in 2016, and first toured the world with a stage act in 2017. Most of what they do in their YouTube videos would not, however, transfer to stage.

On stage with Hilary Hahn

The following video, however, shows a segment from their stage act.

They undertake to play a Paganini caprice with the help of Hilary Hahn. All three are spinning hula hoops while playing.

Hilary Hahn, of course, is a top-tier classical soloist and, as such, makes her living in a cultural sphere that is far removed from the vaudeville stage, which is ultimately where this kind of act comes from. She is not a regular part of their stage act, though she has been on stage with them a number of times and has been on several of their YouTube videos. On one of those occasions she played a piece while spinning a hula hoop, which is one of the various Ling Ling challenges that show up in their videos. Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

At least since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 the issue of Conscientious Objection  (henceforth CO) has been an important one in the context of Catholic hospitals and women patients.  Such hospitals object to the provision of abortions, contraceptives, sterilization, fertility care, and “gender-affirming care” such as hormone treatments and surgeries.

In 1973 the Church (the Senator not the institution!) Amendment was passed. This stated that individuals in institutions receiving federal funds may not be required to perform sterilization or abortions contrary to their religion or conscience. No such individual shall be required to perform or assist in any health service program or research activity if such program or activity was contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.

In 1997 when Medicare Advantage was passed it included a restriction that no such plan, nor any Medicaid-managed plan, was required to “provide, reimburse for, or provide coverage of a counseling or referral service if the organization objected to the service on moral or religious grounds.”

In 2010 the Patient Protection and  Affordable Care act said a State could prohibit abortion in qualified health plans. It also introduced a new restriction. Government-funded institutions may not discriminate against individuals or institutions on the basis that such institutions do not provide any health care item or service for the purpose of causing, or for assistance in  causing, the death of any individual such as by assisted-suicide. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

As I’ve tried to convey over the years here at 3QD, mathematics is the bee’s knees. Like most apologias for mathematics, many of my essays tend to fall into one of two categories.

The extrinsic: on math’s usefulness in real-world applications like internet searches, GPS technology, compression and recovery of images, encryption, the handling of large data, and the like. This is the reason my relatives (and most of my students) think math is worth learning.

The intrinsic: on math’s beauty, universality, timelessness, ability to amaze and inspire awe, its endless depth and richness, and its ability to spark joy and fun. This is what drew me (and some of my students) to study math and still motivates me today to teach and do research.

But there is a third quality of mathematics which I’ve never quite been able to articulate. I’ve only managed to sneak up on it from time-to-time. This is the humanity of mathematics. For some, humanity may seem more the purview of literature, music, art, psychology, sociology, or philosophy. Not mathematics. They would be wrong, though. Read more »

Begin

flames are the feathers of this bird
but I’m not calling the fire brigade
—life burns life

this is a particular bird
whose flame is multitudinous red
with flamboyant nuance:
high-frequency colorwheels thrown in
and well-played purple notes of a bass line
in its wings

—but “multitudinous” fails to tell the tale
of this bonfire bird,
a bird blown by algorithmic winds
at the keystrokes of a friend
lands blazing on my screen and sits
—this birdblaze with redgold beak
sharper than human wit

what do you say when a thing like this comes to light
which exceeds sunshine acid visions?
makes them lame

how to state the spectral luxury of this bird,
to see it, out on a limb, its satiating color
which some pure mind has wrought?

I could say, “Rufous-Backed Kingfisher”
or “Ceyx rufidorsa”

but how to really say it?
how to paint it?
how to see it?
how to hold it in mind’s eye?

don’t try, begin
.

Jim Culleny
12/11/18

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

The United States continues to be virtually the only developed country which does not guarantee any paid time off work to new parents. A study recently released by the New America think tank explores the “complicated, confusing, and uneven leave landscape for workers,” and the behaviors that result. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act entitles workers only to unpaid time off, and many employers and workers do not fall even within that mandate. While some employers, and public insurance programs in some states, do offer paid family leave, such benefits were found less likely to be available to lower-income households and to workers without college degrees.

According to the New America researchers, nearly half of the parents they surveyed reported taking no leave after the birth or adoption of a child. The weight of this finding is underscored by the definition the researchers used for “leave” – namely, anything “more than a day or two off work,” paid or unpaid. The mothers and fathers who reported taking no leave had not, in other words, taken even three days off work.

As documented in a previous report from New America, job-protected paid family leaves are associated with improved physical and mental health for both children and parents. This new research could therefore serve as yet another reminder of the deleterious effects of the family leave policies we have had, and continue to have, in the United States.

What a shame then, to see the study treated as if its primary contribution was to have turned up a previously unappreciated form of gender discrimination. The headline in HuffPost was this: “Even When Men Take Parental Leave, They’re Paid More, New Study Finds.” Great click-bait, and also completely misleading. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Rorschach on the River Li. Yangshuo, China, January, 2020.

Digital photograph.

More on Karst landscapes here, and here.

by Anitra Pavlico

My experience is what I agree to attend to. —William James

While you might not break into a neighbor’s house to log onto your Facebook account if your internet were down, a case can be made that many of us are victims of at least a moderate behavioral addiction when it comes to our smartphones. At the playground with our kids, we’re on our phones. At dinner with friends, we’re on our phones. In the middle of the night. At the movies. At a concert. At a funeral. (I was recently at a memorial service for my friend’s mother, and someone’s cell phone rang during my friend’s reminiscence.)

In his recent book Digital Minimalism [1], Cal Newport argues that we need a philosophy for how to approach the use of digital technology. Ad-hoc measures such as disabling notifications and installing apps that monitor our screen time are missing the point. Instead of working backward from an immersion, Newport says, we should examine our lives without technology first and figure out how technology can serve our values and interests in the least intrusive way. Unlike digital maximalists, who try every new app and gadget and try to shoehorn them into their lives, digital minimalists ruthlessly screen each new tool before using it. Newport portrays maximalism as the technology philosophy that “most people deploy by default–a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention.”  Read more »