by Tim Sommers

Here’s a story that is almost certainly not true, even though I have heard it many times. A philosopher, or anyway a philosophy professor, is on an airplane listening to a businessperson explain what they do. There’s a lull in which the businessperson asks, “By the way, what do you do?”

“I’m a philosopher,” the philosopher answers.

The businessperson responds, “Oh, really? What are some of your sayings?”

One person who told me this story said that the philosophy professor responded, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Which is a Quine joke, if you really want to get into it.

Here’s why I feel pretty confident this story is not true. I have heard it several times, from several different people, none of whom claim it happened to them, rather it always happened to an unspecified friend of theirs. A philosopher’s urban legend, I think.

But the fact that it gets repeated means something. What’s the lesson supposed to be? Probably, a little, we are smarter than people in business, which I am not endorsing, but mostly, we don’t really do sayings, which I would endorse in a qualified way. But do people think that we do that?

Here’s the question I get asked most often when I tell a nonacademic person that I teach philosophy, if I get a question at all. People ask me what the meaning of life is.

They are usually not serious. But sometimes they are. I used to say, “I don’t do that kind of philosophy.” Which is true, mostly. Occasionally, when really, sincerely pressed, I have said, “I don’t know, but I think it would be a really great if we could all try to be a little nicer to each other.” When they are not serious, like other nerds my age, I go with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The answer to “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is, in case you didn’t already know, “42.” The issue is, “What’s the question exactly?”

But, anyway, like I said, I mostly just used to say that I don’t do that kind of philosophy. Then I came to the University of Iowa and the first class I was assigned to help teach was “The Meaning of Life”. So. I guess I do do that kind of philosophy. Read more »

Empty main street of Brixen, South Tyrol, at midday in mid-March, 2020, because of the lockdown.

by S. Abbas Raza

Since I live in northern Italy, a few friends in America have privately asked me if I have any advice for them as America now heads for the situation Italy has been facing. Most recently, my friend Anna Hall wrote this, “Are you ok Abbas? We are about to follow Italy into this abyss — suggestions for sanity and humanity welcome.” Okay, then, here is my personal, non-expert advice based on my experience so far:

• Stay calm but be concerned: this is probably the greatest single challenge the world has faced in our lifetimes. Decisions made in a panic are not good, so meditate, take your anti-anxiety medication, and don’t keep reading everything about Corona all day every day—I did that for a couple of days and then I couldn’t sleep. It is very important to pay attention to one’s mental well-being at this time, as well as physical.

• It is best to get serious advice and information from reputable scientific sources, not friends, family, or Facebook. Go here for some resources.

• Stay at home. Buy groceries for at least a week at a time (two if you can do that) and then don’t be tempted to run out for that one brand of potato chips you suddenly have a craving for. Now is the time to be disciplined about this. As one doctor advised, behave as if you have the virus and don’t want to give it to others.

• A good way to make a comprehensive grocery list is to walk through each room in your house with a pad and pen and look around carefully and see what you might run out of in the next week or two. This way, I remembered to buy shaving blades when I was in the bathroom looking around, for example, which I would have forgotten otherwise. Same happened with laundry detergent in the laundry room, etc.

• Convince others to take the problem seriously and insist that they cancel plans for socializing, travel, etc. Do this calmly and without getting worked up, otherwise they will dismiss what you say as the product of irrational fear. This will only work if we all do it. Obviously.

• Avoid public transport and walk if you can. Driving a car is also better than public transport, for once.

• The natural tendency is to want to visit one’s parents and other family in a time like this. Don’t. Instead Skype with them and keep in touch more than normal through phone, email, social media, and every way except actually being there. Everyone needs reassurance these days, and it’s nice for people who love you to hear your voice.

• Just in case, make a plan with your family about what you will do if one of you gets sick. Better to do this while calm and healthy than in a panic.

• Use this time to exercise more (we’ve been playing a lot of ping pong because we have a table at home), read, do stuff you’ve been putting off that can be done at home. Or just watch TV. That’s good too.

• I’ve also found that being extra clean and keeping the house spic and span helps a lot psychologically to ward off thoughts of disease.

• I asked my wife what she would advise people to do and she said, 1) Structure your day and have a schedule, 2) Buy hand cream because all this washing dries hands out, 3) Buy a variety of foods to store as you get sick of eating the same things, 4) Take an online course.

• Be extra kind to everyone and remain patient and avoid emotional outbursts. And stay home if you can!

Be well, and be safe.

by Ali Minai

I must admit that when I first flipped through Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia by Albena Azmanova, it did not look too inviting. The blurbs on the jacket did nothing to reassure me, suggesting that this was yet another post-Marxist critique of greedy capitalists and their enablers. As it turns out, it is, but in a way that is more interesting than I had assumed. As soon as I started reading the Introduction, I was gripped by the lucidity of ideas and clarity of the prose. For an academic text written from the perspective of Critical Theory, this is a wonderfully direct, incisive and insightful book. One does not need to agree with all the details of the analysis to find reading it a rewarding experience.

Dr. Azmanova is Reader of Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies in Bristol, UK. She has written extensively on politics, economics, democracy, and social justice. The book is motivated by an issue that is on many minds, is the subject of many books, and has motivated recent movements such as the Occupy Movement, the Yellow Vests, and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. It can be expressed concisely in terms of three intertwined questions: 1) Has capitalism led to a society that is unjust and extremely unequal? 2) Is the rise of (mostly) right-wing populism a response to this? And 3) Will this spell the end of capitalism? Her answers to these questions are: 1. Yes; 2. In part, but it’s deeper than that; and 3. Capitalism isn’t dying – just entering another phase unless we do something about it. The rest of the book is mainly about that third – most interesting – answer, and develops the idea of “precarity capitalism” – a capitalism that is all about living on the edge. Or many edges. Read more »

“The writer [Lorca] died while mixing with the rebels, these are natural accidents of war . . .” —Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco.

“The country has to toughen up … part of the problem …is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore, right?” — US president, Donald Trump

Last Day of Federíco García Lorca

Federico, in pajamas and blazer died at night
wearing the sudden-death uniform of poets killed
because there is nothing more dangerous to despots
than an artist who tells the moment’s truth
because some force within insists
—accepting death for being one’s self
is life’s condition of being one’s self
because to speak is to be

This condition applies to all in all times
because nothing ever changes the constitution of love
& witness under any sky or sun. Though
the atmosphere of eras and places swings from
heaven to hell on a dime before the mass has time
to blink, and because the intractable who paint Guernica
or sing Canto Libre, artists who dare,
could well end with bullet through skull because,
to a despot, silence is golden even if desperate,
because despots know that painters and poets,
sculptors and dancers will speak truth
from momentary possession
because they’ve found the straightway
to the brainsoul of human kind,
a place despots only enter
by means of fear & blood
which always mocks
the divine

Jim Culleny
3/7/19

Sughra Raza. Mid-winter Fall. February 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Joan Harvey

It’s a foggy gray day and the stock market is in free fall. Last week, because I’m one of those careless people who doesn’t pay too much attention to these things, I decided to go against my grain and try to educate myself a little more about the new plague. It is, anyhow, almost impossible not to think about. A short time ago it all seemed very abstract; there were only a few cases in America, and only two in Colorado. Today, although now there are only eight cases in Colorado (whoops, now nine, wait, now 17, today 33, now 77), everything looks grim. With the spread of the virus my thinking and behavior have had to keep evolving daily. And writing about this changing scenario begins to feel like trying to catch a greased pig. One day we’re behaving normally, scoffing at people in a shopping frenzy; the next week the WHO declares a pandemic and we realize we’ve seen nothing like this in our lifetime.

In an old issue of Cabinet Magazine from Fall/Winter 2003 (for some unknown reason stored on my computer), I come across an article by David Serlin, with the clever title, SARS Poetica. While SARS was far less dangerous, I’m still struck by how much in common that virus from almost 20 years ago has with our current bug: infection originating in China from the human consumption of exotic animals–in that case civet cats, in this case probably bats but possibly pangolins or possibly something else; the Chinese government in both cases concealing information about the epidemic; the photos of empty public spaces; the lost business revenue. Serlin points out that the economic losses by business were identified as the tragic victims of the virus, far more than were the actual human victims. Read more »

Özden Özer, M.D. is a Hematopathologist at Marmara Leukemia Lymphoma Pathology Laboratory in Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Özer had her medical training at Marmara University Faculty of Medicine Medical School and pathology training at Northwestern University School of Medicine, McGaw Medical Center, as well as at the University of Chicago where she trained under Drs. Janet Rowley and James Vardiman. Dr. Özer published numerous articles describing her findings in national and international medical journals.

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?

Mother Writes to the Lion of Kashmir, Long Deceased

5 August 2019

Dear Sheikh Sahib, daring son of Kashmir’s soil.

They tell me, you’re buried on the left bank
of Naseem lake, with views of the Hazratbal
shrine, which you rebuilt, your tomb guarded
by India’s paramilitary troops.

I tell them this represents one of those
paradoxes history keeps throwing up:
the same people who banished you from
Kashmir for long years now guard your tomb,

and the same people whose “Lion” you were
are disenchanted with you for selling out
to your paymasters in New Delhi who
also bankroll your son and his —both dare

not even sigh while India’s troops, shielded
by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act,
immunize themselves even for rape
as they brutally suppress a Vale of Saints.

Gone days when the refrain
Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah
answered our sovereign plea
Azadi Ka Matlab Kyah? Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

If you, like me, have read premodern philosophers not just for antiquarian interest but also as possible sources of wisdom, you will probably have felt a certain awkwardness. Looking for guidance or assistance in ordering our own beliefs, attitudes and actions, we inevitably run into the problem that the great thinkers of the past knew nothing about what our world would look like.

This is not just a matter of technology; it is primarily a matter of social and cultural change. What use is ancient philosophy to me if it presupposes a patriarchal slave-society at every turn? What use is it, if it does not know of nation-states or global markets, or almost literally any institution that I will encounter in my life?

Nor can this problem be resolved simply by ‘proving everything and keeping what is good’, accepting maxims we find useful and rejecting advice we deem problematic. If we think ancient philosophy could be relevant to our lives, it should not be just to confirm our preferences but also to criticize and change them. There must be some transferable logic to whatever school of thought we approach; it must have enough structure, enough internal coherence to challenge us. On the other hand, it must have enough generality or flexibility to be displaced to the 21^st century without completely breaking down into tiny parts.

Catherine Wilson claims to have identified the sect that can do this, and it is the philosophy of tiny parts. “Epicurean materialism is, to my mind, a sound basis for humane and enlightened political action”, she writes in The Pleasure Principle (222, see below for full reference). This is a strong claim, but it is warranted: Wilson’s book, which presents Epicureanism as ‘a philosophy for modern living’, does indeed manage to connect sympathetic advice about life in our time to core principles of Epicurean or sometimes more generally materialistic philosophy. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Charlie Huenemann

The living few, and frequent funerals then,
Proclaim’d thy wrath on this forsaken place;
And now those few who are return’d again,
Thy searching judgments to their dwellings trace.
– John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666

This isn’t the first time universities have shut down from fear of pestilence. In 1665, “it pleased the Almighty God in his just severity to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence”, and Cambridge University was closed. Students were sent home, and all public gatherings were canceled. Some students arranged to meet with tutors over that time, but we can suspect that a good number of students simply went home, forgot about their studies entirely, prayed fervently, and followed whatever strategies they could to lessen the chance of death. 

One student caught up in this nightmare was Isaac Newton. At the time, he had narrowly won a scholarship at Cambridge, which meant that he could continue his attendance; he could not otherwise afford it. It is a bit of a mystery just why Newton was afforded a scholarship, has he had pretty much left behind everything that his college valued and taught, and had embarked upon his own course of self-study. His focus was on developing a new mathematics that was more adequate to understanding motion, and in doing this he had few teachers who could help him (or even keep up with him). Over 1665, he lived, ate, breathed, and dreamed mathematics, and did little else in terms of our ordinary conceptions of living, eating, and sleeping. Read more »

Self-portrait in lockdown in northern Italy in early March, 2020.

by Joseph Shieber

The traditional assumption in the United States has been that each person is individually responsible for their own health care. In other words, the US has a system in which the wealthy are able to afford more or better care (with the understanding that more care does not always lead to better health outcomes!), and the poor are able to afford less or no care.

There is something intuitively appealing about the idea that you should be rewarded in relation to the work that you’ve done or the results that you’ve achieved. It’s the basis of the well-known children’s fable, “The Little Red Hen”, in which the hen tries to get her fellow barnyard animals (dog, goose, etc.) to help her sow the seeds, reap the wheat, grind the grain, and bake the bread. Since none of the other animals are willing to help, when the bread is done the hen eats it all herself. In fact, the fable is so intuitively plausible that folksy free-market hero Ronald Reagan — pre-Presidency — used it himself.

The idea behind “The Little Red Hen” is so intuitively appealing that it’s not just limited to free market views. Even socialist thinkers from pre-Marxists like Ricardian socialists to later theorists like Lenin and Trotsky embraced the formula, “To each according to his works”, rather than Marx’s “To each according to his needs”.

Indeed, in a very useful paper, Luc Bovens and Adrien Lutz trace back the dual threads of “to each according to his works” and “to each according to his needs” to the New Testament. So, for example, in Romans 2:6, we see that God “will render to each one according to his works” (compare Matthew 16:27, 1 Corinthians 3:8).

In contrast, in Acts 4:35, we read that “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold … and it was distributed to each as any had need” (compare Acts 2:45).

The deep textual roots of these two rival maxims suggests that each exerts a strong intuitive pull — though perhaps not equally strong to everyone.

Public health emergencies, however, reveal the fragility inherent in the motto of “to each according to his works” when it comes to health systems. Everyone’s health is interconnected, and that the ability of each individual to fight infection depends in part on everyone else’s having done their part. Read more »