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 »

Sughra Raza. Untitled. Cape Town, August 2019.

Digital photograph.

by Paul Braterman

This book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the way in which evolution actually proceeds, and the insights that we are now gaining into the genome, which controls the process. The author, Neil Shubin, has made major contributions to our understanding, using in turn the traditional methods of palaeontology and  comparative anatomy, and the newer methods of molecular biology that have emerged in the last few decades. He is writing about subject matter that he knows intimately, often describing the contributions of scientists that he knows personally. Like Shubin’s earlier writings, the book is a pleasure to read, and I was not surprised to learn here that Shubin was a teaching assistant in Stephen Jay Gould’s lectures on the history of life.

Shubin is among other things Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. He first came to the attention of a wider public for the discovery of Tiktaalik, completing the bridge between lungfish and terrestrial tetrapods, and that work is described and placed in context in his earlier book, Your Inner Fish. The present volume is an overview, from his unique perspective, of our understanding of evolutionary change, from Darwin, through detailed palaeontological studies, and into the current era of molecular biology, a transition that, as he reminds us, parallels his own intellectual evolution.

In addition to the underlying science narrative, we have a wealth of biographical detail regarding those involved in the discoveries being discussed, and the milieu in which they worked. These details are not mere embroidery, but an integral part of his exposition. For example, I was aware that Linus Pauling, with Emil Zuckerkandl, was a pioneer in the use of sequence differences as a molecular clock, but did not know how this related to Pauling’s interest in radiation damage to proteins, a topic that brought together his scientific and political concerns. Read more »

Jayesh Mehta, M.D. is a Professor of Medicine (Hematology Oncology) and Chez Family Professor of Myeloma Research at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago Illinois. Dr. Mehta has conducted numerous clinical trials and published more than 320 publications describing his findings. Dr. Mehta was awarded more than 20 grants including some from the National Institute of Health.

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 Samia Altaf

Over the past week, Pakistan has been consumed by the Aurat (Women’s) March, which was held today, March 8, International Women’s Day, in all the major cities of the country. The march’s aim is to highlight the continued discrimination, inequality, and harassment suffered by women. There are some people against it who argue that the march should not be allowed, but the Islamabad High Court has rejected the petition that asked for its cancellation. So the march happened.

Those against holding the march tot up the unprecedented rights and respect Islam affords to women, further endorsed by the constitution of Pakistan. They count the many recent women-friendly pieces of legislation enacted by the government of Pakistan, such as the law against workplace discrimination. In addition, they argue, privileged and educated women already have all the opportunities they want. They cite numbers such as the statistic that more than 50 percent of graduating doctors every year are women. Women politicians are increasing in numbers, women managers, CEOs, etc. are represented in almost all industries. And of course unprivileged women are equal participants in the labor force whether they want to be or not. 

Those for the march argue, rightly, that women friendly-legislation is just paper, since those laws are not implemented. They speak of onerous and time-consuming cultural practices that place the management responsibilities of home and children exclusively on the woman—even if she works outside the home.  Read more »

by Katie Poore

During a recent visit to Paris, I squeezed through the crowded bookshelves of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame, whose charred heights sat masked in scaffolding just across the Seine. It has become something of a Parisian tourist hotspot, mostly because of its association with our favorite Modernist expat writers, immortalized and gilded in a cosmopolitan, angsty, and glamorous mystique through the canonization of their works and, some might argue, the award-winning Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris.

Shakespeare and Company apparently played host and haven to such writers and legends as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. In its upstairs rooms, an estimated 30,000 “Tumbleweeds” have slept on the book-lined benches that trace the rooms’ perimeters. A “Tumbleweed,” according to the Shakespeare and Company website, is a fleeting visitor, someone who, in the words of the bookstore’s founder George Whitman, “drift[s] in and out with the winds of chance,” much like the roaming thistles the word conjures. Shakespeare and Company just happens to have welcomed some of the most elite and canonized thistles the English-speaking world has known.

On my first visit to the store (yes, I went there twice), I was skeptical. It was a tourist trap, I reminded myself. Its paperbacks were marked up to the sometimes-outrageous price of 20 euros, and all because the store had harbored an impressive list of intellectual and literary powerhouses over the years. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

For many historians beginning their journey through graduate school, one question arises over others to prompt many sleepness nights: so what? We, as individual scholars, hope to formulate a unique choice of topics. But at times an advisor or the department might push you into a more mainstream and marketable topic, that turns heads but avoids toes. “So what?” has become shorthand for being able to show that your project helps other historians and the public understand historical processes or events in new ways. Historians tend toward a more conservative bent than our more anarchic colleagues over in English and Sociology departments or in Gender studies. It can be a steeper climb for bringing in perspectives or topics that are a bit more off the beaten path. Sometimes, a more modern historical focus or historical narratives that center on mass culture still get short-shrift, unless framed in particular ways—despite the enormous impact mass media and culture have in our world today.

The “so what?” question that historians must engage with provides the key explanation for this state of affairs. Mass and popular culture, I argue, offer a variety of ways to examine and think about history in the modern period. Understanding that impact is critical to understanding some of the key events of modern global history, from the top-down and bottom-up. Mass media and mass/popular culture have not been entirely ignored, but tend to be studied within particular contexts, such as the Cold War, to give them more legitimacy in historical studies. Often these are seen primarily in a top-down manner, for example as a vector for American empire, but there are other ways to see the spread of mass mediated popular culture. I argue here that especially in recent years, popular culture has been a location for rebuilding community in a world of capitalist individualism and for crafting new kinds of identities. How people have engaged with mass produced culture and have sought to create mass culture of their own (and control the means of production in the process) show some interesting cracks in the “society of the spectacle” facade.¹ In other words, how people make connection and meaning out of the culture in which they live matters. Read more »

Fruit, wires, mountain, rain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in March of 2020.

by John Schwenkler

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

γνῶθι σεαυτόν, the inscription over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is said to have read: Know thyself. The maxim has the form of a command, suggesting that what it describes is something we often fail to do, and moreover that this failure is no mere cognitive lapse, but something that willful effort is required to overcome. As the philosopher Ursula Renz explains in her introduction to a recent volume of essays on philosophical conceptions of self-knowledge through history, many philosophers have taken self-knowledge to be an important part of achieving wisdom:

Some … even claimed that the acquisition of self-knowledge is the very end of philosophical inquiry; to engage in philosophy, they thought, is to explore and thereby to ennoble the self. [This] concern with self-knowledge was immediately practical. Not only is self-knowledge constitutive of the kind of things we are, but it crucially matters for the individual persons we are or want to become.

To modern ears, the command to know oneself suggests a concern with knowing who one is, in a sense of this phrase that we connect with talk of self-discovery and of the forging of an individual identity that defines one’s lifelong pursuits. But this conception of the command reflects an understanding of human individuality that the ancients arguably did not share, or at least did not credit the same importance as many of us give it today.

Shorn of that assumption, the command to know oneself is as much a command to know who–or what–we are: that is, to understand what we sometimes call the “human condition”, not just abstractly but rather in a way that recognizes this description as applying to oneself. Such knowledge is also bound up with the kind of articulacy about ourselves that I described in my first post in this series: the self-knowing person is able not merely to “go on” in the way that we do, but also to say what it is that our going on in this way consists in, and justify why it is that we go on in this way. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

What is commonsense to most people who received a K-12 public education in the United States is that every formal system of state schooling throughout the modern world is designed to educate its students to develop, what Charles Lemert calls “sociologically competencies” within whatever ideological system is dominating at the time of their schooling. People correctly assume that children going to school during the Weimar Republic, for example, were educated to function competently within that ideological system. Children who were in school during the reign of Chairman Mao in the People’s Republic of China were educated to function competently within that system. Children in China today are educated to be sociologically competent in China’s current government and economic system. Children in France, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Iran likewise are educated to function competently in those systems. In the Soviet Union, children were educated to function within its version of communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, children were required to learn different civic knowledge and skills in order to be competent within the newly emerging political ideologies of reformed nation states.

For people educated in the United States, the connection to ideology and schooling is obvious except when it comes to their own perception of the kind of public schooling they and/or their children received. At most, people might blame the educational system for being too liberal or too conservative, but to recognize the constitutive connection between schooling and ideology goes too far. Ideology is something that defines other governmental and educational systems, not their own. Ironically, this points to the deep level of ideological indoctrination that state schools have helped to achieve over several generations in the United States. Fueled by the complimentary discourses of choice, individualism, and Judeo-Christian morality, the connection between ideology and schooling is hidden in plain sight behind a translucent veil of American exceptionalism. What we are left with is an education system that teaches students to believe in an illusion of freedom, while disciplining what Michel Foucault famously called docile bodies and obedient minds. Read more »