by John Schwenkler

This is the first in a planned series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding.

I am the sort of person who can be very good at finding my way around a place, while having almost no ability to translate that capacity into a realistic map of the place that I am able to find my way around.

This place could be a building, a neighborhood, a city, or a more distant set of locations that are connected by major roads. In each case what allows me to get around is the knowledge of what I can do at various landmarks that will take me from one location to another: for example, turn left at the Exxon station to get to the supermarket; walk past the bathrooms and then up the stairs to the right to reach the department office; take the interstate south to exit 53A, then follow the highway over the bridge and take the first left to get to the beach.

My mastery of these landmark-based strategies means that sometimes I am able to give good directions concerning how to get from here to there in places that I know my way around, though doing this requires me to simulate in my imagination what the next relevant landmark will be after taking a given step—and this sort of remembering is something else that I am not always good at doing. Still, when I do manage to remember, or am reminded of, a given landmark along my memorized route, then what I remember is something I already knew: for example, that the road out of the neighborhood goes past an Exxon station, at which one needs to turn left to get to the supermarket.

With maps, things are different. Even if I am extremely adept at getting around a place, often I will have had no idea that the place I am able to get around has the layout that a map displays it as having: no idea, that is, that the locations I know how to get between are located with respect to one another in the ways that the map displays. In knowing how to find my way around, all I knew was what to do, upon seeing a certain landmark, in order to continue on the way to a given place. And I knew all of this very well without knowing much of anything about the spatial structure of the place I was able to navigate, or the spatial relationships between the landmarks I could find my way between.

Based on conversations with other people about these matters, my sense is that I may be a sort of person who is peculiarly bad at aligning my knowledge of how to get around a place with a representation of that place in the form of a map—though there is some experimental evidence suggesting that landmark-based navigation is the default human strategy for getting around an environment. My present interest, however, is not in these questions, but in a wider phenomenon that this is only a single example of, and which I believe provides a common impetus for philosophical inquiry. Read more »

Agnes Denes. Model for Teardrop—Monument to Being Earthbound. The Shed, New York, October 2019 – March 2020.

“The artist’s original Teardrop depicted a monumental teardrop-shaped sculpture “levitat[ing] above the center of the base afloat on an elastic cushion of magnetic flux.” Impossible then and now, a scale version magically floats on a table top in the middle of the gallery.

At the far end of the gallery is the only splash of color in the exhibition design by New Affiliates; a glowing blue-purple wall hints at something special out of sight.”

(Congratulations New Affiliates!)

More here, here, and here.

by Robert Fay

In The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, China has made contact with a technologically-advanced alien civilization called Trisolaris. The aliens plan to invade earth and are cultivating a cadre of earthling collaborators, most of whom are Chinese nationals. The Trisolarians accomplished this, not by using sex or blackmail to recruit agents a la the FSB or CIA, but by creating a seductive computer game designed to both introduce the nuances of Trisolarian civilization, as well as to weed out unworthy recruits. As recruits progress in the game, they proceed through evolutionary epochs of Trisolarian history, which curiously enough, includes historical personages from earth. In one early stage of Trisolarian development, the great Chinese Emperor Qin Shin Huang supervises the successful creation of a massive human computer, involving the recording of endless semaphore signals conducted by tens of thousands of Trisolarian soldiers raising up and down flags.

The emperor is filled with pride: “Each individual’s behavior is so simple, yet together, they can produce such a complex, great whole!” he says. “Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule, claiming that I suppress creativity. But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.”

It’s not impossible to imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping saying this in a moment of candor. If China continues to skillfully counterbalance all of its many contradictions, why wouldn’t Xi stand before the U.N. General Assembly and proclaim the singular superiority of his one-party, authoritarian model of capitalism? For the Chinese today are no longer content with praise, they believe the world should begin studying and imitating China. Read more »

Dr. David Steensma specializes in care and research for myelodysplastic syndromes and leukemia. He and colleagues were the first to identify and understand the clinical implications of the clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Oncology responsible for the “Art of Oncology” section and has more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Steensma currently serves as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, consulting physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a faculty member in the Adult Leukemia Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book 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 Eric J. Weiner

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic. —Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. —R. G. Collingwood

When he was seventeen years-old, my late father-in-law, Mario Gartenkraut, escaped from Poland two days ahead of the Third Reich’s invasion of his town. His family did not believe him when he warned them of the terror that he saw coming. They sent him off to Bolivia in South America, but stayed behind. By the end of the war, all of his sisters and his parents had been exterminated by the Nazis in the death camps. A few of his brothers survived. Mario foresaw the terror of fascism and it saved his life. Most of his family did not and they were murdered. The memory of the kind of fascism that he survived is both a tool for resistance and, ironically, can blind us to things we must resist and overcome. As a tool for resistance, the mantra that we should “never forget” is a powerful way to keep the memories of those we lost alive as well as remember the conditions as they have been represented in official history that led to the systematic murder of millions. But the phrase also plants the seeds of our undoing. The representations of fascism that construct these memories become indelible and as such make it difficult to imagine what fascism might look like in our current times.

Peering at the horizon of our withering democracy for jack-booted soldiers, transport trains, and smoke rising from the ashes of crematoriums makes memory a liability. If we are looking out for one kind of threat based upon the science of historical memory, then we are sure to miss threats to our freedom from other forms of fascism that may be hiding in plain sight. As was true for Mario’s sisters and parents, what we don’t see, won’t see, can’t see, or refuse to see might be the most terrifying thing of all.

The Terror of the Unforeseen, Henry Giroux’s latest salvo against what he calls neoliberal fascism is, first and foremost, a history book. It is, of course, also a cogent critical analysis of current events, particularly as they unfold in the story of Donald Trump’s presidency. But at its core is a deep respect for History’s pedagogical power to teach us as Collingwood writes “what man has done and thus what man is.” Like Collingwood, Giroux sees in History shadows cast beyond the present that reveal in hazy and sometimes horrifying outline what humans might become by taking a complex account of what they have done. Hiding in these late afternoon shadows is the terror of unforeseen advances toward negative freedom, dehumanizing technologies, and state-sanctioned violence against those who have been classified as disposable. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For Fred Weinstein

“What is hidden is for us Westerners more ‘true’ than what is visible,” Roland Barthes proposed, in Camera Lucida, his phenomenology of the photograph, almost forty years ago. In the decades since, the internet, nanotechnology, and viral marketing have challenged his privileging of the unseen over the seen by developing a culture of total exposure, heralding the death of interiority and celebrating the cult of instant celebrity. The icon of this movement, the selfie, is now produced and displayed, in endless daily iterations, in a ritual staging of eyewitness testimony to the festival of self-fashioning.

This same period has also seen a parallel, related but in some senses opposed development: the use of photographic documents – occasionally, indeed, self-portraits, though fragmentary or denatured, and/or amateur photographs of their subject taken by the authors themselves – to illuminate non-fictional works, primarily literary memoirs, (pseudo-)biographies, or historical reconstructions; beginning in 2001 with W.G. Sebald’s epochal Austerlitz and continuing in books overtly or implicitly inspired by the Anglo-German’s peripatetic, omnivorous, documentary style. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (2003), Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is For The Thief (2007), Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008), Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (2013), and Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey (2019) all deploy photographic material obliquely, frequently quite bereft of deictic apparatus and often only remotely or tangentially associated with the adjacent narrative, as if to shadow the work’s textual body, to propose a secondary or paratextual level, or to serve as a form of punctuation (implicitly echoing Barthes’s polysemous term “punctum”, the ineffably affecting element in a photograph) in the rebus that is the written account of a life. These various, recent non-fictional works at once coopt a visual medium for the literary project and mount a subtle protest against the ongoing debasement of the (human, autoerotic) image in selfie culture by restoring to that image some of its Barthesian mystery, even as they borrow from the new idiom its demystification of the art of photography by placing it in the hands of non-professionals. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Late morning heat rises in waves over tall grass. It’s an hour and a half drive, sand flies buzzing, to Luwi bush camp, a seasonal camp with just four huts of thatch and grass on a still lagoon, far out into Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, about 300 miles north of Lusaka.

Perched on a cliff above the Luwi River, today the little camp is empty, but for the permanent staff of six – permanent, that is, for the five months each year camp is open. When the rains come in November they tear down Luwi camp and in late April a work crew of twenty rebuilds it top to bottom in order to have it open by June first. We’re first in, a little early at the end of May.

No other guests, just the staff, our guide Aubrey and a European named Grete, who will manage Luwi camp this season. Six months a year Grete is a translator in Brussels (English, French, Dutch and Spanish) and she spends the other six in the bush. Aubrey has a literate streak himself, framing sentences conditionally, starting like “Whereas, with the puku….” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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

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

Interviewer: So first of all, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I know a lot of readers are interested to learn more about hermit life, but are probably thinking: “How can I find a hermit?” or “Would a hermit even want to talk with me?” or “If I were a hermit, probably the last thing I’d want is to be pestered with questions. Isn’t that what hermits are trying to avoid?” As you can see, people (not me, of course, but other people) tend to make a lot of assumptions about hermits without really knowing what they’re about. So it’s especially great to have this opportunity. Thank you so much! [pause—awkward silence] Right, so my first question is: How did you become a hermit?

Hermit: I think the relevance is in the “becoming,” more so than the arrival at some particular state—the state of being a hermit in this case. The word hermit puts a bit of a full-stop at the end of what might otherwise be a transcendent experience. In my case, however, if indeed I have become a hermit, it goes something like this: I think we all have an inner hermit living in our minds, very much alone, and each person’s internal processes of hermit-thinking and rationalization are adapted and transmuted into the ways they ultimately interact with the outside world. To put into practice the being of a hermit, then, all I have done is allow the inner hermit to exist on its own terms outside of my mind and body. Subsequently I act a hermit in the outside world in much the same, solitary way as one might behave inside their own mind. The full release of said inner hermit, however, is ripe with responsibility. At least it seems so. In much the same way one cannot just decide one day that stop signs are not to their liking, disregard them without consequence, it only seems fair to fully act oneself in relative solitude so as to not conflict with crossing traffic.

Interviewer:  Do hermits brush their teeth?

Hermit: The short answer is yes. Certainly not for vanity, certainly not after every meal, but because teeth are critical and easy to reach. It is possible to tell when teeth need a good brushing, and that is when they get it. Perhaps once per week, sometimes more, sometimes less. In the meantime, chewing on things like twigs and coarse grass stems, consuming apple cider vinegar (followed by clean water), does an amazing job. I imagine every hermit has their own routine. Read more »

by Dave Maier

A while back, when I lived in Philly, my housemates and I got into a memorable discussion. It probably started off innocently enough, with someone wondering what it would be worth to you to lose a limb or something. But since I was involved, the conversation soon got weird, and soon we were thinking of more and more involved and downright bizarre contracts. I’ve forgotten most of them, but I’ve thought up a few more since then.

When someone came up with a good one, we’d each say how much money it would take for us to agree to the deal. It soon became clear that there were forces pulling in opposite directions. On the one hand, you didn’t want to look like a wuss. I shouldn’t need a billion dollars to spend my life in a wheelchair; plenty of people do that out of necessity, with no financial compensation, and they live perfectly fulfilling lives. Such people might be pretty offended to learn that you’d need vast sums of money to put up with the horror of living like they do. Keeping the number down would help to show that you regard such a thing as only a minor inconvenience.

On the other hand, you didn’t want to look like some guy on a Japanese game show, making a fool of himself seemingly for the sole purpose of appearing on TV (or earning a nominal sum). If I’m going to change my life in any real way, I’m not going to do it for a pittance. Some things, we often say, are priceless, and it’s easy to think of things I wouldn’t agree to for any amount of money. But what about things which aren’t quite so uniquely valuable? Everyone’s got his price. Make it high enough and I’m listening. If you really want me to give up nuts, berries and legumes, or agree never to visit South America, surely nine figures can get that done.

At the extremes, it seems that ethical considerations can come into play. Read more »

Just some wild berries outside my house in October of 2014.

by Sarah Firisen

This morning I rode an Uber to JFK from my apartment in Queens. I do this regularly and normally don’t worry too much about it, but this morning, there was just something about the driver that concerned me, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. But every time his, very loud, GPS gave him a direction, in a language I couldn’t pin down, I just had this sense that he truly had no idea where he was going. And in case you’re not familiar with NYC, if you drive a car for a living, you’ve probably driven from the city to JFK more than a few times and do know where you’re going. Anyway, we arrived at JFK, I reminded him I wanted terminal 2 and I thought, “I guess my worries were for nothing”. And almost as soon as I thought that, he missed the sign for terminal 2. I mean, I guess it can happen, but it’s never happened to me before in all my many years of flying out of that airport. The signs don’t exactly creep up on you. I tell him he’s missed it; we start on a loop back around the airport and I say, “the green sign’s for terminal 2”, then he misses it again. And it turns out, the reason he kept missing it was because his GPS was telling him something contrary. I pointed out to him that I hadn’t put terminal 2 in Uber, so how would its GPS know that? The third time around the airport, I rather lost my temper and told him to stop listening to his phone and to listen to me. And third time lucky, we reached terminal 2.

On reflection, apart from thinking that maybe he couldn’t read and definitely didn’t speak great English, it occurred to me that a large part of the problem was his total and utter faith in his technology, over his own eyes and ears (as I kept yelling, “not that way!!!!”). Of course, he’s not alone. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Early in the 20th century physicists restored us to time. That’s not how the story is generally told, but it is a good way to think about it. Having been restored to time, we must now realize that we are time travelers, not just Dr. Who, and his – but I believe it is now her, no? – assistant, but all of us.

Let me explain.

* * * * *

Let us begin by setting physics aside. Journey with me to a concert hall in Chicago in November of 1969. We are sitting next to Wayne Booth, a distinguished English professor at the University of Chicago who is an amateur cellist, and his wife, Phyllis. Though we do not know this, they are grieving the death of their son four months earlier as we are all listening to a performance of Beethoven’s string quartet in C-sharp minor. Here is how Booth described that performance in his book about his cello-playing, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals:

Leaving the rest of the audience aside for a moment, there were three of us there: Beethoven… the quartet members counting as one….Phyllis and me, also counting only as one whenever we really listened …Now then: there that “one” was, but where was “there”? The C-sharp minor part of each of us was fusing in a mysterious way….[contrasting] so sharply with what many people think of as “reality.” A part of each of the “three” … becomes identical.

There is Beethoven, one hundred and forty-three years ago … writing away at the marvelous theme and variations in the fourth movement. … Here is the four-players doing the best it can to make the revolutionary welding possible. And here we am, doing the best we can to turn our “self” totally into it: all of us impersonally slogging away (these tears about my son’s death? ignore them, irrelevant) to turn ourselves into that deathless quartet.

How are we to think of this fusion Booth describes, himself with his wife, both with the four performers, and all of them, by implication, with Beethoven though the medium of his composition? What does that fusion, pushed to the limit, do with time? Is it possible, contra Heraclitus, to dip into the same stream time after time? Read more »

by Michael Klenk

News of a whistleblower’s report recently ushered in the latest scandal surrounding Donald Trump’s US presidency. According to the whistleblower, Trump urged the Ukrainian president to investigate one of Trump’s personal political rivals, Joe Biden, after emphasising that, in the past, “the United States has been very, very good to Ukraine.” Efforts by the Democrats to impeach Trump are since underway (more here).

One of Trump’s reactions to the whistleblower’s report stood out to me because it can be used to illustrate a puzzle about rational belief formation, as I will explain after briefly introducing the case.

Trump retweeted someone’s snippet of a Fox News item, which said that the whistleblower had “political bias” against Trump. Moreover, the original tweeter emphasised that the whistleblower allegedly “supports one of [Trump’s] opponents in the 2020 race.” Trump’s retweet signals endorsement of these claims. In his tweet, Trump did not challenge the whistleblower’s claims directly. He did not, for example, provide proof that what was really said in the phone call differs from the whistleblower’s report (because it wasn’t, as a memo released by the White House later confirmed). Instead, Trump challenged the whistleblower’s claims indirectly. In what is by now a recognisable Trump tactic, he sought to win a debate by incriminating his opponents, sowing doubt about their motives and their credibility.

What should we make of such indirect attacks? Of course, we could ask whether the whistleblower, in fact, has a political bias against Trump and whether the whistleblower, in fact, supports one of Trump’s opponents. But there is a deeper worry. Why would indirect allegations about the whistleblower’s background rather than direct refutations of the whistleblower’s report matter anyhow? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In the past few months I’ve been thinking a fair bit about math and humanity. We often think of math as outside of us but, in fact, it is a deeply human enterprise.

A group of us in the University of Oklahoma (OU) math department have been trying to establish a “bridge program” for students coming out of undergraduate but not quite ready for graduate school. In meetings with various university administrators, I’ve had to fumble my way towards an articulation of the sort of students we hope to have in the program. There are several such programs around the country with most designed to reach one or more groups that are underrepresented in mathematics. But, certainly, to have an effective program and to get administrators to open their wallets, you really need to be able to say who you’re trying to reach [1].

Oklahoma happens to be the home of Langston University, the westernmost historically black college or university (HCBU), along with a number of universities which serve sizable populations of Native Americans. The idea of a bridge program at OU came out of a thought-provoking meeting this past spring with members of the Langston math department. In that meeting we discussed ways we could partner together. A bridge program that gives Langston students the opportunity to be part of a graduate program while staying in Oklahoma would be a great start. More generally, like those other math bridge programs around the country, we would like to knock down barriers for members of under-represented groups who would like to dive more deeply into mathematics.

But as I’ve thought about it, I think it should be more than that. If I were to encapsulate our bridge program in a phrase, I would say our program should be for students who have both potential and interest in graduate school in mathematics, but not yet the requisite background. Read more »

by Jim Culleny

I’ve done a number of things to make a living over the years, but my most protracted make-a-living venture has been as a carpenter. But I’ve not done that alone: without the right tools a carpenter’s as helpless as a musician without an axe. Tools are body’s extension, and mind’s.  Which brings me to my other, coincidental building project, assembling songs and poems. Some time ago, bringing the two together, I began a series of short poems built upon my relationship with tools. The first four are here:

MY TOOLS

1. Adze

I’ve never been a mathematician
physicist or statistician
but, as a carpenter who aspires
to be a word magician,
I can fill you in on certain facz
such as the paradoxical condition
in which, at least from Mesolithic times,
the framer’s friend, the adze, subtracz

2. Hammer

A hammer’s not a thing of glamor
until you feel its weight,
but when you grip an Estwing’s shank
and swing it up to bring it down
to drive a nail into a plank
you recognize its simple grace:
its elegant utility as whammer
and if your nail’s a driven flaw
you always have its graceful claw’s
corrective adjunct to your
curse and stammer

3. Spirit Level

A spirit level’s used to set things straight
with the plane of the horizon as in a beam
or plumb as with a stud to make sure
structure’s right by spirit

you breathe deep and easy and hold the level
so the spirit bubble floats in the small arc of a glass flask
dead center which if placed upon a joist would say,
this floor is level
…………………..
being on the level
good way to be

4. Square

Beloved of a stairway crafter
or sawyer of a stud or joist
or cutter of a common rafter
that he will later lug and hoist
under sun or in a freeze —no matter

the square’s essential charge in being
is to prove all NINE-O  degreeing
so that structure’s straight and true,
with Pythagoras agreeing

by Tim Sommers

Katrina Forrester begins “The Future of Political Philosophy” (adapted from her just released book “In the Shadow of Justice: Liberalism and the Remaking of Liberal Philosophy”) with a series of dramatic claims. “Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to many that liberalism is, in some sense, failing,” this is “due in part to the nature of political philosophy today” and, in particular, to the fact that “for the last five decades, political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been preoccupied” with John Rawls. Let’s start with the first claim, that liberalism is failing. Forget “failing”, for the moment, my question is, ‘Which liberalism?’

I think that the kind of liberalism that is failing is “neoliberalism” which is, of course, “neo” – that is, a “new” kind of liberalism. Neoliberalism argues for (i) the marketization of most public services and (ii) that inequality doesn’t matter. Marketization is supposed to make the provisioning of public services more efficient and cheaper. And inequality doesn’t matter both because the absolute level of poverty is all that counts and (as Bill Clinton loved to say) “a rising tide raises all boats”. This kind of liberalism was always more a political, than intellectual, movement – and a duplicitous one at that. This liberalism, that began in the Reagan and Thatcher era and continued through Clinton/Gore right up to now, is, I agree, failing.

However, this kind of liberalism has nothing to do with John Rawls. He would have objected to (ii) the second claim on principle – on his account inequality is only justified when it makes the least well-off as well-off as possible and inequality tends to undermine the fair value of political liberties, corrupting democracy. As for (i) the first claim, he would have thought of it as empirical. Sometimes the market is a more efficient way of provisioning for public goods, sometimes it isn’t. But since Rawls believed that no one had the right to own the means of production, and that capitalism has led to wide-spread, systemic inequality, he would have objected not just to privatizing public schools or utilities, but also to private control of capital itself. To suggest that because Rawls has been hugely influential in academic philosophy, he is somehow linked to contemporary neoliberalism is just wrong. But, maybe, Forrester just means that Rawls (or Rawlsians) can’t – or didn’t – muster a sufficient rejoinder to neoliberalism. I think she’s wrong about that too, as I will explain shortly. Read more »

Cecilia Vicuña. Quipu Womb (The Story of the Red Thread, Athens), 2017.

Dyed wool; Documenta 14.

More here, here, and here.