by Dave Maier

The relation between mind and matter is a perennial philosophical conundrum for a reason. If the workings of the mind depend too much on the physical material that seems to house it, then it can be hard to see how there’s conceptual room for human agency. On the other hand, if they don’t depend on it at all, then it’s hard to understand why such things as brain injury or the ingestion of this or that chemical substance should have any effects at all, let alone the reliably predictable effects that often result. Something’s gotta give!

We’re certainly not giving up the truths of natural science. However, just as allowing agency to slip the bonds of nature makes a lot of things inexplicable, so does getting rid of it entirely. (Imagine trying to explain, say, the Civil War without even once appealing, even implicitly, to the notion that human beings act on their beliefs and desires, and are thereby subject to praise and blame from others.) The two types of explanation need to learn to live together, as equally valuable tools in our conceptual toolbox. We need to get clearer, then, on how exactly our normative explanations, and our practices of praise and blame, actually play out. What are they good for, and what are their proper domains of application? What happens when we press them too hard, or try to use them for something they’re not designed to do? How can we get them to play nicely with their conceptual colleagues?

Problems result not only when we use normative language like we do the laws and concepts of science (a common error), but also when normative concepts or principles get in each others’ way, which they will even when we’re being careful, because that’s the nature of the beast. (And of course we’re not always careful.)

Let’s start with a look at a widely used principle, applicable not simply in moral contexts but to normativity generally: that “ought implies can.” The point of this principle is fairly intuitive. [Note: as a speaker of American English, I will be using “ought” and “should” interchangeably here (my apologies to the Queen).] It is at least very often true that it makes no sense to criticize someone for failing to do something which is impossible. On the other hand, there are many different potentially relevant senses and degrees of (im)possibility. Read more »

by Michael Liss

It is a big cross. A really big cross. Forty feet in height, made of granite and concrete, The Bladensburg Peace Cross stands tall and straight for all to see.

The Peace Cross, sponsored by the American Legion, was built in 1925 in the aftermath of World War I to memorialize the sacrifice of 49 Prince George’s County servicemen. It was paid for by the Legion, and by subscription of local residents and businesses. In 1961, maintenance of it was passed to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, and the land it currently stands on is State land, in a traffic median, the cost of maintenance paid for by the taxpayers of Maryland.

If you are just a little bit attuned to the First Amendment (religion portion), you might be interested in how that last part meshes with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

It is a perceptive question, one that the Supreme Court grappled with and decided this last Thursday in American Legion v. American Humanist Association. The Peace Cross, they ruled in a 7-2 decision, may continue to stand on public land and be paid for with public funds.

This is the kind of wonky, incredibly subjective ruling that makes my heart go pitter-patter. I’m not sure I agree (or disagree) with the result, but I love the tortured efforts of most of the Justices to do the best they could under difficult circumstances. This is not an easy one. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robert Fay

I’m not typically a reader of White House memoirs, but after finishing the new biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Our Man (2019) by George Packer, I became intrigued by depictions of Obama’s management style in dealing with Holbrooke, Hilary Clinton and others. I soon picked up The World As It Is (2018) by former Obama advisor Ben Rhodes, which has been described as the best “inside” look of Obama to date. Rhodes tells us enough Obama anecdotes to bring the man into focus. And while none of it is terribly surprising, I was intrigued to learn that Obama, despite being President, continued to see himself as an outsider, as someone who, by virtue of his own personal journey and outlook, could never truly become enculturated to power and authority, despite being the executor of state power for eight years.

It seemed Obama’s self-view as an outsider had less to do with being African-American or as someone who had lived in Indonesia as a child, but more to do with being, at heart, a writer (it’s no coincidence that Rhodes, one of his closest advisors, was a speechwriter who had an MFA in creative writing from NYU). Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father (1995) garnered the kind of literary praise that few politicians since Winston Churchill have received. During his presidency, Obama carved out four or five hours of “alone-time” in the White House Treaty room each night to read books, review documents and often just to think. Obama’s famous coolness, his so-called detachment, was likely a misreading of his observational mode with people, a common trait among writers who find you can learn more from a “scene” by observing people than by inserting yourself into the action.

But most of all, I was struck by a random comment Obama made to Rhodes regarding criticism from American Jews over his Israel policy. “I came out of the Jewish community in Chicago,” he said. “I’m basically a liberal Jew.” Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Many years ago, my father and I were at a backyard BBQ in New Jersey hosted by someone we barely knew, I think they were somehow connected to my step-mother. At some point, the topic of flag burning came up and, before we knew it, we were engaged in an extremely heated debate on what patriotism actually means (I believe that the rights the flag stands for include the right to burn it). The debate ended up with a large group of people holding beers and hot dogs decrying the liberal anti-Americanism of the two of us. Not the best way to spend a summer afternoon. These days, it’s possible, in fact too easy, to repeat the unpleasantness of that afternoon all the time on social media. I try my best to steer away from the soul sucking void that is having debates on Facebook with friends of friends. We all have those people in our lives with whom we have a moral or political disconnect and that those people will sometimes make comments that will inflame our more simpatico friends may be inevitable, but doesn’t have to be engaged with and perpetuated. Such debates don’t change hearts and minds. Full disclosure, I admit, sometimes I don’t follow my own advice here as well as I should, but I try.

Perhaps even more pointless is having fights with utter strangers who just happen to subscribe to the same Facebook groups you do. The other day I felt unusually compelled to comment on a New York Times Modern Love posting on Facebook. The story was about a woman who listened to a tarot card reader and took her “predictions” very seriously. Now as far as I’m concerned, if you make the choice to write about your private life in a public sphere, you’re fair game for other people to comment on your choices – indeed, I open myself up for this in writing for this blog, and I get that. I’m not sure why I bothered to comment, why do people write letters to newspapers? But I certainly believe I had a right to state my opinion. A fellow reader disagreed and started a personal attack on me and my judgement of the story writer. I should have left it at that, I didn’t, I answered back. Read more »

Cars seen through a rusty metal fence in Brixen, South Tyrol, in May, 2016.

by Bill Murray

A few months ago, Mikhail Saakashvili, ousted leader of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and the Ukrainian town of Odessa, predicted that Russia would next attack either Sweden or Finland. A few days ago I visited the Finnish and Russian border towns of Lappeenranta and Выборг (Vyborg), and if war preparations in these two places are any indication, Sweden had better man the barricades.

For people of a certain age, coming to Russia from any direction sends up a certain Cold War frisson. Today we shall cross the border from Finland, which has been fought over and traded between Sweden and Russia for centuries.

As early as 1293 a Swedish marshal built a castle in Vyborg, now Russian. The castle traded hands repeatedly between the Swedes and the then Republic of Novgorod. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and loss of fortresses in Narva, Tallinn and Riga, Vyborg Castle is the only European-style medieval castle in Russia. Its current iteration is touted as a prime tourist destination but appears to be randomly, and arbitrarily, closed for renovation.

Viipuri, in the Finnish appellation, was capital of Finnish Karelia and a vital outlet to the sea until Vyborg was seized by the Red Army in June of 1944. John H. Vartenen, in a 1979 New York Times article:

The Finns felt that to some extent they had won the war on the ground by forcing the Russians to come to the negotiating table. On the other hand, they felt that they lost at the table because, though the Russians had never moved more than 50 miles into Finland, the Finns lost eastern Karelia, including the area’s second‐largest city, Viipuri.

While Vyborg is almost exactly the same size today as when it was taken from the Finns, for 75 years it has been Russified. If you were twelve years old on the day Viipuri fell and had a child of your own five years later, that child would now be 70. Teaching Finnish was out of the question in early Russian-occupied Vyborg, but even for those who quietly did so, use of the language is dying – except in tourism. Read more »

Bonfils Ngabonziza. Ngabo Seven, 2018.

More here and here.

by Jonathan Kujawa

I just returned from the joint Vietnam-US math conference held at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in beautiful Quy Nhon, Vietnam.

While it is a human endeavor, mathematics doesn’t care about gender, race, wealth, or nationality. One of the great pleasures of the math community is finding yourself on common ground with people from around the world. It is for good reason movie aliens usually first communicate using prime numbers and we chose to include math on the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record  [1].

In this spirit, the American Mathematical Society and the Vietnamese Mathematical Society organized a joint meeting to encourage connections, collaborations, and friendship between the two countries’ mathematical communities. Given the fraught history between the two countries, the importance and symbolism of the conference were especially notable. During the cold war, even innocuous communication between mathematicians on the two sides was quite difficult. Even sending a letter, nevermind a conference to meet in person, was a rare event. More than a few results were discovered independently on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Progress was often held up due to not knowing of the latest advances on the other side. The Soviet Union, for example, made it difficult for its citizens to participate in the International Congress of Mathematicians. In an age where internationalism and science are treated with skepticism, building direct connections between countries’ citizens is a wonderful thing. The conference even made the local evening news!

Another great thing about these sorts of conferences is the breadth of mathematics covered. This meeting covered everything from topology to mathematical physics, from modeling natural gas flows in pipelines to groups and representations (my own area of research). As part of this, the meeting had six plenary talks by eminent mathematicians covering the various fields represented at the conference.

One of the speakers was Henry Cohn, arguably the world expert on sphere packings. Dr. Cohn gave a fantastic talk about the latest breakthroughs in this area. Nearly three years ago here at 3QD we talked about an amazing breakthrough in sphere packing. This included work by Dr. Cohn. As we’ll see, Dr. Cohn and his collaborators haven’t been napping. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

What has happened to music? To the joy of cozying up with your records, tapes, or CDs and your music source, whether it was a boom box, or stereo with faux-wood speakers taller than a small child, or Walkman? It used to be simple to figure out where to buy music and how to listen to it. You went to the local record store, and then you brought it home and absconded to your bedroom, where you cranked your new purchase as loud as you could before your parents knocked on the door and told you to turn it down. There was a spatial aspect to music, as the music store was obviously circumscribed in space, with different sections for different tastes. Listening also usually took place in an intimate setting, layered like a palimpsest with memories of years past. Well before five-disc (and then 100-plus-disc) CD changers, we listened to one album at a time, and usually with the songs in the same order that the artist or the producer intended. It was a form of communion, however illusory, with the musician. There were also visual and tactile elements, as you had something to hold in your hands and pore over–liner notes, album credits, lyrics, glossy pictures of the band members. Did anyone ever vote to relinquish these sensory companions to the music-listening experience?

I did not have access to the ultimate in high fidelity as a kid, and I remember practically gluing my ear to my Sony Dream Machine clock radio’s speaker. When my parents bought me my first “boom box” they managed to find one with only one speaker. It hardly boomed, but it was still more than sufficient. In my mind’s ear, even these devices had much better sound quality than the digital music we have come to rely on. At the source, at least, the sound was fuller, less broken down or compressed into heartless bits and bytes. We did also have a lot of vinyl, not because we were hipsters, but because it was the 1970s.

I can’t pretend that it always makes a difference, today’s lesser sound quality. It was a trade-off that didn’t trouble me for years as I joined the rest of the world in celebrating the fact that virtually my entire music collection could fit on an iPod that I could carry around with me. As years go by, and you simply lose the memory of what music used to sound like, you don’t realize that convenience has supplanted most of the other elements of the experience of listening to music. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

In the first scene of the first episode of “The Wire”, McNulty asks the Corner Boy who witnessed the murder of his friend “Snotboogie”, for stealing the money from the pot in a crap game, why they let Snotboogie play, since he always tried to steal the money. The Corner Boy replies, “Got to. This is America, Man.”

This is America. Everybody gets to play. More than that, everybody gets an equal, or at least a fair, shot. Everybody deserves equal opportunity. Justice itself demands that we strive for equality of fair opportunity. Right?

I’m not sure. But I think not. I think equality of opportunity is a bad idea – all the worse because it seems so obviously like a good idea.

But how can one deny that we should strive for equality of fair opportunity? Here’s one way. If you think property rights override everything else, and you always have the right to do what you will with your property no matter what; then it follows that you don’t have to hire gay people if you don’t want to and you don’t have to serve people of color at your restaurant if you don’t want to. This is how Rand Paul, who fancies himself a libertarian, got in trouble – questioning the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I have no sympathy for this way of being against equal opportunity. Of course, nondiscrimination, what is often called “formal” equality of opportunity, is a requirement of justice. I just don’t think we should call that equal opportunity. I would prefer that we treat the right not to be discriminated against as a basic liberty on par with free speech or the right to vote – maybe, even as part of, or an extension, of equality before the law. Read more »

by Adele A. Wilby

Shade from the mango tree blocked out the light to my room. I felt into the darkness of my wardrobe, and as I did so I hoped a confused cobra had not gotten lost and slithered in and curled itself up and taken temporary residence in a corner amongst my clothes.  I walked my fingers down my pile of shirts until I recognised the texture of the one I wanted to wear, and dragged it out. Nervous excitement whirled around in my stomach.  Today could be the day, I thought, as my fingers fumbled to button up my shirt.  Perhaps I was being foolish: perhaps I shouldn’t go.

‘Let’s go. Let’s go.  It’s getting late,’ shouted the driver, as he gestured to the group of guerrillas languishing on the veranda waiting to get into the vehicle for their ride home. The murky green of the pick-up made it look more like a battle tank than a transport vehicle.

The four young men threw their carry bags into the back and clambered onto the vehicle and perched themselves on the seat. The cool breeze would fan their hair and their faces as they made their way along to their homes, and from where they could be on guard also. They held their Kalashnikovs tight and upright between their legs. They knew their lives depended on keeping a firm grip of that rifle as they passed through the jungle road where the known that lurked amongst the tangled foliage posed as great a threat as the unknown. Read more »

Self-portrait in a reflection in a passing train window, while another train goes the other way behind me, at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019.

by Brooks Riley

Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Eisenach, Erfurt, Altenburg, Jena, Weimar, Dessau—markers of histories whose tentacles reach into the present in ways that belie their sleepy status on the map. You suppress the urge to slow down and take the off-ramp instead of moving right along to a big-city destination You opt to remain on the asphalt treadmill with arrival anxiety, telling yourself that one day you will take the time to explore all this, just not right now.

That was my first brush with Dessau, as I was rushing somewhere else. I knew that it was a home of the Bauhaus and that it had been heavily bombed during the war—more than half of it destroyed. In the distance I could see the amorphous outline of a town I wanted to visit someday.

Destiny must have listened. For reasons that had nothing to do with architecture or the Bauhaus, I ended up spending time in both Weimar and Dessau—the two main locations of a movement that exerted an immeasurable influence on the future of architecture worldwide, and occupied an inordinate amount of downtime in my imaginary life. Read more »

by David Introcaso

Two weeks ago the 9th US Circuit Court heard oral arguments in the Juliana v. the US case filed in 2015 by 21 children who petitioned the federal court to require the government to protect their Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by addressing the climate crisis. In its defense the US argued the plaintiffs have “no fundamental constitutional right to a stable climate system,” or a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”

It appears plaintiffs’ lives are in fact not protected.  In a just-published essay in The New England Journal of Medicine by Harvard’s Dr. Renee Salas and her colleagues concluded, “climate change is the greatest public health emergency in our time and is particularly harmful to fetuses, children and adolescents.” This is because recent reports including the US’s National Climate Assessment, the United Nations’ (UNs’) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) “Global Warming of 1.5ºC” and Lancet’s “Countdown on Human Health and Climate Change” all describe in agonizing detail rapid atmospheric warming from currently 1º Celsius to 2º Celsius within the next few decades are causing increasing flooding, wildfires, disease, starvation, forced migration and war.  According to a recent Carbon Brief study, the carbon budget of a child born today will have to be one-eighth that of one born in 1950 if they want to live in a world that is less than 2º Celsius warmer.

The Juliana case along with numerous related others was decades overdue.  Since Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has denied or worked to undermine the life-extinguishing effects of atmospheric warming.  President Trump summarized his recent 90-minute discussion on the topic with Prince Charles by stating, “the US right now has among the cleanest climates.”  He refused to recognize climate science stating, “I believe there’s a change in weather and I think it changes both ways.” Incoherent rhetoric aside, the US Geological Survey recently decided to project climate crisis impacts only through 2040 rather than to the end of the century to avoid detailing the worst impacts of Anthropocene warming. Read more »

by Emily Ogden

Because I wanted to write about something I believe in, my topic today is irony.

The alert reader is already asking, can you believe in irony? The ironist is widely supposed to be a person who doesn’t really believe in anything. Disavowing her attachments as soon as she forms them, holding nothing sacred, she occupies a stance of cool detachment. I don’t think this picture is right. Far from detaching us from the world, irony allows us at once to hold fast to our attachments and to hold them at a distance; to be convinced about our convictions and to be willing to question them.

Such a definition of irony doesn’t necessarily change the ironist’s outward aspect. Go ahead and imagine the same cool customer as before, if you like. But reconsider what might lie behind her performance of detachment. She doesn’t simply say the opposite of what she means for comic effect, as a sarcastic wit might do. Instead, the ironist means everything she says and more besides. If I say that irony is the one thing I really and truly believe in, for example, I’m deliberately invoking the conflict we think exists between irony and belief. I invoke that conflict not to cancel the belief with the irony, but to show that these attitudes can survive their mutual antagonism. Not all conflicts have to end in the extermination of one combatant. Read more »