by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Diogenes of Sinope famously walked the streets of Athens searching for an anthropos. The tale is regularly rendered as him looking for an honest man, but this is too restrictive a translation. Rather, he was looking for a human, in the thick sense of the word. It is like a coach of a soccer team, challenging the squad of players, asking them if they are soccer players. In this regard, the thick sense of the term bears a normative weight, as a success term. And so, when one points to Lionel Messi and says, “Now, that’s a soccer player,” one is not merely saying that Messi plays the game. Rather, one is saying that he plays excellently, that he is exemplary. And so, when Diogenes, with his lit lamp in the daylight, asks people he meets if they are human beings, he is using the term in the thick sense. And given that his search seems to be ongoing, he implicates that everyone is failing to live up to the standard.

The standard that Diogenes — and with him, the ancient Cynic tradition — had in mind is not clear. However, one value at the center of this thick notion of humanity is not in question: that of autarkeia, roughly, independence, self-sufficiency, freedom. The genuine human is free; but, again, Diogenes finds no one fulfilling that standard. Instead, he finds people who are who have lost or given away their independence. Hence a famous Cynic paradox: only the practicing Cynic is free, only the Cynic is rich. How to make sense of these claims? Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

Ms Green isn’t any good with
love poems or tokens, doesn’t like
small, easily lost objects. So she wants
to give him her visions—for example
the wedge of park & slim streetlights
shattering in shallow rainwater
like swarms of bottled fireflies
or clusters of leaping stars.
She wants to give him her gratitude
for life itself: darkness broken by light
days broken by night. The pattern of
dark leaves pressed against the sky.

by Tim Sommers

I know you’ve heard this before. But it’s just too relevant to avoid, so, please, bear with me. It may, or may not, be a garbled version of something Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I am not a Christian, but it has become the equivalent of an urban legend in philosophy. It goes like this. Some famous philosopher or another, maybe Russell, maybe William James, is traveling in some non-Western country, probably India, because of the elephants, and they ask a local informant about their cosmology. The local says, “We believe that the world is a vast sphere resting on the back of four great elephants.”

The philosophy professor says, “But what are the elephants standing on?”

“The elephants are standing on the back of an enormous turtle.”

“What’s the turtle standing on?”

“An even larger turtle.

“But what is that turtle standing on?”

“You are very clever, sir, but I’m afraid it’s turtles all the way down.”

What is that so relevant to? Maybe, the cosmological argument for the existence of God, for one thing, but certainly this. Either the universe has existed in some form or another forever or the universe came into existence out of nothing at some point. That’s not physics or even cosmology. That’s logic. P or not P. Either some turtle is standing on nothing or it’s turtles all the way down. Read more »

Etel Adnan. Al-Sayyab, Mother and Lost Daughter. 1970.

Ink and watercolour on a Japanese book.

More here, here, and here.

by Niall Chithelen

1) I got to see a different side of the Forbidden City when I brought visitors to there on a Monday and learned that the Forbidden City is not open to the public on Mondays. The side of the city that I saw was the outside, because Plan B (improvised) was to walk around the Forbidden City to the park behind it, which amounts largely to walking alongside a large, wide gray wall. Truly remarkable, you know, the immaculate geomancy, the imperial wonders and golden roofs. And then the wall and then us on the other side, strolling around as though I did not just commit a grave and truly ignominious error—strolling in pained, weak silence.

2) On any informal tour I lead, I like to show people the real China, you know, not just the tourist spots. Some people might like to see the inside of the Forbidden City, but for most of its existence, common people could not see the Forbidden City, and so it is more appropriate, I think, to walk around it, as a person would have two or three hundred years ago in order to do whatever business or activity people did at that time in this city—perhaps involving carts, or administration, or workplace conflict resolution. I am not sure about this. This is a more legitimate experience—no ticket required—just a channel into Beijing, feet on the ground in this old city, eyes on those old buildings that have seen so many years of change, an injection of pure Beijing right into your goddamn veins, really. And I try to be informative and even-handed as I dole out history and explain contemporary developments. Is China perfect? No. Is the US perfect? Also no. It is so difficult to judge these things. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

New York City at twilight from the top of the New Museum in July, 2016.

by Nickolas Calabrese

1. “…And I, who timidly hate life, fascinatedly fear death.” Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

2. I didn’t ask to be born, yet I’ve been condemned to death. Early on in Plato’s Phaedra, Socrates declares that it’s the job of the philosopher to prepare for death. Addressing Simmias and Cebes he states, “I am afraid that other people do not realize that the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death.” There is something vulgarly sunny in the way he suggests it, but it also rings clearly true. What philosophers talk about when they talk about ‘the good life’ is a life not regretted when it comes time to exit it. Theirs is the pursuit of truth and understanding, and our own mortality could not be a more present topic to pursue.

3. Quite a few artists are engaged in a similar investigation. Although theirs is not as pure as the philosophers’, the good ones have a strong tendency to make work that both eviscerates vanity and frames mortality. By its very nature, the subject becomes the object. The countless examples of musicians, artists, poets, etc., examining the finitude of their own lives constitutes a vast list. Those who have spent time producing work in this vein are legion: from Bob Dylan to Future, from John Donne to Amiri Baraka, from Cady Noland to Andy Warhol. It comes as no surprise that one’s own death is an attractive topic. After all it’s something that every person ever has either done or will do in their lives. Death is more common than emotions. Not all people are capable of, say, love, but everyone must die. But what artists try to do with their work is antithetical to what Socrates was defining: artists are trying to cheat death. I’ll say more about this further down. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

This is the 40^th anniversary of the onset of economic ‘reform and opening-up’ (gaige kaifang) in China under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, which eventually led to a dramatic transformation of its economy and global status. It is, however, remarkable that China’s current supreme leader, Xi Jinping, marked the anniversary in a speech in the Great Hall of People in Beijing mainly emphasizing the Party’s pervasive control. It is also remarkable that in recent years this leadership seems to have forsaken Deng’s earlier advice of tao guang yang hui (“keep a low profile”). In the flush of Chinese nationalist glory, Xi explicitly stated in the 19^th Party Congress that China has now entered a “new era”, when its model “offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence”. Many people both in rich and poor countries seem to be already awe-struck by this model.

What are the special characteristics of the Chinese development model? Briefly, it’s a model of essentially capitalist development under authoritarian leadership and purposive governance, with a vertical production structure where basic capital goods are produced in monopoly state-owned enterprises and the much-larger rest of the economy is under private ownership, with a state-guided nationalist industrial policy and finance, with subsidized access to land and credit for state-favored business and repression of labor rights, massive investments in infrastructure funded by a very high national savings rate (particularly on account of large undistributed profits of companies), with rural industrialization in a decentralized framework of jurisdictional competition, and openness to foreign trade and acquisition and learning of foreign technology.  It has produced a rapid pace of economic growth over the last three decades and lifted hundreds of millions of people above the poverty line—undoubtedly a spectacular historic feat for any developing country. The recent slowing of the growth rate does not tarnish the long-term shining performance so far.

I have discussed some of these features of Chinese development, particularly in a comparative assessment with Indian development, in my book Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay (Princeton, 2013)—incidentally, I should mention here that when a Chinese translation of this book came out in Beijing, the translator thought it fit or prudential to take out, without my permission, some of the passages in the book that criticized Chinese policy, while those critical of Indian policy remained.

I believe the Chinese governance system is a crucial part of the China development model, and in this article I shall concentrate on its special features, both positive and negative, which tend to be overlooked in the simplistic discussion on authoritarianism vs. democracy that tends to dominate the usual observations on the system. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for some of those special features. In many ways these features undergirding the Chinese polity and economy are quite distinctive, and their roots go long back in history. I shall focus here on the aspects of governance that affect economic development and less on their clearly repressive police-state aspects and gross abuse of basic human rights. Read more »

Painting by Hua Tunan.

More here and here.

by Jeroen Bouterse

“Am I ever going to use this later?” As a math teacher, I seem to be getting this question about once a month (which is actually less frequently than I would have predicted). It is asked with varying degrees of openness to the idea that a satisfying reply is even conceivable, but almost invariably by students who are probably justified in believing that their tertiary education or future career is going to involve few linear equations indeed.

Rather than trying to conjure up some practical situation in which one might need to solve a fractional equation, I usually suggest that math may be worthwhile even if it turns out you can safely forget the techniques you learned in school. Isn’t this puzzle fun, doesn’t it make for good mental exercise, don’t you feel yourself getting a little bit smarter? Implicitly, I am banking on the idea that math improves your thinking. But what does that mean?

Recently, I stumbled upon a pamphlet from the 1920s that turned out to be both a feast of recognition and a source of further questions. Its author was Tatiana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa. A Russian mathematician and physicist, Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa spent much of her time teaching mathematics and developing a program of mathematical pedagogy. Having worked in St Petersburg, she moved to the Netherlands in the 1910s when her husband, Paul Ehrenfest, became a professor of physics at Leiden University. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The traveler comes to a divide. In front of him lies a forest. Behind him lies a deep ravine. He is sure about what he has seen but he isn’t sure what lies ahead. The mostly barren shreds of expectations or the glorious trappings of lands unknown, both are up for grabs in the great casino of life.

First came the numbers, then the symbols encoding the symbols, then symbols encoding the symbols. A festive smattering of metamaniacal creations from the thicket of conjectures populating the hive mind of creative consciousness. Even Kurt Gödel could not grasp the final import of the generations of ideas his self-consuming monster creation would spawn in the future. It would plough a deep, indestructible furrow through biology and computation. Before and after that it would lay men’s ambitions of conquering knowledge to final rest, like a giant thorn that splits open dreams along their wide central artery.

Code. Growing mountains of self-replicating code. Scattered like gems in the weird and wonderful passage of spacetime, stupefying itself with its endless bifurcations. Engrossed in their celebratory outbursts of draconian superiority, humans hardly noticed it. Bits and bytes wending and winding their way through increasingly Byzantine corridors of power, promise and pleasure. Riding on the backs of great expectations, bellowing their heart out without pondering the implications. What do they expect when they are confronted, finally, with the picture-perfect contours of their creations, when the stagehands have finally taken care of the props and the game is finally on? Shantih, shantih, shantih, I say. Read more »