by Yohan J. John

Once, some years ago, I was attending a talk by the philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was engaged in his usual counterintuitive mix of lefty politics and pop culture references, and I found myself nodding vigorously. But at one point I asked myself: do I really understand what he is saying? Or do I simply have the feeling of understanding? As a neuroscientist, I am acutely aware of the mysterious and myriad ways in which brain areas are connected with each other and with the rest of the body. There are many pathways from point A to point B in the brain: perhaps Žižek’s words (and accent and crazed physical tics) had found a shortcut to the ‘understanding centers’ (whatever they might prove to be) in my brain? Perhaps my feeling of comprehension was a false alarm? Had I been intellectually hypnotized?

One way to check would be to try and explain Žižek’s ideas for myself. A handy sanity check might involve directing my explanations at other people, since I knew from first-hand experience that a set of ideas can seem perfectly coherent when they float free-form in one’s head, but when it comes time for the clouds of thought to condense into something communicable, very often no rain ensues. (This often happens when it’s time for me to translate my ruminations into a 3QD essay!)

Many of us like to see ourselves as members of a scientific society, where rational people subject ideas to rigorous scrutiny before filing them in the ‘justified true belief’ cabinet. But there are many sorts of ideas that can’t really be put to any kind of stringent test: my ‘social’ test of Žižek’s ideas doesn’t necessarily prove anything, since most of my friends are as left-wing (and susceptible to pop cultural analogies) as I am. This is the state of many of the ideas that seem most pressing for individuals and societies: there aren’t really any scientific or social tests that definitively establish ‘truth’ in politics, history or aesthetics.

To attempt an understanding of understanding, I think it might make sense to situate our verbal forms of knowledge-generation in the wider world of knowing: a world that includes the forms that we share with animals and even plants. To this end, I’ve come up with a taxonomy of understanding, which, for reasons that should become apparent eventually, I will organize in a ring. At the very outset I must stress that in humans these ways of knowing are very rarely employed in isolation. Moreover, they are not fixed faculties: they influence each other and gradually modify each other. Finally, I must stress that this ‘systematization’ is a work in progress. With these caveats in mind, I’d like to treat each of the ways of knowing in order, starting at the bottom and working my way around in a clockwise direction.

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Editor’s Note: My sister Azra has kindly given us permission to publish remarks that she delivered to The Citizen’s Foundation gala in Houston a few days ago. She will provide translations of the Urdu poetry soon.

by Azra Raza

Thank you Dr. Abdullah Jafari, thank you TCF, thank you Houston for giving me this opportunity to speak tonight. I am greatly honored. This evening, we are going to celebrate the women of Pakistan.

In the 1930s of Aligarh, my mother was sent to Merath for a vacation. She was barely ten years old. In Meerath, she became homesick in the house of her relatives. A few weeks later, she learnt that her father would be visiting a nearby town so she wrote begging her mother that her father should take her home to Aligarh when he returned. This one simple act of letter writing caused a major upheaval in Aijaz Manzil because the first thing my Naana wanted to know was how Naani Amman found out about Ammi’s unhappiness. Naani Amman had to produce the letter which was examined carefully. My Naana was scandalized by the idea that his daughter had secretly learned to read and write, an activity considered subversive and dangerous. While a good head and a good heart in a woman was a desirable combination, adding a pen to that was tantamount to outright rebellion.

I remembered this story because when my own daughter Sheherzad was ten years old and I asked her one day what she would do if she won the lottery and had millions of dollars, her instantaneous and forceful response was, “Finish my education, of course!” What a contrast between two 10-year olds separated by one single generation. Sheherzad did not have to think twice about her education because of the sacrifices made by my mother and by the women of her generation in the pre-partition subcontinent. So if we are going to celebrate the women of Pakistan, let us begin with the pioneers. Ms. Fatima Jinnah and Begum Rana Liaqat Ali Khan, Lady Haroon and Begum Shaista Ikramullah. My mother became deeply involved in women’s education in Karachi and through her tireless efforts, managed to provide for both primary and higher education to hundreds of underprivileged students. When she died 15 years ago, my epitaph for her was the famous Faiz sher:

Karo kaj jabeen pay sar e kafan
Meray qaatiloun ko gumaan na ho
Kay ghuroor e ishq ka baankpan
Pas e marg ham nay bhula diya!

(Faiz)

(Keep the shroud tilted on my forehead as a sign of defiance and pride. Let not my assassins have the misapprehension that in death, they succeeded in crushing the honor and pride I took in my passions).

The first University open to women was in Bombay in 1882 while Harvard Medical School admitted women for the first time in 1945. As far as Pakistan is concerned, let us do a little math. The population is roughly 186 million. There are 296,832 students enrolled in degree level education which comes to 0.1% population. Despite these dire statistics, the good news is that 62% of them are women and the level of achievement of girls is consistently higher than that of the boys. Girls outclass boys in examination, and they are also higher achievers. And yet, when it comes to the work-force, their efforts are not rewarded equally. I was horrified to hear the goal announced at the International Women’s Conference last year: 50-50 by 2030 meaning equal pay by 2030. Why?

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by Paul Braterman

R: Sagan warns us against fallacies. But is exposing fallacies enough to shield us from the demons?

I had been waiting for a quiet moment to write about this, but there isn't going to be a quiet moment, so now will have to do.

Debaters regularly accuse their opponents of using fallacies. These can be formal fallacies, such as simple errors of logic, or informal fallacies, such as appeal to authority, ad hominem and strawman arguments, among others. If a piece of reasoning depends on any of these fallacies, so it is claimed, the conclusion does not really follow from the premises, and while it might still be true we have not been given any good reason to believe it.[1] And so books that discuss logic, and science-promoting blogs (including one I follow), regularly include descriptions of informal fallacies, with stern instructions to avoid committing them.

In an article entitled The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life, Maarten Boudry, Fabio Paglieri and Massimo Pigliucci (henceforth BPP) challenge this view. BPP is written for the perusal of trained philosophers, which I am not, but I use it here as a jumping off point, while mixing in further content of my own.

BPP apply what they call the fallacy fork test to accusations of informal fallacy; either the reasoning is obviously erroneous, in which case no one would really use it, or else it is not obviously erroneous in context, and we still have all the work to do. In the first case, formal analysis is redundant; in the second, the facts of the matter need further consideration. So naming and shaming the particular kind of fallacy is either unnecessary or uncalled for. I agree, and suggest that we drop the label "fallacy" for such informal arguments, since to make the label stick we have to show on other grounds that the argument as used really is fallacious. The discussion made me think of my own reflections on formally valid logical arguments, which only work because the conclusion has actually been accepted in advance, otherwise we would not have accepted the premises. In both cases, the formal or semi-formal reasoning, while seemingly at the heart of the argument, is an unnecessary elaboration, and we can cut out the middleman.

Going beyond this, it is becoming increasingly clear that the logical is only one aspect, and not usually the most important aspect, of an argument. More important are the heuristic and rhetorical aspects; will the reasoning point us towards a way of acquiring new knowledge, and how useful is it in the attempt to persuade our opponents to change their minds. (In passing, I suggest that if our objective is to persuade others to change their minds, we are not arguing in good faith, unless we are at least in principle open to the possibility that we too might change ours.)

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by Katrin Trüstedt

While the murder series of the right-wing terror trio National Socialist Underground (NSU) has generally escaped major international attention (especially in comparison with Islamist terror attacks), one of the assassinations continues to come up. The murder of Halit Yozgat, the 9^th assassination of the NSU, resists the fate of the others, because of one rather delicate detail: a secret service agent was present at the crime scene at the time of the murder. When Halit Yozgat was shot in the head by two members of the NSU on April 6, 2006, from a close distance with a silenced Česká CZ 83 pistol (the signature style of the NSU assassinations), Andreas Temme, an agent of the Hessian domestic intelligence service, was in the internet café in Kassel. When Halit Yozgat's father, İsmail Yozgat, found his son when he returned to the café a few minutes after the murder, Temme was gone.

The agent claimed first to have been at the café the day before, and then that he had left the place right before the murder. He later changed his statement when confronted with overwhelming evidence placing him at the scene when the murder happened. He then claimed he didn't see or hear Yozgat getting shot while he was chatting with his online affair; that he put coins on the reception desk and left, not noticing that Yozgat was dying on the ground behind the desk; and that he didn't report back to the police like all the other witnesses in the café because he didn't want his pregnant wife to find out what he was doing there. The police, the court and his employers at the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution accepted his testimony. But his presence continues to raise suspicions that government agencies might in some way be involved in the murders, fueling conspiracy theories in various directions. Much justified criticism of the authorities' handling of the case came from the left, pointing out the general trivialization of right-wing violence by state agencies combined with racist prejudices when it comes to the victims, when the various agencies investigating the murders had disregarded the possibility of right-wing terror and rather investigated the victim's families for possible criminal ties, thereby doubling the crimes they were supposed to prevent. Against this background, the fact that an agent of the domestic intelligence service was present at the scene raised the suspicion that government agencies might have actively protected or enabled the NSU. Meanwhile there are, on the other hand, many rumors in the right-wing scene itself claiming the NSU murders were orchestrated by the state authorities in order to hurt the scene.

Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths around the architect Eyal Weizman, have launched an independent investigation into the case and recently presented preliminary results.

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by Elise Hempel

I'm about to enter yet another poetry chapbook contest that I'll have little chance of winning. This one's cheap – only $10 to enter (compared to the usual $20 to $30), but that's because there's no monetary prize (most chapbook and full-length book contests award $1,000 to the winner), only publication and a contract for a certain percentage of the printed chapbook's sales.

Though we're now in the age of Trump, in the age of "winning," of loving winners and loving to win, I'm still the same person I was before November 8, 2016. Of course I'd love to win this chapbook contest, to have my 20 to 30 poems neatly packaged in a perfect-bound little book with a colorful glossy cover, to add one more publication to my résumé. But, like Anis Shivani, I also don't believe in poetry contests, and I resent the fact that this is what I, and other less-well-known poets, must do to even come close to getting just a chapbook published. And I continue to be baffled by the fact that most poetry contests (for both books and chapbooks, and for a single poem or group of poems) name only a single winner, awarding prize money and publication to the one "best" submission, though sometimes a few lucky finalists are also given publication and a lesser amount of cash.

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by Christopher Bacas

After any commercial job, I was a whirling particle; negatively charged. I wanted to appear simultaneously in a distant vector of the universe (preferably, garage level). Spooky action proved impossible. Quantum properties aren't conferred at loading docks. A single sound launched our universe, though. I wonder who was on that gig…

One band leader, obsessively germ-phobic, always brought food; peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches held tightly between layers of crinkled foil, fingers never touching bread. His musicianship so secure, he'd simultaneously walk impeccable left-hand bass, comp and go over details with the party planner. Preoccupied with himself, he never requested dinner service for sidemen, even when available. We usually got squashed sandwiches in clear folding trays. The potato chips inside, moistened by a pickle, bent a full 360 degrees without breaking. Once, a maitre'd bypassed him and asked the horn section if we wanted surf and turf. At break time, our boss fumed while staff uncovered our glistening plates and poured bubbly into elegant flutes.

We worked exclusively for a suburban Maryland office. They had high-end bar-mitzvah work sewn up. The chief drove a Porsche. He required us to make a new video at least once a year. The sound stage and audio/video team were part of his business; a club date version of the company store. Shoots dragged for needless hours as the "crew" struggled to properly mic and mix instruments and music they saw and heard weekly. While the smoke machine wafted saccharine clouds through skronking feedback and buzzing amps, grown-up high-school AV nerds, pocket protectors and cluttered tool belts included, scuttled around jabbering into wireless headsets.

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by Humera Afridi

I am the companion of the new Adam

Who has earned my self-assured love

(Fahmida Riaz)

“Mommy, when are you going to start dating? You’re not even trying!” complained my nine-year old on a sunny afternoon in February, two days before Valentine’s Day.

We’d just returned home from family day at Chelsea Piers, our cherished Sunday ritual. His words—incongruous in that moment and, certainly so, for his age—struck me with force. I dropped my gym bag, feigned horror. But the horror was as real as if I’d stumbled upon a nest of rodents as I breathed through a rush of emotions—alarm, sadness, mirth, shock.

These had suddenly appeared skittering and scampering, prodded by an innocent question which had penetrated, with the precision of an arrow, layers of social and cultural conditioning. My son’s words had spilled out, I noticed, in a single breath, question and complaint merged into an astutely observed assessment which he’d delivered with an air of impatience.

I threw my head back and laughed, pinched his chin. “Eeeks! Dating? I have zero interest. And, anyway, who has time?”

“Mom, there are apps, you know, where you can find a boyfriend.” He was adamant, unwilling to relinquish his position. “And that way I can have a stepdad,” he added, frowning now to conceal a tremor of self-consciousness.

This tragi-comic pronouncement in the elevator ride up to our apartment rapidly mounted into an existential crisis—I felt the urge to double over in reams of chronic laughter, I wanted to curl myself into a ball and weep, all at the same time.

Instead, I joked. “Hey, mister, how come you know about dating apps?”

The ground beneath my feet felt like quicksand. The mellow passage of domestic stability was suddenly under threat with the possibility of the new order that my son’s unsolicited and precocious ‘advice’ had raised. Stendhal’s words popped into my mind: “The most surprising thing of all about love is the first step, the violence of the change that takes place in a man’s mind.” Presumably, a woman’s mind, too. And I, comfortably ensconced in my routines, freedom, and independence desired no disruption, thank you. Motherhood is a gift I cherish; it has also, naturally, been my compass. But my child had now inadvertently made lucid the fact that I’d been occupying this station complacently, with inordinate fealty to an ideal of motherhood that upholds those who are settled in constancy, those spared the volatility and “violence” of new love—married mothers.

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by Richard King

Good news for US exports this month. Australia, my adoptive country, has also adopted the trigger warning. Taking its lead from US campuses, Melbourne's Monash University has obliged its academic staff to review their course materials with the aim of identifying content that may be "emotionally confronting" for students, and is set to attach fifteen advisory statements to subjects dealing with, inter alia, racism, torture, homophobia and colonialism. All very exotic in a country revered for its colourful language and casual racism, but that's the power of globalisation. And they say the American Century is over.

Not everyone is happy about the new arrival. Following their US counterparts (the reaction, too, has an imported feel), critics of "political correctness" have declared the adoption of trigger warnings to be a new front in the culture wars and the heir to such PC atrocities as affirmative action and university speech codes. According to this line of argument, trigger warnings are a Trojan horse from which the polo-necked Foucauldian foot-soldiers will emerge the moment Professor Tomnoddy brandishes his Amontillado-stained copy of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. "Sensitivity" is code for censorship and the imposition of radical values on the entire academic cohort.

Notwithstanding the muscular, male-menopausal, almost vaudevillian liberalism with which their animadversions come served, these critics aren't completely wrong. Trigger warnings are political and do derive, via a circuitous route, from the cultural "turn" in leftwing politics in the late 1960s and 1970s. But they are not political in the way conservatives or classical liberals think they're political, being neither an assault on "academic freedom" nor a Marcusean attempt to drive the sacred cows of tradition, "Western Civ." etc. towards the abattoir of Cultural Marxism. Possibly there's a bit of that, but my strong sense is that what we're dealing with here is a new form of subjectivity that regards the expression of personal hurt, not just as a form of political agency, but as the very stuff of politics itself. Like their close cousins "safe spaces" and "microaggressions", trigger warnings represent a new political epistemology.

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by Carl Pierer

I.

The old problem of induction raised the question of how we can justify inferences from singular observations to general statements. In the last century two newer problems were presented. The Ravens Paradox, which I will explain in section II, is due to Carl G. Hempel. The ‘grue problem' was put forth by Nelson Goodman and I shall present it in section III. In section IV I will first compare the two problems and then attempt to show that Hempel's paradox can be solved, whereas Goodman's ‘grue' points to a deeper problem.

II.

Carl Hempel focuses on the question of what counts as evidence for hypotheses. There are two principles of inductive reasoning that we seem to accept.

(i) If all Ps have been observed to be Qs, then this counts as evidence for "All Ps are Qs". Hempel writes: "(…) this hypothesis is confirmed by an object a if a is P and Q; and the hypothesis is disconfirmed by a if a is P, but not Q." (Hempel 1945, p. 18)

(ii) What counts as evidence for one statement, counts as evidence for all logically equivalent statements. So, if all non-B's have been observed to be non-A's, then this counts as evidence for the original statement. It seems plausible to accept the second principle. The statements are equivalent exactly because they are true under the same conditions.

Hempel thinks that this account entails a paradox, namely the Ravens Paradox. Say we start off with the hypothesis: "All ravens are black". We can then construct its logical equivalent: "All non-black things are non-ravens". By (i), everything that we can observe that is not a raven and not black will count as evidence for the second statement. By (ii) we are bound to accept these evidences as evidence for the initial hypothesis. But this seems absurd. We do not believe that my brown jumper does in any way affect the hypothesis that all ravens are black. This fact seems completely irrelevant.

III.

Nelson Goodman formulated a "new riddle of induction". In order to construe it, he needs to come up with a new predicate: the infamous "grue" (Goodman 1954, p 74). Objects are grue if they are observed before time t and are green, and if they are observed after t and they are blue. Now, t is some time in the future, say the 1^st November 2020. So, if we have a green emerald before time t, then this certainly supports the hypothesis "All emeralds are green". However, we can also take it as evidence for "All emeralds are grue". The issue, then, is to determine whether we have any reasonable grounds to prefer thinking of emeralds as green over emeralds as grue.

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by Holly A. Case

Demonstration in Budapest in support of CEU, April 9, 2017

On Tuesday of last week, the Hungarian parliament passed a law that seeks to drive the Central European University, founded in 1991, out of the Hungary. Many articles and op-eds have been written condemning the law, and declarations of support have come from Hungarian universities and student unions, scores of universities and scholarly organizations in Europe and the US, and from CEU students and alumni. Demonstrations and solidarity events have taken place in Budapest, New York, London, Lisbon, Friedrichshafen, St. Petersburg, Warsaw, Saarbrücken, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Bucharest, Mainz, Vienna, Berlin, Cluj, Stockholm, Heidelberg, Zagreb, and Prague. Members of the European Parliament, as well as US and European diplomats and statesmen have criticized the law, all to no avail. The governing party in Hungary, Fidesz, with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at its head, remains unmoved.

Somewhere in between all the domestic and international support and the Hungarian government's attacks on CEU is the actual place and the people who have studied or worked there. What follows is a series of anecdotes about an educational institution in the heart of Europe like no other, one that has no obvious forerunners or successors. The child of a euphoric moment in the region's history (1989), CEU has since grown and changed, but has also transformed the many people who have passed through it.

1996: The Conference (by yours truly, no affiliation with CEU)

I first visited CEU in the spring of 1996. A friend of mine and I had come up from the town of Szeged for a conference. We met the other participants in a cafeteria-like setting at the brand new Kerepesi dormitory on the outskirts of Budapest. The conditions for language surfing were ideal. Everyone had a few, it seemed: all the former Soviets knew Russian, all the former Yugoslavs knew…well, that language that they all spoke (the name of which was a plaything in that cafeteria, but a minefield outside it; the war in Bosnia had barely ended). Plus there were the displacement stories, like Leonid, a Russian-speaking Jew from Moldova, who also happened to speak Bulgarian as well as that language, thanks to friendships and a love interest from Serbia.

I gave my conference presentation on absurdism in Polish and Hungarian literature. While the cafeteria conversations had unfolded in numerous languages, the conference proceedings were all in English, which was rough for many of the participants who had only been learning the language for a short time. After my panel, a group of us—myself, a Croat, a Latvian, a Hungarian, and Leonid—were standing in the lobby when someone commented on how good my English was. “How did you learn it so good?” he wondered. Before I could tell him it was my native language, the Latvian spoke for me, waving a hand dismissively: “You know how it was, the borders were changing so quickly.”

We burst out laughing. The collapse of multi-national states, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the end of the bipolar world order: the borders had indeed changed very quickly.

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by Paul North

We're used to thinking of the past as something that already happened. We say it's over, finished. We've moved on. Some go further and say that the past itself has moved…out of reach. It is over and done with, it holds no claim on us, it has not only stopped happening but also no longer has effects. As naïve as this seems, there are reasons to take this view. What do Napoleon or the Warring States period in China have to do with shopping malls and the global poverty level? Which parts of the past influence us and which are truly out of date? A good example of the "over and done with" theory of the past is old technology. Is that a clay tablet for sale in my office supply store? This evidence can be used to argue for a strong discontinuity with the past.

The same evidence, the reed stylus for making wedge-shaped impressions in a clay tablet, can be used to show a strong continuity with the past. Some would point out the obvious similarities between 300-year old stylus and ballpoint pen, for instance, and perhaps a little more surprisingly, but not much, some will note the screen-like nature of the clay tablet. Those who see this think that the past, though completed, nevertheless has influence on our present. Some believe that the US Constitution fixed the standards for high-level political issues, and these very standards—freedom of assembly, the right to bear arms, freedom of speech, among others—persist, despite multiple problems of interpretation, and despite the way language changes and forms of living and frames of reference change. The past happened. It is done and closed for business. Our present reenacts—in perpetuity—matters settled long ago.

In perpetuity—this is just the point. Many also think the past, though fixed and formed and unchanging, influences not only the present but also the future. This view is shared by evangelicals and tech junkies alike. The belief that in the deepest past God fixed a date for salvation is close cousin to the belief that in the recent past the invention of the computer fixed the course of progress. These beliefs, despite the obvious differences, have a similar view of the past. Past events, finished, final, and certain as they are, nonetheless shaped future events.

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by Grace Boey

How should we listen to others? The social act of listening necessarily involves two parties: the listener, and the speaker. In many situations, the answer to the question depends on the comparative standing between the two.

Consider, for instance, how I should listen to my doctor. I ought to place more stock in his medical judgments than my own, since he is a medical expert and I am not. Suppose my doctor tells me that my sore throat has been caused by a virus, which will not be cured by a course of antibiotics. I should trust what he says, even though there may be a slim chance that he is wrong. And I ought to do this even if I suspect that antibiotics might help me, since they have cured a painful case of strep throat in the past.

Yet it is not the case that everyone ought to defer to my doctor’s medical judgments. Consider a senior medical specialist who has much more experience diagnosing painful throats than my doctor. If she concludes that my sore throat is bacterial, and not viral, then she ought to place more stock in her own judgment than his, and advise him to prescribe me a course of antibiotics. So whether or not one ought to defer to my doctor’s medical judgments depends on who they are. In this situation and others like it, the question now becomes: given who we are, how should we listen to others?

The medical case above is uncontroversial, as are similar cases involving other types of expertise like engineering, science, math, and so on. We have no problems recognising that we should listen to experts in these fields, since they have important skills and information that we lack. But there is one type of listening which is, although socially and morally salient, much less often conceived in these terms: listening to others about oppression. So: given who we are, how should we listen to others about oppression?

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by Leanne Ogasawara

It is every astronomer's dream.

To be granted your own island, you are then given practically unlimited funds so to be able to design, build and run your own observatory. Who could have such luck, you are probably wondering? Well, Tycho Brahe, who stands as one of the most fascinating and quirky characters in the history of astronomy, found himself in just this ideal position.

It was the mid 16th century. And the island he set his sights on was located in the middle of the Danish sound, not far from the Elsinore, the stage of Hamlet's tragedy. A quiet island, Tycho was not only given the island of Hven in its entirity, but he was put in charge of the people living there as well. Conscripted like Russian serfs, the villagers of Hven woke up one day to learn that a new boss was in town, and they owed him two days work a week–no wages to be paid.

And so with their labor, Tycho's great building project commenced "for the contemplation of philosophy, especially of the stars."

John Robert Christianson, in his delightfully well-written book, On Tycho's Island, describes the project in detail. "A Platonic philosopher, Paracelsian chemist, and Ovidian poet, Tycho Brahe was the last Renaissance man," says Christianson.

The last Renaissance man was also the "first great organizer of modern science."

A high ranking aristocrat from a powerful family, Tycho had the full backing of the Danish crown. The king hoped that Tycho would bring fame to his country in the form of great scientific discoveries. And everyone at court looked forward to seeing the new observatory take shape. Tycho planned Uraniborg ("Castle of Urania") to be both elegant AND cutting edge. Trying to create something like "the past glories of Castiglione's Urbino and Ficino's Platonic Academy in Florence," Uraniborg was probably really modeled on Palladio's Villa Rotunda, near Vicenza, which Tycho might have seen when he visited Venice 1575. Tycho was perhaps drawn to Palladio's architecture because of its strict use of purely geometric forms.

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by Bill Benzon

The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1921. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese. A Japanese ten-year-old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in 1938 and thirteen years later he created the most famous robot in Japanese culture, Tetsuwan Atomu, Mighty Atom, aka Astro Boy in English. Čapek’s play was a response to industrialization; Tezuka’s manga was a response to the Allied Occupation of Japan. Čapek’s robots were not electro-mechanical devices; they were organic, but constructed, like Frankenstein. They were created to serve humans as workers, but they rebel and, in time, kill all humans save one. Tezuka’s conception is quite different; his robots are electro-mechanical, but many of his stories center on social tension between humans and robots.

Though Tezuka hated WWII, he was a patriotic Japanese and expected Japan to win the war. Near the end of the war he created an unpublished comic in which Japanese and American comic strip characters fought one another (Frederik Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays, 2007, p. 27). After the war he continued his medical training while beginning to publish manga, publishing New Treasure Island in 1947, which is reputed to have sold 400,000 copies. He experimented with science fiction in Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. He introduced Mighty Atom as a secondary character in 1951, and then gave him his own title in 1952.

Chris Galdis, Astro Boy Outside Kyoto Station

While he had some misgivings about whether or not his primary audience, Japanese boys, would be able to identify with a robot, those misgivings were groundless. Mighty Atom was a success. He published Mighty Atom stories continuously from 1952 through 1968, and a few thereafter. In the 1960s he created an animated TV series that was almost immediately exported to the United States as Astro Boy. During the 1980s he created fifty-two anime episodes in color, most of them based on stories in the earlier anime series or in the manga.

Tezuka set Mighty Atom in a future world with advanced technology. Space travel was routine, as was undersea and deep earth exploration. Mighty Atom was the size of a ten-year-old boy, more or less, but had a 100,000 horsepower atomic energy heart, an electronic brain, search light eyes, super-sensitive hearing, rockets in his legs, ray guns in his fingers, and a pair of machine guns in his posterior. He attended primary school, where he was often teased for being a robot, and lived with robot parents and a robot sister. He was particularly close, however, to two middle-aged men. Dr. Elefun was head of the Ministry of Science and created Atom’s parents and sister; he also repaired Atom. Mr. Mustachio was Atom’s teacher in school. Both men worked closely with Atom on his various missions and adventures and offered him sage advice.

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