by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Science is beautiful. Or so they say. When Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, made his major breakthrough, he wrote “the whole area of internal relations in atomic theory is unexpectedly and clearly spread out before my eyes. What these internal relations show in all their mathematic abstraction, is an incredible degree of simplicity, a gift that we can only accept with humility. Not even Plato could have believed that it would be so beautiful. In fact these relations cannot have been invented: they have existed since the creation of the world.” Such pronouncements are not rare; the splendor of theories and the elegance of equations has been extolled by generations of scientists. Unfortunately, however, these sentiments aren’t always shared by the general public, most of whom assume that this particular form of beauty lies only in the eye of the (highly educated) beholder – a tragic misconception which precludes many from claiming the profound relationship with the universe that is their birthright.

It is true that the deeper we delve into any subject the more subtle our appreciation of it becomes, but just as we do not need a degree in Art to enjoy a painting, or a degree in Music to enjoy a song, a formal degree is not a prerequisite to experiencing the joy and wonder of science. Scientists find aesthetic pleasure in their subject, not just because they know more than the lay person, but because they have imbued what they know with meaning. They are aware of the context in which statements are made, and of the connections that exist between one idea and another; through long years of practice, they have trained their ears to hear the beautiful and passionate harmonies that lie implicit in apparently bland scientific laws.

To those of us who lack such associations, the very same statements fall flat. They do not evoke emotion, any more than a printed musical score would. But if someone plays the composition, that is another thing entirely; suddenly, the monochrome pattern of notes weaving through staff lines becomes a living entity, with a story and a soul. When non-scientists read textbook passages, or newspaper articles distilling the latest discoveries, it is only natural that they remain unmoved. Most people lack the experience, the mental images and the knowledge networks which would allow them to create meaning from a string of facts; in the absence of such connections, statements that should rightly inspire awe, dwindle into mere trivia.

Read more »

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
…………….. —Robert Frost

Safe

I'm safe
I've locked myself in
You're with me and safe too

Through the barred window of this box
the world has changed, grown more lovely

I savor its barred beauty more
as I recall it close at hand

Now unattainable it seems exquisite
or, I see now how exquisite it has always been

But we're safe now from its predations
bounded and safe

look, out there, the honeysuckle,
remember its scent?
.

by Jim Culleny
12/10/13

by Grace Boey

A runaway train trolley is racing towards five men who are tied to the track. By pulling a lever, you could divert the train's path to an alternative track, which has only one man on it …

If you're gearing up to respond with what you'd do and why, don't bother. It doesn't matter whether you'd pull the lever: it's too late. The five were run over almost fifty years ago, because philosophers couldn't decide what to do. They have been – pun most certainly intended – debated to death.

Formulated by the late Philippa Foot in 1967, the famous “trolley problem” has since been endlessly picked apart and argued over by moral philosophers. It's even been reformulated – apart from “classic”, the trolley problem also comes in “fat man”, “loop”, “transplant” and “hammock” varieties. Yet, in spite of all the fascinating analysis, there still isn't any good consensus on what the right thing is to do. And, not only do philosophers disagree over what to do, a significant number of them just aren't sure. In a 2009 survey of mostly professional philosophers, 34.8% of the respondents indicated some degree of uncertainty over the right answer [1].

Philosopher or not, if you're in the habit of being intellectually honest, then there's a good chance you aren't completely certain about all your moral beliefs. Looking to the ethics textbooks doesn't help – you'd be lucky not to come away from that with more doubts than before. If the philosophical field of ethics is supposed to resolve our moral dilemmas, then on some level it has obviously failed. Debates over moral issues like abortion, animal rights and euthanasia rage on, between opposing parties and also within the minds of individuals. These uncertainties won't go away any time soon. Once we recognize this, then the following question naturally arises: what's the best way to act under moral uncertainty?

Ethicists, strangely, have mostly overlooked this question. But in relatively recent years, a small group of philosophers have begun rigorous attempts at addressing the problem. In particular, attempts are being made to adapt probability and expected utility theory to decision-making under moral uncertainty.

Read more »

by Bill Benzon

For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all comers: politicians, scientists of all kinds, and disgruntled letter writers. And always the defense comes down to this: we provide a holistic and integrated view of what it is to be human in a world that is, well, just what IS the world like anyhow?

It's a mug's game and I refuse to play it. I was trained in the human sciences: hermeneutics AND cognitive science, history AND social science, and I've played jazz and rhythm and blues in seedy nightclubs, ritzy weddings, and outdoors before thousands. It's all good. It's all come into play as I've investigated the human mind through music and literature.

In this essay I look at literature. First I consider literary form as displayed in ring form texts. Then I review a historical problem posed by Shakespeare and the rise of the European novel. My general point will be that we need all our conceptual resources to deal with these problems. But let's begin with an analogy: how do we understand, say, a cathedral?

The Cathedral Problem

Cathedrals are made of stone blocks, mortar, pieces of stained glass, lead strips, metal fittings, wooden beams and boards, and so forth. You can go through a cathedral and count and label every block and locate them on a (3D) map. You can do the same for the doors and cabinets, the plumbing, heating fixtures, and wiring, and so forth. You will now, in some sense, have described the cathedral. But you won't have captured its design. That's difficult and those how focus on it often use vague language, not because they like vagueness, but because, at the moment, that's all that's available.

And so it goes with literature and newer psychologies: cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience. My humanist colleagues keep hearing that they should get on board with the cognitive revolution and the decade of the brain. But it all sounds like trying to explain a cathedral by counting the building blocks, measuring the pitch of the roof, and analyzing the refractive properties of pieces of colored glass.

The advice may be well meant, but it isn't terribly useful. It takes our attention away from the problem – how the whole shebang works – and asks us to settle for a pile of things we already know. Almost.

Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Maybe I’m just getting old. Having recently turned 45, I realize that what I’m about to write may very well just be an early sign that I’m about to turn into one of those older people who need a young person to help them use their phone/computer/toaster. Despite the fact that I spent almost 20 years as a techie, perhaps I’ve jumped the shark and should give up trying to keep up with technology and the changes it brings to society. Even as I shake my head in disbelief at the lack of civility that seems to have become acceptable, I realize that civility is in the eye of the beholder and that to my 13-year old, this is what society is. This is the Beatles and their long hair, Elvis and his overtly sexualize hip gyrations, dresses that showed ankles, or one of the many, many harbingers of the “end of life as we know it” that have been decried over the years by the older generations.

So if you think I’m just old and stuffy, spare me the comments telling me so. But honestly, I do think that there’s something unfortunate going on and I worry about the slippery slope it puts us on. Since my marital separation, I’ve been trying out online dating. I’ve had some good dates and some bad. Just like dating was 20 years ago. But one thing is not the way it was the last time I was single, the utter degradation of civil discourse.

I’ve been really shocked at what men (and I know that maybe women do this as well, but I only date men so that’s my experience) feel it’s okay to say to a total stranger they’ve been talking with for a few minutes or less. It’s not that I didn’t meet my fair number of boors in bars in my twenties, but that behavior was almost always fueled by alcohol. But this behavior isn’t. And it’s not even the supposed anonymity of the Internet that encourages these people to say and do things that I have to hope they wouldn’t say and do in person – many of them have no problem owning to who they actually are before they launch into their sex talk.

Clearly online dating is far from the only Internet area where vulgarity, bullying and generally boorish behavior seems to be exponentially greater than its in-person counterparts; comments sections on blogs and newspapers (including some of the comments I’ve received on this site over the years) often seem to be utterly lacking in compassion, empathy or any consideration for other people’s feelings.

Cyberbulling and the dehumanizing of the subject matter sometimes gets taken to such extremes as to be almost funny, if it wasn’t so unpleasant; the poor woman whose photo happened to be on the homepage of the health insurance enrollment website was “lambasted by cyberbullies who associated her face with the politically divisive law”. Really? Are people really that stupid and that mean?

Read more »

by Eric Byrd

In an ideal library Mark Twain is the author of Around the World with General Grant (1879; handily abridged in 2002). On earth, however, Ulysses Grant commenced his travels before he and Twain were well acquainted, and even if they had been Twain was a famous writer with a schedule of lucrative lectures, not at all what Grant needed and found in the New York Herald's John Russell Young – a pure correspondent, an instrumental journalist whose lively dispatches from the epic world tour (Liverpool to Nagasaki, May 1877 to September 1879) would keep Grant in the domestic eye and impress the American voter (who might be asked to consider an unprecedented third term) with report of the honors European royalty and the picturesque potentates of faraway Asia were showering on the homely ex-president. Young notes that while cruising the Mediterranean aboard an American warship, Grant read and enjoyed Twain's Innocents Abroad.

The Wanderings of Ulysses

In 1877: Philadelphia, Liverpool, London; a detour around Paris, where the Third Republic was in its volatile infancy, and where Victor Hugo had issued a poem denouncing Grant as pro-German and crypto-royalist; Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Geneva, Alsace-Lorraine; Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle for a gigantic parade of workingmen's associations, Birmingham; Paris, which would become their European base, then Villefranche, Naples, Palermo, Malta. 1878: Alexandria, Cairo, the Nile to Assiout, Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, Thebes, Aswan, and back to Alexandria; Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Damascus, Beirut, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice, Milan, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gottenburg, Christiana, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Vienna, Munich, Bordeaux, Gibraltar (where a British soldier's daughter young Molly Bloom recalled “the damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all directions if you didn't open the windows when general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship”), Vittoria, Madrid, Lisbon. 1879: London, Dublin, Londonderry, Belfast, Marseilles, Alexandria, Suez, Bombay, Agra, Delhi, Rangoon, Penang, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macao, Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, Nagasaki, Yokohama, Tokyo, San Francisco.

Mother Country

Dominic Lieven has written that the Anglo-American solidarity “crucial to the victory of democracy in the twentieth century” could have been impeded, perhaps prevented, by Confederate independence and British recognition thereof. Even after the destruction of the unrecognized Confederacy, however, relations remained sour. There remained the US government's claims for damages against Great Britain, called the “Alabama claims” after the rebel commerce raider built in a British shipyard and allowed to sail by Prime Minister Palmerston. Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, called for $2.5 billion, a sum he knew the British would reject, and declared that in lieu of the cash, Canada would be acceptable. International arbitrators meeting in Geneva would eventually award the US a far smaller sum – $10 million. Sumner was to be the last of the long line of American politicians to threaten invasion of Canada.

Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Exile is a state of mind and quite necessary in the kind of critical awareness, imaginative empathy and artistic autonomy that go into a work of excellence, a “global work.” Our lists of poets we consider as “world poets,” assuming that “world poet” is indeed a meaningful category, may vary dramatically but the criteria we are likely to agree upon for such a category, are: an agile imagination, an intuitive bond with humanity, a finely tuned connection with history, and an ability to go beyond merely utilizing language— to reach for the universally unsayable and cast it in a renewed, common language, and above all: an ability to move the spirit in an authentic way.

I recently had the luxury of conversing with Fady Joudah and Anis Shivani— two writers I admire for their range and gift for innovation. Their approach to literature, as reflected in their poetry and prose, betrays traits of the contemporary “global writer” I’m interested in—traits that ultimately cast the larger literary moment in their art. In other words, the shared and conflicted global histories they address, the deftness with which they assemble disparate cultural perspectives, and the richness of their positions—political and aesthetic—illuminate the present, and in a sense, the future, of an increasing and an increasingly globalized readership.

My conversation with these authors was centered on the idea of our literary moment, mainly keeping Fady Joudah’s book Textu and Anis Shivani’s My Tranquil War in mind.

Read more »

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Why We Argue (And How We Should) is centrally concerned to elucidate the concept of a dialectical fallacy. This concept deserves comment. “Fallacy” is the name given to especially common and attractive failures of reasoning. Works in logic and critical thinking typically distinguish between formal and informal fallacies.

Formal fallacies are pervasive errors of formal inferences. Consider the argument:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is handy.

Therefore, Bill is a carpenter.

This argument fails because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: the first premise states that being a carpenter is sufficient for being handy; it does not claim that all and only handy people are carpenters. After all, Bill could be a handy car mechanic who has never cut a piece of wood. We call this error the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This error gets its own name because we are especially prone to this kind of mistake. Once one is trained to spot it, one will find that this fallacy is committed frequently.

By contrast, informal fallacies are pervasive errors in informalinferences. Informal inferences differ from formal ones in that the latter propose to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions whereas the former aspire only to show that their conclusions are most likely true. A familiar informal fallacy is the ad populum fallacy. Consider:

Most people think that Joe is guilty.

Therefore, Joe is guilty.

This argument fails because it appeals simply to what “most people” think, without any regard for questions concerning the level to which “most people” are informed of the relevant facts of Joe's case. The mere fact that “most people” agree about some claim is no evidence at all for its truth.

The important thing about fallacies is that they are attractive and so pervasive errors of reasoning. Part of what accounts for their popularity is the way in which they mimic or ride piggyback on proper inferences. The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a mimic of the obviously successful inference known as modus ponens:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is a carpenter.

Therefore, Bill is handy.

Read more »

by Jalees Rehman

The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries offered by Autocomplete are “a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages indexed by Google“. Considering the fact that more than five billion Google searches are conducted on an average day, the Google Autocomplete function has a huge database of search information that it can reference. This also means that the Autocomplete suggestions are quite dynamic and can vary over time. A popular new song lyric, the name of a viral video or a recent movie quote can catapult itself to the top of the Autocomplete suggestion list within a matter of hours or days if millions of users start search for that specific phrase. Autocomplete may also take a user's browsing history or location into account, which explains why it may offer a varying set of suggestions to different users.

Autocomplete can be quite annoying because the suggested lists of queries are based on their web popularity and can thus consist of bizarre combinations which are not at all related to one's intended searches. On the other hand, Autocomplete is also a fascinating tool to provide a window into the Zeitgeist of web users, revealing what kinds of phrases are most commonly used on the web, and by inference, what contemporary ideas are currently associated with the entered keywords. The Google Zeitgeist website reveals the most widely searched terms to help identify cultural trends – based on the frequency of Google search engine queries – during any given year.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an ad campaign to highlight the extent of misogyny on the web. Searching for “women should…” or “women need to…” was autocompleted to phrases such as “women should be slaves” or “women need to be put in their place”. The fact that Autocomplete suggested these phrases means that probably hundreds of thousands of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries or on web pages indexed by Google – a reminder of how much gender injustice still exists in our world.

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“And if you can't bear the thought of messing up
your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the
whole idea of life, and become a saint.”

~ John Osborne, “Look Back in Anger”

As the paeans for Nelson Mandela rolled in last week, observers might have been forgiven for thinking that it was not a single human being had passed, but rather an astonishing confabulation of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. The narrative can be encapsulated thusly: a despicable regime unjustly imprisons a passionate activist for 27 years, who upon his release goes on to lead his nation into peaceful democracy and becomes an avuncular elder statesman, unconditionally loved and respected by all. But this narrative tells us little about who Mandela actually was, and why he acted in the world in the way he did. A brief examination of Mandela's involvement in the ending of non-violence and the initiation of armed struggle in the early 1960s serves to illustrate some of this nuance.

The perpetuation of the saccharine narrative is enabled by, among other things, the cherry-picking of Mandela's own words. One endlessly quoted passage has been the end of Mandela's opening statement at the start of his trial on charges of sabotage, at the Supreme Court of South Africa, on April 20^th, 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

This is stirring stuff, and worthy of being engraved into the marble of a monument, but only if you bother to read the preceding 10,000 words. In a far-reaching statement notable for its pellucidity, Mandela lays out the circumstances and philosophy that resulted in armed struggle against the regime.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto [we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC]. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

Without this context, Mandela's lofty concluding paragraph is as cheap as a Hallmark card. It's now clear to the reader exactly the lengths to which Mandela would be willing to go to die for his beliefs – not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a fiery revolutionary. It is difficult to conceive of Gandhi initiating such actions. But why was Mandela prepared at that point to resort to violence?

Read more »

by Madhu Kaza

During the month or so that my father spent in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in suburban Detroit, my travel habits changed in peculiar ways. Not knowing ahead of time the duration of my stay in Detroit nor how long I would be back home in New York before being called again to the Midwest, I was hardly able to pack anything at all. Yet I could not help but take luggage with me, so more than once I travelled with an empty suitcase, which brought to mind the image of an out-of-work businessman who still carries his briefcase everywhere. What I did pack were vegetables. I found myself regularly transporting produce from one state to the other. If I had lettuce in my fridge in New York I would carry it with me on the flight to Detroit imagining the salad I would make at my parents' house. One time, I took two carrots from my mother's fridge and put them in my vacant suitcase so that I could use them in a lentil soup I planned to make when I returned to New York. Suddenly, using an airline carrier to transport the ingredients I had gathered for the day's lunch or dinner not only made sense, but also seemed vital to my well-being. I think it allowed me to feel a kind of continuity between morning in the ICU with my father in Michigan and early evening alone in my apartment in New York at a time when I felt quite dislocated from the routines of my life. During this same period of time there was another odd development, which I understood far less: I became a person who felt compelled to take a fifteen hour train journey instead of a routine one and a half hour flight.

I bought my ticket for the Lake Shore Limited departing from New York on September 21^st. The #49 train departs daily from New York Penn Station at 3:40pm and reaches its final destination, Chicago's Union Station at 9:59 the following morning. Another section of the Lake Shore Limited departs from Boston. In Albany, the New York and Boston trains are hitched together for the journey to the Midwest. I would be getting off in Toledo, OH around 5:55am and would continue by car for another hour to Detroit.

I had enough experience on Amtrak's well-trafficked Northeast Corridor routes to not be romantic about American train travel. But I also knew that the railroads had been fundamental to the (often mythologized) American past. 19^th century railroads, including those regional lines that were consolidated into the powerful New York Central Railroad, facilitated the economic development and westward expansion of the country. Given the proliferation of railroad companies in the 19^th century, many ventures bankrupted investors and owners. On the other hand, the success of the New York Central Railroad made the Vanderbilt fortune.

Read more »