In keeping with Battleground God, there’s this. This Ethical Philosophy Selector offers a set of questions. “These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers. Answer the questions as best you can. When you’re finished answering the questions, press ‘Select Philosophy’ to generate your customized match of ethical philosophers/philosophies. The list orders the philosophers/philosophies according to their compatibility with your expressed opinions on ethics.”

My results, which left me horrified at least by the position of Ayn Rand (too high), Bentham (too high), and the Epicureans (too low):

1. John Stuart Mill (100%)
2. Kant (99%)
3. Prescriptivism (78%)
4. Jean-Paul Sartre (71%)
5. Aquinas (68%)
6. Ayn Rand (66%)
7. Jeremy Bentham (63%)
8. Aristotle (61%)
9. Epicureans (60%)
10. Spinoza (45%)
11. Stoics (45%)
12. Ockham (40%)
13. St. Augustine (38%)
14. Nel Noddings (34%)
15. Plato (33%)
16. David Hume (26%)
17. Nietzsche (24%)
18. Thomas Hobbes (13%)
19. Cynics (3%)

Today Translations’ site lists the most untranslatable words, as measured by a poll of a thousand professional translators and interpreters it conducted for the BBC. “Plenipotentiary” won as the most untranslatable English word. The winner among foreign language words is “ilunga [a Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire].”

However, Lanuage Log is skeptical. “The thing that puzzles me, though, is where Zilinskiene [head of Today Translations] turned up 1,000 linguists who know Tshiluba vocabulary. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this survey might have been a class project in one of Zilinskiene’s Problematics courses…”

“Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground? In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion…The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency.” To test whether or not your religious belief cuts the logical mustard, click here.

A collection of Eqbal Ahmad’s writings on South Asia has recently been released. You can find reviews of Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia here and here.

Eqbal Ahmad was a remarkable figure who lived a phenomenal life. A brief biography and selected articles are available here and here.

“In May, the White House announced that George W. Bush would deliver five weekly speeches intended to shore up support for his Iraq policies. How many of the five did he deliver before abandoning the effort?

(a) One.
(b) Two.
(c) Three.
(d) Four.

Answer: (a)”

One question in an amusing if predictable Bush quiz from the current New Yorker. Also check out this obliquely related but fairly thrilling profile of the Olympic experience of the Iraqi soccer team, from the same organ.

In the wake of the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream yesterday, here’s a short review of recent thefts of major artworks from Scotland on Sunday.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately and this has provided an occasion to reappreciate the Avalanches’ 2002 record, Since I Left You. It is a modern classic, and one of the few pieces of music I’ve heard that uses the potential of sampling technology as the basis for a new formal art. As with most formally brilliant aesthetic output, repeat auditions reward the listener with previously unnoticed features. Their sound has tremendous density and a symphonic tendency for elements to fade in and out of conscious hearing: the horse’s whinny that has structurally replaced the hip-hop horn, the sunken counterpoint to a haunting piano riff, the celebrated use of the bassline from Madonna’s “Holiday.” Additionally, I love the Avalanches’ internationalism: they’re Australian djs who happily circumnavigate in search of cool sounds. They also invent a space in which the listener (temporarily) becomes a global citizen, travelling the world and thinking contrapuntally. In short, a work of genius. If you want an accurate review try here.

A great thing about the world wide web is that people do things like this. There is no better reason to brush up on your Latin than Catullus’ delightful hendecasyllables. Coleridge’s ode to those syllables (from Matthison) can be found here.

I’m not sure if they have quite captured the full humor potential here but it is worth taking a look at the first Islamic version of Onion Magazine. By the way, this site was brought to my attention by Alan Koenig of Doghead. If there is a better place for analysis and insight into the policy twists and turns of the Iraq war I don’t know what it is, though Ackerman’s Iraq’d is always worth reading. And, if you don’t know of Juan Cole you have your head in the sand on the matter.

In 1956, Benjamin Lee Whorf published Language, Thought, and Reality, which he concluded with the following.

“Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is shown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thought are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is conscious. These patterns are unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language–shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in another language–in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese.”

A year later, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures and launched the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics and, well, a bunch of fields, effectively destroying claims such as Whorf’s and inaugurating one of the most successful research projects in modern science.

But now comes this.

“[A]re there concepts in one culture that people of another culture simply cannot understand because their language has no words for it?

No one has ever definitively answered that question, but new findings by Dr. Peter Gordon, a bio-behavioral scientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, strongly support a “yes” answer. [Details of the study will appear in the Thursday, August 19, issue of the journal Science.] Gordon has spent the past several years studying the Pirahã, an isolated Amazon tribe of fewer than 200 people, whose language contains no words for numbers beyond “one,” “two” and “many.” Even the Piraha word for “one” appears to refer to “roughly one” or a small quantity, as opposed to the exact connotation of singleness in other languages.

What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the right linguistic resources can carve out one’s reality. ‘Whorf says that language divides the world into different categories,’ Gordon said. ‘Whether one language chooses to distinguish one thing versus another affects how an individual perceives reality.’

When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and dropped to zero with larger sets of objects. The only exception to this performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Here, the performance of participants deteriorated as the number of items increased to 6 items. Yet for sets of 7 to 10 objects, performance was near perfect. Though these tasks were designed to be more difficult, Gordon hypothesizes that the uneven spacing allowed subjects to perceive the items as smaller ‘chunks’ of 2 or 3 items that they could then match to corresponding groups.

According to the study, performance by the Piraha was poor for set sizes above 2 or 3, but it was not random. . .” (read on)

One of the reasons that some philosophers and, indeed, common sense itself, finds it difficult to accept Dennett’s naturalism, though it is clearly correct, is that Dennett’s naturalism is anti-intuitive. We feel as if our experience of the world and all its chance, will, and complexity cannot jibe with any version of determinism. Of course, it turns out that determinism and meaning, freedom, chance, etc., are fully compatible. But, dammit, it still seems like the aren’t anyway. An interesting place to try and re-train your intuition is a website Dennett mentions in Freedom Evolves. There you can play the game Life, where a simple arrangement of ‘cells’, given simple rules and made to be ‘live’ or ‘dead’, generate something very complicated and autonomous out of something that isn’t. Try playing it. You’ll wonder why you ever thought that that ghost was running stuff in your head in the first place. We are mechanisms friends, but very cool ones, and it is going to be OK.

“James’ [Surowiecki] book [The Wisdom of Crowds] goes in two directions as regards actual policy suggestions. As regular CT [Crooked Timber] readers will be expecting, I don’t really agree with either of them, but one is very much more interesting than the other.”

Daniel Davies reviews The Wisdom on Crowds over at Crooked Timber. It’s worth a read.

“My found-through-Craigslist inventory runs deep. My last two apartments. My dining room table. My living room couches. My futon. Red Sox tickets. Freelance writing assignments. I sold my car through the service. Do you Craigslist? OK, it doesn’t quite have the ring of the now-classic ‘Do you Yahoo?’ pitch line, but tech investors would do well to keep their eyes on Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based international swap meet. Craigslist began as a daily e-mail sent out by founder Craig Newmark in 1995 and is now a motley collection of want ads and personals, with a little space left over for rants. Most of those ads are free, so the site has never seemed to have much of a business model.” Article here from Business 2.0.

“In a new book, ‘Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism’ (Princeton University Press), Timur Kuran, professor of economics and law and the King Faisal professor of Islamic thought and culture at the University of Southern California, looks at the cluster of ideas known as Islamic economics. This concept, he notes, is a 20th-century one, developed in India before independence, when many Muslims worried that they would become an oppressed minority in a Hindu-ruled state. Some feared that Muslims might be so marginalized that they would lose their identity.” Interesting article from the New York Times, via Arts and Letters Daily.

“I’ve always loved math, and as a child I especially loved word problems about everyday things. The idea that the real world can be described mathematically was, to me, simply wonderful. Today I get the same enjoyment from mathematical descriptions of nature, which are just more complicated versions of the word problems I adored in my youth. A truly breathtaking range of such problems can be found in John A. Adam’s Mathematics in Nature, which tackles quite a broad assortment of nature’s patterns, going beyond the typical ones with which we might all be familiar. Most, however, are within nearly everyone’s realm of experience. For example, the book’s 24 color plates present fascinating cloud patterns, a double rainbow, sand dunes, ocean waves, plant and floral forms, patterns on animals and cracks in asphalt. Adam builds the reader’s mathematical intuition as he discusses these phenomena.”

More of Will Wilson’s review of Mathematics in Nature: Modeling Patterns in the Natural World by John A. Adam here, in American Scientist Online.

“Editor’s Note: Czeslaw Milosz passed away on Saturday, August 14. In his honor, we are republishing Leon Wieseltier’s August 1, 1983 review of The Witness of Poetry.” Here it is, from The New Republic.

The always admirable David Aaronovitch in the always readable Observer on the continually depressing failure of the always less-than-adequate response to the situation in Sudan.

“Marina Abramovic’s Count On Us – a work replete with spooky, haunted house imagery of skeletons, blackness, and the United Nations – is straight-up Abramovic. A dark, multi-paneled room at the 2004 Whitney Biennial displays a series of unnerving and sardonic videos that evoke the kind of weird chuckle one discharges when simultaneously being in on a joke and made fun of. On one wall, an unenthusiastic and black-clad children’s choir sings the praises of United Nations aid (directed with gusto by the artist in a skeleton costume). The choir sounds more like a mechanical hum than anything else. Another wall shows a close-up of a young girl and boy gazing upwards with stolid pride, or perhaps longing. And there is a human Soviet star comprised of (yep) children, in black, as the artist (still in her skeleton get-up) stands in the mush-pot. What is going on here?”

More in this short essay by Stefany Anne Golberg in The Old Town Review.

“One issue that is raised by Peter Eisenman’s writings, and especially by his exchanges with Jacques Derrida, is that of the relation of philosophy to the rest of culture. I am more suspicious of attempts to use philosophical ideas outside of philosophy than Eisenman is. In particular, I am not sure that the criticism of what Derrida has called “the metaphysics of presence” has much relevance to the work of architects, painters and poets. The first paper I ever wrote on Derrida’s work and influence was read to an audience of literary theorists and was called “Now that we have deconstructed metaphysics, do we have to deconstruct literature too?” That title expressed my skepticism about the attempt to turn what seemed to me a specifically philosophical movement, a commentary on specifically philosophical texts, into something larger and more pervasive. As I see it, the attempt to make philosophy useful to the arts is OK if philosophy is used as a source of inspiration but dubious if it is used as a source of instruction.”

This is from remarks delivered by Rorty at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in October, 2000. And here is an interview with Rorty conducted by Joshua Knobe.