by Jalees Rehman

We often laud intellectual diversity of a scientific research group because we hope that the multitude of opinions can help point out flaws and improve the quality of research long before it is finalized and written up as a manuscript. The recent events surrounding the research in one of the world's most famous stem cell research laboratories at Harvard shows us the disastrous effects of suppressing diverse and dissenting opinions.

The infamous “Orlic paper” was a landmark research article published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature in 2001, which showed that stem cells contained in the bone marrow could be converted into functional heart cells. After a heart attack, injections of bone marrow cells reversed much of the heart attack damage by creating new heart cells and restoring heart function. It was called the “Orlic paper” because the first author of the paper was Donald Orlic, but the lead investigator of the study was Piero Anversa, a professor and highly respected scientist at New York Medical College.

Anversa had established himself as one of the world's leading experts on the survival and death of heart muscle cells in the 1980s and 1990s, but with the start of the new millennium, Anversa shifted his laboratory's focus towards the emerging field of stem cell biology and its role in cardiovascular regeneration. The Orlic paper was just one of several highly influential stem cell papers to come out of Anversa's lab at the onset of the new millenium. A 2002 Anversa paper in the New England Journal of Medicine – the world's most highly cited academic journal –investigated the hearts of human organ transplant recipients. This study showed that up to 10% of the cells in the transplanted heart were derived from the recipient's own body. The only conceivable explanation was that after a patient received another person's heart, the recipient's own cells began maintaining the health of the transplanted organ. The Orlic paper had shown the regenerative power of bone marrow cells in mouse hearts, but this new paper now offered the more tantalizing suggestion that even human hearts could be regenerated by circulating stem cells in their blood stream.

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by Bill Benzon

…though many don’t think of it as art at all, but as crime. After all graffiti – by which I mean the styles that originated in New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s – was born when kids and young adults began spray-canning their names on other people’s walls without permission. They were committing crimes, and some of them did time for it. Still do.

Art? Crime? Art? Crime? The question isn’t a real or least not a very deep one. Why can’t graffiti be both artistic and criminal?

Enoe

Such mythical, but nonetheless real historical, figures as Taki 183 and Cornbread weren’t trying to make art. It’s safe to say that many of the early writers had never been inside the Guggenheim, the Met, or the Barnes and had never taken Art History 101 in college. They just wanted to get their names up, to be noticed. Not their real names, that is, the names on their birth certificates. But names they assumed for purposes of getting fame; names that had one significance within graffiti culture but that simultaneously were opaque and provocative to the outside world, names that told of another society walking the streets and claiming the walls.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

For whatever reason, all of our conversations ultimately ended with him explaining why some aspect of Japanese culture was somehow extraordinary. And this time was no different. After thanking me for the pictures I had sent of our son, he said (apropos of nothing whatsoever):

日本文化の根底に、草木国土悉皆成仏があります。人間だけでなくすべてに心があるということ。これが大切やね。(At the root of Japanese culture is the idea that everything is on the path to becoming a Buddha. Not just sentient life but everything is on the path to Buddhahood.~~Rough translation, other possible translations welcome).

This idea (草木国土悉皆成仏) is from the Nirvana Sutra, and argues that even things like trees, rocks and other inanimate objects also have a Buddha-nature — and therefore all things are precious.

It was exactly a year ago that I posted this 3Quarks daily piece about the enchantment of things and China's legendary Nine Bronze Tripods 九鼎.

From Xia to Shang
And from Shang to Zhou….

You know the story: Nine bronze tripods– cast back in the mists of great antiquity– were treasured by ancient Chinese Kings as a symbol of their right to rule.

Passed down from dynasty to dynasty– for nearly 2,000 years (or so the story goes) until the time when the First Emperor, Shihuangdi, finally toppled the last Zhou King– and rather than see their transfer to Shihuangdi’s new dynasty– the last Chu King flung the nine bronzes forever into the River Si

Given their symbolic significance, Shihuangdi actively attempted to dredge up the sacred bronzes from the river, but it was to no avail; and scholars of later dynasties saw this as further evidence of the lack of moral virtue of the First Emperor.

I wondered if things have the power to move us in this way anymore? I mean, there was a time (the time Umberto Eco likes to write about) when people were obsessed by fantastical maps and with great quests for objects that held much power. Like mountains, certain objects had the power to draw people in. Relics, for example, were big business. Think of Sainte-Chappele, built to house the Crown of Thorns or recall the mystery surrounding the quests for the Holy Grail. Eco's Baudolino is almost entirely taken up with the relic trade and the role played by faith (faith in the fragrance of these relics–where it is the perfume that is true– not necessarily the relic itself). This kind of devotion to relics is famously practiced by Catholics and Buddhists, and probably harkens back to an ancient propensity for becoming enchanted by things.

It is also a commitment to remember, right? (Poor, dear Henri Fontal!)

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by Brooks Riley

Okay, I’m not a girl anymore.

In many ways, I never was. I’m more interested in dendrites than dentists, bosons than Botox, solar energy than SPF factors, cosmology than cosmetics, physics than fitness, Leibniz than Lagerfeld. On the other hand, I’m enough of a girl that if I do watch a sport, it’s with the same bewilderment that a homeowner greets an intruder: Where did you come from?

Maybe I’m the wrong girl to write about a World Cup.

When I first moved to Europe, I was peripherally aware of the game we call soccer: It was all those short guys running around in their boxer shorts, trying to engender as much dexterity with their feet as they might have with their forbidden metacarpi–a preternatural challenge that could only end in heartbreak, or so it seemed. I even bought into the cliché that the game is boring (but never as boring, even for a reluctant neophyte like me, as American football, a stop-start time-waster where full-metal hulks huddle longer than they play, in a version of rugby for sissies). What did I know?

In the meantime, I’ve learned that the rest of the world grows up training their lower extremities to be as precise as a violinist’s fingers on a fingerboard. And like violinists, they start early enough, so that by the time they reach the teenage years, talking with their feet comes naturally.

Like all games, soccer is a form of dramatic narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The climaxes come at strange times, though, not according to classic Aristotelian or Freytagian itineraries, but in breathtaking combinations of movement that were not even imaginable seconds earlier. Hubris and hamartia are teammates, equally responsible for goals and missed goals. Aesthetics comes into play: How often has the word ‘beautiful’ been used to describe a kick, a save, a pass, the game?

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by Matt McKenna

In Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise’s character inadvertently acquires the power to relive the day he dies, a day in which he dons a bullet-spewing exoskeleton and is eviscerated by aliens along with the rest of his fellow soldiers. With this plot device as its core narrative instrument, the film plays out like Groundhog Day meets Elysium except with a glowing extraterrestrial hive mind in place of Groundhog Day's Punxsutawney Phil and ham-fisted action sequences in place of Elysium’s ham-fisted allusions to contemporary class warfare. This isn't to say, however, that Edge of Tomorrow is bereft of social commentary. Indeed, the film uses its narrative structure to great effect in its criticism of the endless repetition present in American politics. Whereas Cruise’s character in Edge of Tomorrow must repeatedly suffer the pain associated with being airdropped into a hopeless maelstrom of human carnage, real-life Americans must repeatedly suffer the pain associated with witnessing the hopeless maelstrom that is the presidential election cycle.

Tom Cruise plays Private Cage, a demoted military PR sleaze ball who is press-ganged into active military service for reasons that aren’t particularly clear to me. Against his will, Cage joins the front lines of a counteroffensive designed to repel the ongoing alien invasion that has steadily been conquering Europe. Naturally, Cage's public relations background has left him unprepared for intricacies of alien combat, and he subsequently dies mere moments after his boots make contact with the beach. Fortunately for Cage, a splash of alien blood finds it's way onto his grimacing, five o'clock shadowed face, imbuing him with the handiest sci-fi trope of them all–time travel. With his newfound power at the ready, each time Cage dies, he immediately wakes up the previous morning with the memory of his deathday still intact. And so the plot unfolds predictably: Cage relives the same day over and over until he finally has a perfect memory of the battle and the skill required to destroy the alien horde.

Clearly, the parallels between Edge of Tomorrow’s plot and American politics are strong, even if the film’s ending is a bit optimistic. Most obviously, Cage's attempts to survive the day and break his time loop represents the United States' attempt to break free from the tight grip of its national politics, itself a cycle in which even if the political party in charge changes, the partisan hackery and divisive rhetoric never do. Whereas Cage is shot, crushed, and blown up during each iteration of his hellish day, Americans are bombarded by political ads, hoodwinked into watching trite political bickering on television, and even conned into giving money to the political parties that perpetuate this terrible national distraction. Director Doug Liman deftly utilizes this parallel to make the point that the United States is desperately mired in its current political environment, and the only way for it to extricate itself from this environment would be for the American electorate to have an eidetic memory of previous elections and therefore not to succumb to the tired political tactics that arise during each election cycle.

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by Eric Byrd

Perhaps unique among France's many colonies, possessions, dependencies and departments outré-mer, Lisle has no foothold on the French Parnassus. Baudelaire's “dame creole” was Mauritian. Leger was born under the palms of Pointe-à-Pitre. And this mulatto isle never produced a polemicist of Négritude – we're obvious bastards, dark enough for chains but not black enough for pride. Lisle's sole literary monument is the work of the American Charles Wharburton, author of Alphonsine; or, The Siege of Saint-Christophe (1846). Wharburton was a didactic novelist of pastoral dilemma, of scrupulous parsons. Following a tour of the Antilles he published Alphonsine, his only novel set outside New England, assembled from notes, and from the Romantic demonism that lay all about his era. Wharburton's readers were affrighted and doubtless titillated by this tale of a Protestant missionary stranded on the nightmare isle, where he and the titular ward, dusky but redeemable, are caught between the bloodthirsty maroons and the depraved Creoles, between savage idolatry and the complicit Catholic church, with its gleaming black saints. Wharburton's surrogate desires only Alphonsine's salvation, deplores the mixing of races, and denounces plaçage as “a foul practice that supports a languid class of concubines in attitudes compounded of Gallic hauteur and Negroid indolence.”

Such silly, bigoted old books are easy to come by, and help me to travel in time. I can see in Wharburton's half-novelized notes the exhibitory balls and parasoled promenades of quadroon courtesans: they're slow-moving, pouty, spoiled – and bred for pleasure as horses are bred for racing. Lisleans are now said – are proclaimed! – to have evolved beyond the béke and his Black Venus; are supposedly “overjoyed” – emotion for murals! – to abide as sexlessly interchangeable comrades in a puritanical police state ruled by a fatigue-clad guerilla chieftain. El Caudillo is decades removed from comradely struggle, displays a vestigial sidearm amid praetorian Kalashnikovs. For a time I was keeper of his looted pictures. He billeted his fighters in palaces whose fleeing owners had carried away nothing but trifles – a string of pearls, a monogrammed cigarette case destined for the pawnbrokers of pauperish exile. Soon the sensibility of imperiled revenue interrupted the desecration. Merciful Mehmed called off the pillage, and rescued or confiscated the private galleries. He sold abroad the great collections, as well as my father's modest, incipient portfolio of eighteenth century dessins (the heads of young girls and the lute-strumming fingers, disembodied, delighted one by the economy of their manifestation, the few swift strokes of their being). The strictly regional remainder, a rump gallery of touristic sunsets and forgotten worthies, was grandly christened the Musée Lisle. I was its curator before I was a conscript, a deserter, and a fugitive.

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by Kathleen Goodwin

If you haven't visited ladypockets.com, it's worth it for a laugh. In the words of creator, Katherine Fritz, “instead of writing the great American Novel, I made a fake fashion + lifestyle blog where I tell you where to buy Ruth Bader Ginsberg's earrings.” Gems include a photo of Christine Lagarde gesturing from a podium wearing a flower-patterned scarf with the caption, “Frankly, if we had to deliver some less-than-sunny news about Eurozone inflation rates at the World Economic Forum, we'd opt to spread a little springtime cheer with this rose-print floral scarf too.” As well as the familiar “Who Wore it Best?” trope, which includes adjacent close ups of Joan Didion and Harper Lee, both pictured wearing tortoiseshell glasses. My personal favorite is the feature on Angela Merkel, which incorporates a caption that reads, “She may have a doctorate of chemistry, but sometimes the key player in the European financial crisis lacks the basic science of how to flatter a tricky figure”.

As Fritz explains, “the joke is evident” but while the site is obviously tongue in cheek, it deserves a bit of analysis. Is the gag how bizarre the captions read, where the accomplishments and intelligence of the woman in the spotlight take a backburner to her accessory choices and the cut of her pantsuit? When a woman is a world famous writer, head of a global organization, or an elected official; is it pertinent to comment on her color coordination? The joke is truly multi-layered in its absurdity, because it reveals a reality. Regardless of their career choice, all women in the public eye are subject to discussions of things that have nothing to do with their jobs and responsibilities. In the Author's Note of Hillary Clinton's recently released memoir she writes, “I considered a number of titles…My favorite was 'The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It's Still All about My Hair.'”

Powerful women are held under a microscope for their appearance and behavior in a way that men are not, giving the media and the public endless source material to scrutinize, and deflecting attention away from truly critical matters. Yet when women try to eschew the rigid expectations of femininity and assume typical masculine attitudes and practices, they face an equally strong backlash. The result of this obvious double standard is what I'd characterize as a “can't win” dilemma that all women, regardless of their recognizability, contend with on a daily basis. Women are regularly criticized for being both “too masculine” and “too feminine” and conversely also face criticism for not acting feminine enough or not adopting sufficiently masculine characteristics.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

On “How Not to be Wrong” by Jordan Ellenberg.

I have to admit something. When I travel I cringe on the inside when the person sitting next to me asks what I do for a living. The arc of the conversation invariably follows one of a few paths. On the very rare occasion I am pleasantly surprised to find myself talking to someone with a genuine interest and curiosity in mathematics. Far more commonly we immediately head into “I hate math” or “I was never good at math”. Their general feeling is some mixture of fear, dislike, and bewilderment. I've learned that decades of bad experiences with math won't be overcome by our brief conversation. I must confess that I usually dive out the side door of the still moving conversation in a tuck-and-roll position and hope to tumble my way into sports, religion, Middle East politics, or some other more pleasant topic.

Math has a PR problem and it's mostly self inflicted. Most math curriculum is tedious, dull, confusing, and disconnected from everyday life. And any hope of turning things around is sabotaged by teachers and parents who themselves have unpleasant feelings about math. When asked, most people will say that math is important and useful but in ways which were never made clear despite years of math classes. They certainly won't say it's fun, thought provoking, or moving. And the “applications” they remember are those awful word problems involving circular ponds in square gardens, five workers making ten widgets every two hours, and other obviously fictional nonsense.

Jordan Ellenberg [1]

Fortunately there are folks making the effort to show the beautiful, exciting, engaging, and useful sides of math. One of those is Jordan Ellenberg. He is a well-regarded mathematician at the University of Wisconsin. Before turning to fulltime math, Ellenberg earned a master’s degree in fiction writing and wrote a novel (“The Grasshopper King”). Nowadays he has a blog on “Math, Madison, food, the Orioles, books, my kids”, and he writes occasional articles on math for Slate, the New York Times, and other media. As you can tell, he's the perfect guy to write a popular book about math. And he has! His book, “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” has just come out and deserves to be on everyone's summer reading list. The title of this post is from Ellenberg's book and captures its spirit perfectly.

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by Tamuira Reid

I. Theresa

He hit her, not the other way around.

Thought it was a deer, she told the police. Same kind of thud, thick and heavy. It was raining but not too hard. The impact dented the hood, busted the window, the glass splintered and folded in on itself.

Killed a man with her car. It wasn't her fault but still.

It was dark. The road was long. Oldies played on the radio. The kind of music people dance to when they think no one is watching and there is still that chance of something good happening.

The paper runs his photo with details for a memorial service at the Y on Harrisburg Street. He was nineteen, worked weekends at a Ford dealership.

She folds the story into a square and hides it under her mattress. Sometimes she feels him breathing but doesn't tell anyone.

A television crackles from a corner of the room where his two little sisters sleep, arms and legs locking. Waiting. The last thing he saw was the glare of headlights.

Silk blouse and Penny's slacks with the pleats down the front. They go into the washer with extra Woolite and she studies the water for signs of death but it's all over at this point. She lets the lid down slowly, disappears into the kitchen for another cigarette.

II. Luna

The day Luna went mad her mother thought, finally. The signs had been there, hanging around at the dinner table, in the bathroom where she ironed her hair.

It had waited patiently in the corner of a room, under a chair, in the oven with the bread. Now they wouldn't need to wonder when it would all fall apart because it just had.

The day Luna went mad she was wearing pink lipstick. Her legs were waxed and smoothed down with cocoa butter because she was religious about that kind of thing. Never know who you're gonna see, she'd say, sliding a gold hoop through each ear.

It happened slowly and over a period of time. Shop closed. Her mind just closed-up on her. Went out of business.

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by Misha Lepetic

“For the last twenty years neither matter
nor space nor time has been what it was.”
~ Paul Valéry, 1931

Ever since Napster tore through the music industry like an Ebola outbreak, there has followed a ceaseless hand-wringing about the ever-decreasing “value” of music. Chart-busting hits have been replaced by body blows to an industry that was once fat and happy. From Napster's peer-to-peer networking model to the current ascendancy of streaming services, the big labels have seen their fortunes scrambled and re-scrambled by the onrushing and ever-changing technological landscape. This is further complicated by the fact that young people are its most desired demographic, but are also the most ardent adopters of said inconvenient technologies. It's easy to say that there is no going back – and there isn't – but how can artists respond to this seemingly unstoppable race to the bottom, now that the link between a work of music, and the physical artifact that is its vehicle, has been permanently sundered?

Earlier this spring, we received a candidate answer from the venerable hip hop outfit Wu-Tang Clan. The Wu-Tang have been secretly recording a new double album for several years, an event that would commonly be greeted with much rejoicing by their legions of fans. However, the zinger is that only one copy of the album will be made, destined to be sold to the highest bidder. Even more interesting is the fact that, prior to the auction, the record will tour “festivals, museums, exhibition spaces and galleries for the public as a one off [sic] experience.” (Imagine the stringency of the security that will be required to keep this particular cat in its bag; I am already anticipating the Twittersphere lighting up in outrage as museum staff shine flashlights into people's ear canals, conduct full body cavity searches, and generally out-TSA the TSA.)

Of course, such acts of conceptual brazenness are usually (and usually regrettably) accompanied by a manifesto, and Wu-Tang does not disappoint…

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by Madhu Kaza

These are the tears of things, and our mortality cuts to the heart.

–Virgil, The Aeneid

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon at a friend's apartment while she held a moving sale. I went primarily to keep her company, and I spent hours in the room where she had neatly arrayed books, jewelry, film and camera equipment, exercise machines, clothes, pottery and various knick-knacks. Every sale was accompanied by the story of the object – how she had acquired it, what it meant to her, and what a great deal the customer was getting. The longer I stayed the more I could feel a tinge of sadness in the room, but her friends and neighbors lapped the stuff up, seemingly unaware of the melancholy. When one of my friend's neighbors invited me to visit her apartment upstairs, I left the sale for a while and walked into a large, bright, cluttered apartment. I sat at a dining room table strewn with books, wires, a computer, cookie cutters, takeout containers and piles of papers and thought, what a relief to be in the middle of things. What I meant was: what a relief not to be at the beginning or the end. The room was a mess but the objects carried no self-consciousness. They were at home and settled into the ongoing-ness of days.

I wrote previously about things, but I hadn't really touched upon their sadness, which is to say our sadness towards them. Recently, though, I've been thinking about the Japanese idea of “mono no aware” or “the pathos of things.” The sensitivity to impermanence at the heart of mono no aware is exemplified in this extract from the poet Kenko's 14^th century “Essays in Idleness”:

When I sit down in quiet meditation, the one emotion hardest to fight against is a longing in all things for the past. After the others have gone to bed, I pass the time on a long autumn's night by putting in order whatever belongings are at hand. As I tear up scraps of old correspondence I should prefer not to leave behind, I sometimes find among them samples of the calligraphy of a friend who has died, or pictures he drew for his own amusement, and I feel exactly as I did at the time. Even with letters written by friends who are still alive I try, when it has been long since we met, to remember the circumstances, the year. What a moving experience that is! It is sad to think that a man's familiar possessions, indifferent to his death, should remain unaltered long after he is gone.

Because we invest our belongings with memories they inhabit time with us in peculiar ways. They become our companions through life and when we lose them or give them away we feel bereft not merely of the object, but of some span in our own lives that they marked.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

There is nothing more exciting to me as a writer than catching a new place at daybreak— the moment that marks the beginning of a city's unique rhythms, when a traveler may somnambulate into its most secret, subtle self, its still-dreaming, unspoken quintessence. In this sliver between night and day, before the wearing of masks, arranging of words in functional frames, there is treasure to be collected.

I hunt for stray, untamable truths.

I love breakfast made by others, and relish the morning scene as it unravels; some of it predictable (the clatter of dishes, the smell of eggs, steam rising from cups, waiters stumbling about in a half-awake state), some of it appealing for its novelty value (rice porridge with chicken in Singapore, fresh figs with boiled eggs in Istanbul, sweet-bean pastry in Hong Kong) and some of it serendipitous or unforgettable such as keeping the company of pastry and insomnia and Andalusi ghosts in Granada, where my room was a whisper away from the Nasrid graveyard (which led to the opening piece in my book Baker of Tarifa), or watching a Chinese student copy the calligraphy on Alhmara's walls beautifully in his sketchbook, not knowing about how the Arabic letters work, or beholding sunrays as they hit olive trees in Florence— seeing the sky transform, through a window just as it was being washed by a groggy boy.

At the time of sunrise, history is on equal footing with the present. Ancient ruins, imperial buildings, places of worship, modern shops, parks, all bask in a brief romantic glow; everything is equally vulnerable. I've found this to be as true in Rome as it is in Bangkok, Lahore, Delphi.

At dawn, wherever I am, I like to bring a cup of tea, and find a spot —a ledge, a stair, a bench, a rock— ready to become part of a unique panorama that will last for not more than a few minutes but will likely transport and teach me: an otherwise elusive moment of clarity will, for a moment, unveil itself and nourish me.

by Ahmed Humayun

The conquest of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is the latest indication of the Arab world's descent into chaos. Described by Western officials as even more extreme than Al Qaeda, this formidable Sunni extremist army controls chunks of Syria and is marching on Baghdad, intending to establish an Islamist state that will redraw the boundaries of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is merely the latest development that underscores yet again the tragic folly of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Americans lost interest in Iraq long before the last American soldier departed the country in December 2011. It is remarkable that after having occupied Iraq for almost a decade, how easy it has been to let the entire experience simply recede into the background. (This amnesia applies even in the case of Afghanistan where American forces are still present in significant number. There is a palpable lack of interest with what is to become of that country and South Asia after the imminent U.S. withdrawal). It seems that when banners of victory cannot be credibly hoisted atop aircraft carriers ala ‘Mission Accomplished', then the story simply isn't worth following anymore.

We must reject this amnesia. We must remember what our leaders did in Iraq and follow this story all the way to its sordid denouement, if only because though the United States can leave, the inhabitants of these countries cannot. We should harbor no illusions that the nightmare that began on September 11, when Al Qaeda's henchmen attacked the United States, is over simply because we are in the process of disengaging from Muslim countries. We must understand our contribution to the festering of this problem so that we may instead contribute to its resolution.

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MOTHER WRITES
TO THE LION OF KASHMIR
SHEIKH MOHAMMED ABDULLAH

They tell me
you are buried
on the banks of Naseem
near the Hazratbal shrine,
your tomb heavily guarded
by India’s army.

I tell them
this represents
one of those ironies
history keeps throwing up:
the very people who jailed
you now guard your tomb

And the very people
whose ‘Lion’ you were
are disenchanted
with you for selling out
to your paymasters in Delhi
who now also bankroll

your son and his son,
sexually-transmitted dynasts,
who dare not even sigh
while soldiers shielded by
the Syrupy Secularism Act
silence the Vale of Saints.

By Rafiq Kathwari, Winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2013. More poems here.

by Grace Boey

Philosophy: you either get it or you don't. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a proud defector from the other side: Peter Unger, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, has come out against the field in his latest book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy.

Unger has written extensively over the course of his career on various philosophical topics, and his best-known writings include Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (1975) and Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (1995). As a no-holds-barred critique of mainstream analytic philosophy, Empty Ideas is a continuation of Unger's signature provocative style.

As a former student of his, I spoke to Unger in late May about Empty Ideas, his thoughts on the value of philosophy, Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, David Lewis, and the difference between philosophy, crystal healing and self-help (the answer: nothing that important).

Hi, Peter. To start things off, could you say a bit about your book Empty Ideas, and what it’s about?

Philosophers easily get the idea that somehow or other, just by considering things about the world that they already know, they can write up deep stories which are true, or pretty nearly true, about how it is with the world. By that I especially mean the world of things that includes themselves, and everything that’s spatio-temporally related to them, or anything that has a causal effect on anything else, and so on. They think they can tell a deep story about how it is that all of this stuff really hangs together, that’s much deeper, more enlightening and more comprehensive than anything that any scientist can do.

And so philosophers proceed to write up these stories, and they’re under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion. To say new and interesting things about the world — and that’s very hard, things of any generality I mean, or even anything interesting — you really have to engage with a lot of science. And very few philosophers do any of that, at least in any relevant way.

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by Yohan J. John

The osmosis of neuroscience into popular culture is neatly symbolized by a phenomenon I recently chanced upon: neurochemical-inspired jewellery. It appears there is a market for silvery pendants shaped like molecules of dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine and other celebrity neurotransmitters. Under pictures of dopamine necklaces, the neuro-jewellers have placed words like “love”, “passion”, or “pleasure”. Under serotonin they write “happiness” and “satisfaction”, and under norepinephrine, “alertness” and “energy”. These associations presumably stem from the view that the brain is a chemical soup in which each ingredient generates a distinct emotion, mood, or feeling. Subjective experience, according to this view, is the sum total of the contributions of each “mood molecule”. If we strip away the modern scientific veneer, the chemical soup idea evokes the four humors of ancient Greek medicine: black bile to make you melancholic, yellow bile to make you choleric, phlegm to make you phlegmatic, and blood to make you sanguine.

A dopamine pendant worn round the neck as a symbol for bliss is emblematic of modern society's attitude towards current scientific research. A multifaceted — and only partially understood — set of experiments is hastily distilled into an easily marketed molecule of folk wisdom. Having filtered out the messy details, we are left with an ornamental nugget of thought that appears both novel and reassuringly commonsensical. But does neuroscience really support this reductionist view of human subjectivity? Can our psychological states be understood in terms of a handful of chemicals? Does neuroscience therefore pose a problem for a more holistic view, in which humans are integrated in social and environmental networks? In other words, are the “chemical self” and the “social self” mutually exclusive concepts?

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