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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by Carol A. Westbrook

The single most important skill you need to practice medicine is the ability to pass multiple-choice exams. Most people saw their last standardized test when college or grad school ended. No so for us doctors– exam taking continues until retirement. The process begins with the high SAT score required for entry into a good college, then a high MCAT to get into medical school. In medical school we complete Steps 1 and 2 of the USMLE (US Medical Licensing Exam) and in residency, Step 3. After residency come the Specialty Boards (e.g. Internal Medicine, Surgery, etc.), then the Subspecialty Boards (e.g. Cardiology, Oncology). It continues with re-certification exams in your specialty every 10 years. It does not end until retirement.

So here I am, in my 60's, having to sit for an exam in order to renew my credentials as a Medical Oncologist. If you haven't taken a standardized test within the last decade you will be surprised to find how things have changed. There is no paper, no filling out circles with No.2 pencils, and no exam booklets. The questions are read on a computer screen, and answered by point-and-click with a mouse. The exams are given at a testing center in a strip mall, where other test-takers may be fireman, manicurists, or hairdressers taking their state licensing exams. After passing triple security (two ID's and a palm print scan) you enter the exam room, where you will be directed to a workstation containing only a computer on an otherwise empty desk. No purses, wallets, watches, pens, cell phones, or calculators are allowed into the room. It is dead silent, and anonymous. Nonetheless, you quickly adapt to the computerized routine, and the exam itself is remarkably similar to any other multiple-choice exam. As always, there are a series of single questions and 4 answers, of which only one is right, including the notorious “all of the above” or “none of the above.”

Scoring well on a multiple-choice exam requires certain skills. You do need at least a passing familiarity with the material, of course, but just as important is a feel for the psychology of the exam–are they trying to trip me up on this question? Is there a hidden trick? Does the exam phrasing suggest a certain emphasis? Also required is precise reading of the question, and facility with English grammar (beware of the double negative!). The most important skill for the test-taker, though, is the ability to “cram”. By cramming, I mean the ability to review and retain a large amount of detailed information for a few days prior to the test.

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by Mara Jebsen

One of my favorite memories is also a mysterious one.It is 2006, and I am in Togo. The first goal struck for the continent of Africa has just been shot by Mohamed Kader. He’s representing the Togolese team, who are making their first and only World Cup appearance. A near-hysterical roar goes up in the neighborhood. I suspect I can hear roars from across the nearby Ghana border, too.

The sound is the invigorating effect of many groups of fans rising out of their seats in thatched roof bars and in courtyards under sticky mango trees. I run up to the balcony at the top of our house to see what’s happening in the street. A parade of shouting boys has collected on a road near the ocean. They are running and waving Togolese flags. An intense color combination results: the yam-dirt road, the brown boys, the dirty whitewashed city walls– and the whipping grass-green, and primary red and yellow of the cheap plastic flags. The boys march and deliver their holler into the big wide sound. Now one particularly small boy, wearing only green underwear, does not have a flag. As I watch, he shimmies his skivvies down over his dry knees, raises them in the air, and, belly thrust out, waves the green underpants round and round, whooping buck-naked for all he’s worth.

I'm not sure why I like this image so much. I’ve tried, in storytelling, to re-enact (without actually undressing) the fluid motion of the boy stripping and whooping without deliberation. He may have been about 7, and he swung the underpants around like a lasso, but with his head held high, proud.

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by Jeff Strabone

Kristina Williamson is a multimedia visual artist who can find the erotic in a Cheese Curl, the surreal in the every day, and signs of globalization in the empty village left behind. Her photographs span the globe from her small-town origins somewhere in America to the islands of Greece and Spain. Like Byron's Childe Harold in the ruins of the Acropolis, her new book of photographs in Greece contemplates in the contradictions of modernity what endures of the past and what is 'Gone—glimmering through the dream of things that were'. Her work alternates between domestic, global, eerie, surprising, revelatory, and beautiful—sometimes all in the same image. On the eve of her book's publication I caught up with the artist at her studio in Brooklyn to talk about the project and her new work, which she describes as 'the accidental surreal'.

Q: Your new book One Year on Kythera is a monograph of photos from a Greek island no one's ever heard of. Why Kythera and what is this strange vision you had there?

A: I've always been interested in rural communities having grown up in a small town. My first exposure to Greek culture was while living in the Greek precinct of Melbourne, Australia during a semester abroad. I was fascinated by the community's efforts to maintain a satellite of their homeland. So it was a combination of these two things that inspired my research into photographing in rural Greece.

Q: But why Kythera specifically? How did you end up there?

A; It actually started with a book called Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village by Juliet du Boulay. It's an important sociological study of rural Greece written in the late 1960's, early1970's illustrating village life on the island of Evvia and its response to modernization. Originally, I had the idea to revisit this same village thirty years later to see what has become of it. However, when I managed to track down du Boulay she refused to reveal the name and location of the village for concerns that it might bring it some 'uninvited publicity'.

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by Emrys Westacott

Some things are simpler than the experts would have us believe. Recently I watched the EUFA Champions League final between Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid. In the build up to the match there was, naturally, a great deal of expert analysis focusing on matters such as the history of games between these clubs, the psychological stratagems of the coaches, the defensive systems to be used, and the potential impact of the rival superstar strikers Cristiano Ronaldo and Diego Costa. These were supplemented with all sorts of statistical data made possible by modern technology. Here's an excerpt from a preview of the game in The Guardian:

“[Real Madrid] have won a higher proportion of their games without Alonso in the starting line-up (80%) than with him (65.2%) in the league this season, but they will miss his ability to break up play in front of the back four. The side have conceded 1.13 league goals per game with him compared to 0.91 when he has been in the line-up……”It's no coincidence that since [Arda] joined in 2011, Atlético have scored more goals per game 1.81) with Arda in the starting line-up than without him (1.56).”

Here's what happened. Costa was not fully fit and had to be substituted after nine minutes. Ronaldo had a fairly quiet game, effectively neutralized by excellent defending. Atlético took the lead due to a rare and hence very surprising error of judgement by Real's goalkeeper, the great Ikar Casillas. It looked like they were going to win 1-0, but deep into injury time Real's defender Sergio Ramos equalized with a simple direct header from a corner kick . (The header could have been easily blocked had Atlético placed men by each goalpost, and why any team doesn't do this, especially when defending a corner in the last minute of the game, is a total mystery to me…..but I digress.) After having had the cup dashed from their hands, Atlético were finished, and in extra time Real always looked like they were going to win, which they eventually did 4-1.

My point is this. The sophisticated analyses of the experts seemed to bear little connection to the crucial events that actually decided the outcome of the game: a goalkeeping error and a poorly defended corner. This happens often. For instance, the 2010 World Cup semi final between Spain and Germany pitted against one another teams with interestingly contrasting styles of play. The pundits discussed at length such matters as whether Spain's intricate passing game would or would not create openings behind the German midfield, and so on and so forth. But in the event Spain won when seventeen minutes from the end their muscular centre back Carlos Puyols barged through a crowded penalty area and headed in a corner. That was the decisive event.

I see examples of excessive sophistication in analysis­ in many areas.

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by Mara Naselli

“However insipid and perhaps superfluous details so well known may appear,” writes Duc de Saint Simon of
his recollections of court life at Versailles, “lessons will be found therein for kings who may wish to make themselves respected, and who may wish to respect themselves.” Saint-Simon claims his formal purpose is to give a robust critical account of the Sun King’s court—indeed he is unsparing in his judgment of the king’s vanity—yet his attention in the memoirs, on a paragraph-to-paragraph level, is fixed on the individual characters at court. His memoirs are more like a collection of portraits, one after another, with thin transitions, and scant overarching narrative. Most interesting, each portrait is unequivocally embodied. Saint Simon enacts for us the dance of court life: the sitting, the standing, the bowing, the washing, the dressing, the kissing, the confiding, the eating, the removing of hats, the donning of hats, the touching of hats, the screaming, the moaning, the kneeling, the whispering, the wringing of hands. Open to a random page in the memoirs: you will find living, breathing, thriving, ailing, moving bodies.

Under the Sun King, everything was seen. The most intimate activities had a public dimension. The design of Versailles itself was intended to surround Louis XIV with his court, to keep them close under his supervision and convey a singular magnificence and power. Versailles was designed as a symbolic and practical instrument to unify a fragmented state. Aristocrats were persuaded to leave their landholding estates to attend court. Courtiers were on display, many struggling to finance and maintain the right fashion and entertainments so as to earn a glance from the monarch. To be away from Versailles risked a rebuke from the king (“I do not know him”) that could have lasting consequences.

The gardens at Versailles were also designed to convey a sense of wealth and total control. The ornate, rigid geometry suggested a kind of god-like omniscience over the vast grounds that extended as far as the eye could see. Landscape architect Ian Thompson has noted that one of the most memorable fountains at Versailles also issued a warning. It depicts Enceladus, a mythical giant who attempted to revolt against Zeus. Zeus punished Enceladus for his rebellion by striking him with a bolt of lightening. The fountain featured Enceladus drowning, with a jet of water from the giants throat thrust eight meters into the air—a clear warning to anyone who might suspect they might tamper with Louis's power.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Bomblet (1937), Julian Tervelyan, 1910-1988; Tate Modern, Surrealism and Beyond.

Display Caption: Trevelyan was living in Paris in the early 1930s when the Surrealists began to explore the idea of the Surrealist object, which appeared to embody hidden or repressed desires. Following the same tradition, Bomblet is at once disconcerting and vaguely comical. The tactile forms, suggesting organic or body parts, contrast with the elaborate framing. It was, apparently, the discovery of a baking tray that triggered the potential for the unsettling object.

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by Brooks Riley

In or around 1970: It was one of those humid hot nights in New York. At a party on someone’s brownstone roof, I was hawking my theory of how the world would end, to a couple of contemporaries I’d just met. It went like this: We would never be able to save the planet from the multiple disasters of our own making because we are incapable of preventive action, only reaction. When disaster strikes we react. Warned of imminent disaster, we try to react. But warned of a disaster at some indeterminate point in the future, we don’t react at all, we merely furrow our brows sympathetically and continue on with the here and now. It’s built into our genes. Now is everything. Someday has no meaning, except to a squirrel.

“Far out!’ said my interlocutor, if you could call him that. Suddenly I felt uncouth, a reluctant soothsayer with egg on her face, a Cassandra manqué. Was that all that could be said about my pessimistic view of the world? Was there no valid counter-argument brewing under the bushy brows of the young dissident I was talking to–or at, in this case?

It was a sign of the times that my contemporaries were activists, pacifists, and also, like this one, ‘passivists’. ‘Go with the flow ‘ was the motto for my generation, and the flow was anti-establishment, countercultural but also counterproductive. Many yelled their heads off against the war in Vietnam, against the domination of big business, against inequality of all kinds, and against nearly everything their parents stood for. I stayed away from these social gatherings, but I nodded in agreement.

Were we for something? We were for peace (‘Give peace a chance’), but as we’ve since learned, one man’s peace is another man’s compromise: Sooner or later a simmering détente will come to a boil again, it always does, sometime, somewhere.

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by Carl Pierer

Often, people don't do a particular thing. Even if they are supposed to. Tamino didn't talk to Pamina, Kant didn't leave Königsberg and Peter Singer doesn't donate all his money (to the point of marginal utility) to charity. We like to take this not acting as evidence for something more. Tamino's silence for unrequited love. Someone never leaving their hometown as a conservative old bore. Singer's “selfishness” as falsifying his philosophy. While intuitively plausible, this reasoning is flawed. It is the lover's fallacy.

In Act 2, Scene IV, of the magic flute, Pamina hears Tamino playing on his flute and hurries to talk to him. But he, undergoing the second ordeal, is bound to remain silent:

“You're here, Tamino? I heard your flute and ran towards the sound. – But you are sad? Will you not say a word to your Pamina?”
Tamino motions her to go away.
“What? I am to keep away from you? Do you love me no more? Oh, this is worse than an offence – worse than death.”

Pamina, deeply disappointed, reasons: “There are two possibilities, either Tamino doesn't talk to me or he loves me. So, if he loves me, then he talks to me. He doesn't talk, so he doesn't love.”

The fallacy is based off a close link between or and if-then sentences, or disjunctions and conditionals. A truth table will readily illustrate this:

~P is the negation of P, so whenever P is true ~P is false and vice versa. We see that for a conditional to be false we need the antecedent (~P) to be true, while the consequent (Q) is false. Here, this is the case when P is false and Q is false. It is important to notice that if the antecedent is false, the conditional is necessarily true. Now, a disjunction is true as long as at least one of the disjuncts (P or Q) is true. Since the truth table entries for P ∨ Q and ~P → Q are the same, we say they are (logically) equivalent.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Generally, in any conflict between long-held, seemingly obvious beliefs and new research challenging those beliefs, defenders of the old beliefs will find themselves charged with sitting in armchairs. It never is a rocking chair, park bench, hammock, or divan. It is an armchair, the sort of chair one finds in venerable, wood-paneled clubs where stodgy old men opine about the world's events more from preconceived opinions than from any well-grounded knowledge. An armchair represents both laziness and privilege, a luxurious class of opinion-mongers who simply will not bother themselves with actual empirical research – the original La-Z-Boys, as they might be called.

Such armchairs – unfortunately, from my perspective – are often associated with philosophers, for those who argue from the armchairs are arguing from broad, philosophical perspectives. These perspectives are allegedly grounded in a priori truths, but those “truths” are in fact little more than prejudiced opinions born of casual reflection. But of course the world has no obligation to pay any attention to what philosophers take to be obvious, and if we want to know what really happens, then we must rise from our armchairs and take up residency in the sciences.

Reflective and informed people will recognize that this is a poor characterization of philosophers, who usually are very well aware of empirical research. One could not find a more ambitious researcher than Aristotle, who is said to have spent his honeymoon collecting biological samples (and no, that's not a euphemism). Descartes busied himself with experiments and dissections. Leibniz knew all the science known by anyone of his day. Kant offered expert lectures on physics, anthropology, geography, and mineralogy in addition to topics in philosophy. Hegel knew his physics, and even the latest research findings in phrenology. Russell and Cassirer published good books on general relativity, and, in general, the bulk of 20th-century philosophers working on matters connected to science have suffered the requisite pains to know what they are talking about – to a far greater degree (I pridefully add) than have scientists who take it into their heads to write philosophy.

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by Thomas Rodham Wells

Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
Epicurus

Economists pay a lot of attention to productivity, the efficiency with which inputs are translated into outputs. This is quite reasonable since productivity is the source of the wealth of nations. But economists tend to focus on the supply side: the ratio of labour/capital to the final product. They tend to neglect the fact that productivity is also a feature of the other side of the market relationship: consumption. If we could be more efficient in our consumption decisions – if we were better at buying what we actually wanted – then we would be better off just as much as if we could afford to buy more stuff in the first place. We could achieve our present level of utility with a smaller outlay than present (allowing us to work less). Or, if our budget stayed the same, we would be able to get more utility for it than we do now.

The late Gary Becker was an economics genius who made a career out of applying perfectly orthodox economics methods in radically unconventional ways and to unconventional subjects, like crime, discrimination, and fertility. (Unfortunately, his 'economic approach to human behavior' has also led to excesses like Steven Levitt's Freakonomics, where the “Hidden Side of Everything” turns out to be only always about incentives, but that's another issue.) One of Becker's contributions was to point out that consumption itself requires production. For example, if you buy a book for $20 completing that transaction does not mean that the book has now been 'consumed'. In order to consume the book (in the normal way) you still have to read it. In other words, to enjoy your purchase you will have to put several hours of your own labour into producing utility out of it. The same goes for restaurant meals, clothes and so on. (This, by the way, is something to bear in mind when giving gifts. Just how much work are you implicitly imposing on your friends and family if they are to appreciate your present properly?)

If one prices the labour you put into this 'productive consumption' at even minimum wage levels (let alone your actual wage levels), one will often find that the market price of a good is less than it will cost you to actually enjoy it. And this should not be a surprise. The reason we have outsourced so much from the household to the market is that it allows us to access the productivity pay offs from vast economies of scale and divisions of labour. Indeed, there is some further scope for increasing the productivity of consumption with the help of the market. For example, eating at a fast food restaurant like McDonald's is not only quite cheap in price but also in the time it requires of you. There is even specialised capital equipment available to make the household a more efficient factory for turning purchases into utility, like the dishwashers and washer-driers which make meals and clothes cheaper to consume. Yet it must be noted that some kinds of consumption activities, like watching a movie with your friends or reading Jane Austen, stubbornly resist such market efficiencies. That is because the time and attention they require are intrinsic to their enjoyment.

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by Paul Braterman

Science, some say, rejects supernatural explanations on principle; this is called intrinsic methodological naturalism (IMN). In Part I I argued, following the work of Boudry et al. (here, here , and here), that this strategy is misguided. Here I go into more detail, using actual past and present controversies to illustrate the point.

“I have no need of that hypothesis.” So, according to legend, said the great astronomer and mathematician Piere-Simon, marquis de Laplace, when asked by Napoleon why he had not mentioned God in his book. If so, Laplace was not referring to the hypothesis that God exists, but to the much more interesting hypothesis that He intervenes in the material world. And Laplace’s point was not, fundamentally, philosophical or theological, but scientific.

The planets do not move round the Sun in circular orbits, but in elliptical pathways, moving fastest when closest. All this and more Newton had explained using his laws of motion, combined with his inverse square law for gravitational attraction. There is one small problem, however. The planets are attracted, not only to the Sun, but to each other, perturbing each other’s pathways away from a perfect ellipse. These perturbations are not trivial, and in fact it was the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus that would lead to the discovery of Neptune. Newton himself surmised that they could, eventually, render the entire system unstable so that God would need, from time to time, to intervene and correct it. Laplace devoted much of his career to developing the mathematical tools for estimating the size of the perturbations, and concluded that the Solar System was in fact stable. So Newton’s hypothesis of divine intervention was redundant, and it was this hypothesis that Laplace was supposedly referring to.

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Hummingbird Acetylene

The turquoise flame of a hummingbird’s head
is a blazing torch of acetylene

burning, as when my father put a welding tip to steel
joining parts of his world with the bluegreen flame
he held between

this hummingbird burns in afternoon light
at the mouth of a flower in god’s machine

jabbing her tip at a perfect hour
joining her flame to mine
in a darting iridescent sheen
.

by Jim Culleny
5/30/14