by Tim Sommers

In “Calculating God,” Robert J. Sawyer’s first-contact novel, the aliens who arrive on Earth believe in the existence of God – without being particularly religious. Why?

There are certain physical forces, they explain, that make life in our universe possible only if they are tuned to very specific values. Which they are. We are here, after all. But there’s no physical reason that the values need to be set the way they are. The aliens have concluded that someone, or something, set the values of these parameters at the beginning of the universe to insure that life would come into existence. That something they call God.

Here’s a much earlier, very different version of this argument. If you were hiking through the woods and you picked up a shiny object that turned out to be a small stone, it would probably not occur to you that it might have been made by someone. If it turned out to be a watch, however, you would immediately conclude that it had been intentionally created. So, is the universe more like a stone or a watch?

This argument from design was an especially powerful argument for the existence of God when very little was known about biology. The complexity of living things puts watches to shame. But then Darwin came along and used evolution to explain how such diversity, complexity, and apparent design could come about without a designer.

Just when the argument that the complexity of our world could only be explained by God seemed lost, a new, purely physical reason to think that the universe was designed appeared. The one the aliens embrace.

“A striking phenomenon uncovered by contemporary physics,” Kenneth Boyce and Philip Swenson write in their forthcoming paper “The Fine-Tuning Argument Against the Multiverse,” (Philosophy Quarterly) is that many of the fundamental constants of nature appear to have arbitrary values that happen to fall within extremely narrow life-permitting windows.” Read more »

1/1/26 Typhoon USA Aftermath Premonition

—This is a revised version of a poem I wrote when a newly insane river running
through our town one day came through, almost over-toping bridges, spilling
into streets with wild abandon during Hurricane Irene. 

One year back the river tore through
on its fall to the sea, courts and laws
slid beneath a steal (sic) bridge on Maga swells,
small shops (especially) pirouetted off their base,
rushed downstream to lodge against
the remains of a constitution compromised
by Magarussian jackhammers of mad winds.

Cellars of The People filled with mendacious mud
and whatever the river had dredged, whatever it had
sucked from cesspools of Oligarchs, whatever it had
ripped from the gardens of the free, of their
summer afternoons, of their homes and barns,
earth and offal left along its banks, in basements,
in streets, in the vacant classrooms of children before
books were banned, tongues of free speech
caught in eddies of choreographed confusion.

A cornfield, tall enough the day before when its
cobbed yield might have grinned yellow from humble
plates until a typhoon of raw, privileged intent laid it low,
its proud ranks of green stalks now laid flat from
sea to shining sea by Potomac’s winnowing rake, all now
lay supine as a woman or man, after a sweet or savage life,
lie still before the sweep of a polluted sea.
.
Jim Culleny
modified, 3/14/25

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by Katalin Balog

The mind-body problem in its current form – an inquiry into how the mind fits into the physical universe – was formulated by René Descartes in the 17^th century. In his Meditations, a thin volume of philosophy that had a monumental effect on all later Western philosophy, he famously argued that it is possible to conceive of a mind without extension – a disembodied soul – and a body without thought – a mindless zombie. And since whatever can be clearly and distinctly conceived, can be brought about by God, it is possible for there to be a mind without body and a body without mind. He concludes, based on observations about our concept of mind and body, that they are really distinct. His position is called dualism, which is the view that the world has fundamental ingredients that are not physical. Of course, dualism was not original to Descartes; from Plato to the Doctors of the Church and ordinary folks, most people up until the Enlightenment have advocated it. But his way of arriving at it – examining what he can “clearly and distinctly” conceive – has set the template for all subsequent discussions. Nota bene, he had more empirically based arguments as well; for example, he thought nothing physical could produce something so open ended and creative as human speech. He would have been very surprised by ChatGPT.

According to Descartes, the mind, or soul, is an exalted thing: it is non-spatial, immaterial, immortal, and entirely free in its volition. He also thought – reasonably enough – that it interacts with the body, an extended, spatially located thing. In Descartes’ view, there are sui generis mental causes; purely physical causes cannot explain actions. Descartes held that only the quantity of motion is strictly physically determined, not its directionality. In Leibniz’s telling of the story in The Monadology, Descartes believed that the mind nudges moving particles of matter in the pineal gland, causing them to swerve without losing speed, like the car going around the corner. He had a real, substantive disagreement with his contemporary Hobbes, a materialist who thought that there were only physical causes.

Developments in science have had an enormous impact on this debate. The gist is that advances in the physical and biological sciences ultimately ruled out Descartes’s idea of the mind as a sui generis force – though not necessarily other forms of dualism which we will talk about shortly. Not only is it hard to comprehend Descartes’ idea that a non-material mind can move a material body, but such sui generis non-physical causes are ruled out by what we know about natural processes. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

In a kindergarten classroom in the mid-1960s, a kid named Mikey steered clear of the boys stacking large toy blocks on top of one another and knocking them down again–so obnoxious—and instead went and sat at the table of girls making beads out of salt dough and stringing them together on a thread. These girls were not averse to tasting the salt dough and smacking their lips in disgust. The teacher had wisely settled on salt dough because she knew it wouldn’t poison the students should they eat it. At least the girls were smart and funny and didn’t continually knock each other to the floor.

Mikey preferred these sober, artsy activities–making necklaces of salt dough beads, pressing hand prints into soft clay disks, tracing the profiles of silhouetted heads projected via lamp light onto sheets of construction paper–over the rough-and-tumble of block stacking, fat-ball tossing, and floor hockey, because–well, he just did. Thus developed the central themes of his boyhood–hates sports; likes art and language; hangs out with the girls.

Throughout grade school, gym class gave him a terrible knot in his stomach and he longed to be elsewhere, a disposition cemented into place by an incident during a game of “battle ball,” in which boys stood at opposite walls and hurled large pneumatic balls at each other for God knows what reason, and a ball smacked him square in the face and knocked his glasses off his head.

The glasses allowed him to read the teacher’s flowing, cursive handwriting on the chalkboard, reading which he was good at, and he forever yearned to be allowed to pick up a long piece of chalk and tap-scratch letters onto the board himself. This desire was at long last granted, and soon he was permitted whole boxes of colored chalks to use, and the teacher allowed him and some girl friends to cover the entire chalkboard with decorative chalk drawings. Read more »

by Alizah Holstein

When a statement was issued last November stipulating that a new U.S. government department known by the acronym DOGE was to be formed, the medievalist in me snapped to attention. To me, “doge” was a word with distinctly medieval meaning. But hardly anywhere was this meaning being explored in the context of DOGE.

For anyone who has been living in a glacial crevasse for the past few months, DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. Two phenomena are purported to have inspired the DOGE acronym. One: the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. And two: the “doge” internet meme featuring photos of a Japanese Shiba Inu overwritten with pidgin English text that played on a misspelling of the word “dog.” Both were much beloved by Elon Musk, who has to all appearances been heading DOGE.

But there’s a third association worth exploring as we consider the implications of this (unofficial) government department. Stated simply, a doge was the chief magistrate of medieval Italian maritime republics. Venice had doges for over a thousand years, from 700 until 1797 when the Napoleonic Wars brought the republic to its end. Genoa, for a shorter time, had them as well, and Pisa, too, counts a single doge in its historical register. What in Italian is doge in Venetian is doxe, and both derive from dux, the Latin word for leader and a cognate of duke.

The possible association of DOGE with a medieval magistrate has not been widely explored, but I do think it matters. Why? Because medievalism feels peculiarly salient right now in culture and politics alike. Last month at London Fashion Week, models strutted in chain mail and armor, while one carried a decorative sword.[1] Castlecore, which offers “a nostalgic ideal of luxury and wealth,” is trending on social, and romantasy sells.[2] Medievalism has never been very far from the American imagination, but in this moment it feels top of mind. Read more »

Reflections in panes of glass (or maybe plastic?) in a garage door in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Bill Murray

I.

A hundred years ago two battered and beleaguered old men, one an Italian prisoner, the other taken to wandering Irish bogs, arrived at the same fateful truth: the world around them was collapsing.

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist theorist, imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

William Butler Yeats, a sort of mystic horrified by violence and uncertainty across his Irish homeland, saw the same future. From a cottage in County Galway he wrote “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” What was worse, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

One a political theorist dissecting history’s brutal transitions, the other a poet divining the chaos of human nature, both foresaw the same truth—that societies don’t glide one era to the next. Sufficiently stressed they shatter, and from the wreckage, new orders struggle to emerge. A hundred years on, Gramsci and Yeats’s alarmed realizations read less like prophecy than real time commentary.

Today’s Americans grew up confident that they stood outside history’s cycles of rise and fall. Battered but buoyed by victory in World War II (and recognizing an opportunity), the United States built a powerful international system meant to foster global stability and economic growth while, naturally, serving its own interests. And, in a world laid waste by war, so it did.

For the longest time this system forestalled large-scale conflicts, allowing America and its allies to prosper.

That system has played itself out.

It was easy enough for the mighty and victorious United States to stamp its model on a war-exhausted world. Turns out, maintaining that system indefinitely in a restive world is challenging.

Gramsci speaks outside of time straight to this week that the old is dying. As a new alignment struggles to be born, just as he said: witness the morbid symptoms.

American legend still holds that the US is fundamentally different from and superior to other nations. We call it American Exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism thrived during the fleeting unipolar moment. With the Soviet collapse and the Cold War’s end, the U.S. bestrode the globe—for better and worse. But the hubris and mutations born of that era now blind us to our decline. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by TJ Price

At a certain point, all memory is fiction. What we retain of the past is selective—our brain typically glosses over the finer details—even the substance of it is subject to change. Our past, much like our present and future, is fluid, constantly running, and not even Memory can step in that same river twice. The memoir, however, attempts to fix what is in flux, to render still the dynamic motions of the past. Often, I find that reading memoir comes with a sense of forced progression—a somber plod of narrative, marrying recollections of a life to the dramatic scaffolding of the Hero’s Journey—but lately, I have discovered a wholly new avenue of the telling, and in a surprising place: poetry.

I first heard of The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, by Naomi Cohn (in a gorgeous paperback publication by Rose Metal Press) by way of a friend, currently researching altered sight for a thesis. Braille is, of course, the writing system of the blind, consisting of little raised dots in a matrix, each arrangement translating to a letter, or sometimes an entire word. What I didn’t know about it, however, as I learned from the excerpt that my friend posted, was that Louis Braille had been accidentally blinded at the tender age of three years old in his father’s workshop, with an awl. Cohn remarks on this, drawing a breathtaking association: “Is it an accident that my tool for making hand-punched braille is so much like an awl?”

It’s a curious book, not easily categorized. As the subtitle outlines, it is a collection of “brief essays,” arranged in the format of an imaginary encyclopedia, with each entry ranging from personal anecdote or recollection to etymology and jargon all the way to scientific fact and even Yiddish. These, more than anything, are poems—some of them are only a few lines, a paragraph—and each entry uses its title as a kind of homing beacon, returning back to it again and again to create a beautiful resonance underneath not only each “essay,” but layers of the same beneath the book in its entirety. The voice guiding the reader is frank, but also wry, and uniquely confessional. In so narrating the personal details and arranging them in this abecedarian manner, it overflows and touches far more stories than just its author’s own. The experiences belong to the writer, but the poetry used to convey them expands past this, and even beyond an inquiry of the visual sense itself, opening new avenues of thought via ontological questions of perceptions and perceiving, and even being perceived. Indeed, even the nature of reading (in all its many forms) is interrogated—how the endless permutations and combinatorics of language can transmogrify in the crucible of the mind.  Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Those first eight thunderous notes—”Oh Fortuna, velut Luna”—delivered by a massive choir of a hundred voices, have become as instantly recognizable as Beethoven’s da-dah-dah-DUM or the opening of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Since John Boorman first deployed O Fortuna in his 1981 film Excalibur, this choral juggernaut has stampeded through many horror films, parodies, videos, and cartoons—always to soul-chilling effect.

There’s no denying O Fortuna’s raw power. The chanting choir, the pounding drums, the ascending shrillness of the voices: it creates the unsettling sensation that an army of insane monks is closing in on you from the dark corners of a satanic cathedral. It is the musical embodiment of the Burkean sublime: an encounter with vast, uncontrollable, and terrifying forces.

This two-minute masterpiece by German composer Carl Orff, which opens and closes his 1936 “scenic cantata” Carmina Burana, has made the entire 60-minute work into one of the more frequently performed pieces of classical music worldwide. Dozens of professional, academic, and community music groups across America will stage it this year—no small feat considering the orchestra size and number of singers required. For symphony orchestras and concert halls, Carmina Burana has become a reliable cash cow, more valuable than many other popular favorites because it attracts that rarest and most coveted entity in the classical music world: the under age-65 audience. Read more »

Monica Rezman. After Dark. 2023. (“this is what it’s like to live in the tropics”)

Canvas, acrylic, thread.

With permission of the artist after a studio visit in Merida, Mexico (thank you Victoria Sharp!).

More here and here.

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by Richard Farr

As everyone knows, the word philosopher comes from two Greek words — philo, a rich, buttery pastry and by extension a person with a weakness for any self-indulgence, and sofa, a couch. Hence: a person who’d love to find a comfortable chair.

If you are a plumber or a tax attorney, or maybe an epidemiologist specializing in tropical blood diseases, most random strangers will understand in a broad way what you do for a living and why it is that someone else is prepared to pay you for doing it. Even if you work in a university and teach poetry, or the extinct fauna of the Oligocene, no great mystery. Even people who think it’s a complete waste of time will understand roughly why other people don’t.

Philosophy, on the other hand.

I was in my late twenties, Ph.D. still fresh-baked and steaming. Not yet accustomed to being addressed as Professor, I sat on the bus next to a complete stranger one day and had a conversation with him that went something like this: 

“A philosopher, eh? Really! So what’s your philosophy then?”

Uh-oh! How to begin? How to navigate the truly remarkable fact that in our culture it’s typical even for highly educated people to signal thus that they have never encountered this once-central thread in our civilization’s story? That they have literally no idea what the subject / field / discipline called “philosophy” is? 

I choose a poor way to begin. “I specialize mainly in modern political ideas. And ethics.”

“You teach politicians to be ethical?”

“No no! That would not be — well, I supposed it would be logically possible, even nomologically possible. But — anyway, no. That’s not it.”

“So tell me more about what you do.”

“I spend a lot of time on normative ethics.”

“Eh?” Read more »

by David J. Lobina

It can be lonely being a football player, especially when the ball is rolling.

I live on the wing, my natural habitat. As close to the touch line as possible, old-fashioned. No-one really understands me. I think my teammates live in a completely different world to my own. I can track the movements of the strikers and even anticipate what they’ll do with the ball when they get hold of it, but it is all foreign to me. I can track the central midfielders better and more closely, as these are the people who make sure the ball reaches me ever so often, but their general motivations are equally inscrutable. The goalkeeper and the defenders are even more of a mystery; I’m not sure throwing your body to the ground like they do is always necessary, but I am sure that I cannot do it quite like that myself. The other winger is the closest thing to having a twin, but one that is the exact opposite in every way. Every player is their own person here, with movements and motivations unlike those of the others. We are a team in name only; more like a collection of 11 inlets.

It always all starts in the midfield with the opening kick. I am on the wing and do not expect to see the ball for a good few minutes. The strikers get things going by kicking the ball backwards to the midfielders, and then mechanically field towards the goal without a worry, so eager are they to reach their own natural habitat – away from it, and they look lost. The midfielders start their routine of not wanting to have any kind of responsibility by getting rid of the ball as soon as they receive it, lest they make any mistake that might need the attention of the defenders or even the keeper. Defenders patiently wait for these mistakes; they would wish them into being from time to time if they could, in fact. Goalkeepers would wish defenders’ mistakes into being, in turn; the more the merrier, in fact. One striker tends to be more artistic than the other and ventures into the midfield on occasion in order to try out things for art’s sake and with only aesthetic objectives in mind, in a trial-and-error kind of fashion; success or fail matters not, it just needs to always look pretty. Read more »

Rapprochement:

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by Derek Neal

Close-Up, a 1990 Iranian film directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is one of the rare films where the viewing experience is enhanced by knowing certain details beforehand.

The movie opens with a scene in a taxi. A journalist is in the front seat while two armed military police officers sit in the back. The journalist explains to the driver that they are on their way to arrest a man who has been impersonating the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. So far, so good. But what you don’t realize, unless you’re familiar with the film, is that most of these people are not actors. The journalist is a journalist and the police officers are police officers. So the director is going for realism, eschewing the use of professional actors in the manner of Bresson? Not quite. Makhmalbaf is a real Iranian director, and someone really did impersonate him—this is a true story, and many of the people in the film play themselves. The journalist is the real journalist who broke the story, which brought it to the attention of Kiarostami, leading him to make the movie. The officers are the real officers who arrested the impersonator. They are on their way to the real house of the family whom the impersonator conned, and the family as well as the impersonator play themselves, too. Everything in the film really happened—this is real life, close up. Or is it? Does filming something change it? Does a reenactment alter the original act? Can a copy replace the original? What is real and what is make believe, and can we cross back and forth between the two realms? Can one exist without the other? These are the questions the film presents to its viewers.

In the taxi on the way to the Ahankhah residence, where the impersonator will be arrested, the journalist asks the taxi driver if he knows the director Makhmalbaf, to which he responds, “I don’t have time for movies. I’m too busy with life!” Later, when Kiarostami tells the judge who will preside over the case that he would like to film the trial, the judge tells him, “I took a look at this case, and I don’t see anything worth filming.” The judge and the taxi driver insist on the difference between movies and real life, or more broadly, art and reality. Kiarostami seems to have something else in mind.

In the former scene, the scene in the taxi, the journalist Farazmand is playing himself whereas the taxi driver is portrayed by an actor (at least, he’s not listed as playing himself in the opening credits). This conversation, then, may not have really occurred, although the drive to the Ahankhah residence certainly did. Kiarostami has presumably inserted this dialogue to make the viewer question what is presented on the screen. Is it a movie, or is it life? The scene with the judge is also a reenactment, although this time all the characters play themselves. The judge is the real judge and Kiarostami, off camera, asks him questions. We are inclined to believe that this dialogue did take place, that the judge did question the worth of filming such a simple trial. But did he? There’s no way to know, and attempting to find out the truth only leads to more questions, as I discovered while researching the movie.

The film itself, contrary to the opinion of the taxi driver or the judge, proposes that something becomes worth filming when it is filmed; in other words, the act of representation itself makes its subject worthy of representation. No external explanation is needed other than the resulting piece of art, which, once it has been created, becomes a part of real life. Read more »