by Julia Galef

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gets credit for pointing out that many classic philosophical conundrums are unsolvable not because they are so profound, but because they are incoherent. Instead of trying to solve such questions, he argued, we should try to dissolve them, by demonstrating how they misuse words and investigating the confusion that motivated the question in the first place.

But with all due respect to Wittgenstein, my favorite example of the “dissolving questions” strategy comes from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains a cheeky and unforgettable dissolution of which I’m sure Wittgenstein himself would have been proud: A race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings builds a supercomputer named Deep Thought, so that they can ask it the question that has preoccupied philosophers for millions of years: “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”

After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought finally announces the answer: Forty-two. In response to the programmers’ howls of disappointment and confusion, Deep Thought rather patiently points out that the reason his answer doesn’t make any sense is because their original question didn’t make any sense either. As I’ve written before, questions like this one, or the very similar “What is the meaning of life?” question, seem to be committing a basic category error: life isn’t the kind of thing to which the word “meaning” or “answer” applies.

But in this article I want to take my analysis a little further than that.

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by Dave Munger

It's 10:00 on a beautiful Sunday morning in California. To my left is some of the most spectacular coastline America has to offer. I'm walking along a road on Point Lobos that is ordinarily packed with cars on days like this, but today, thanks in part to my $135 entry fee, the road has been closed to traffic.

There's only one problem: I should be running, not walking. Over the past year, I've spent hundreds of dollars on running gear and race entry fees. I've logged more than 1,600 miles training for this event, including nearly 1,000 miles in the past four months alone. I've lost over 35 pounds and steadily improved my speed and stamina. Why can't I make my body do what I've trained it to do?

Dozens of runners pass me on either side, each of them experiencing varying degrees of misery similar to my own. Most of them, like me, have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to get here, spending $500, $1,000 or more to participate in this event, the Big Sur International Marathon. Like Boston, New York, Paris, and Berlin, Big Sur is a “destination marathon,” a once-in-a-lifetime experience that is so beloved, many runners return year after year.

The race was run on May 1 this year, but Big Sur's 4,500 spots for marathoners had already sold out last October. Other races sell out even faster. This year's Boston Marathon, despite strict qualification standards, sold out in 8 hours. The 2011 Marine Corps Marathon, which tours the monuments of Washington, DC, sold out its 30,000 spots in 28 hours.

While I'm a better-than-average runner, I'm by no means a competitive athlete. My best finish ever was fourth place, in a 5-kilometer race that only had 74 participants, many of whom were walking the entire course. I'm certain that there are several hundred runners faster than me who live within 50 miles: When I do well in a race, it's either because those guys aren't racing, or they're racing elsewhere.

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by Akim Reinhardt

There is pervasive form of Americana that is a pubescent rite of passage for so many: car culture. But having been born and raised in the Bronx, I never acclimated it.

I walked to P.S. 24. I walked to J.H.S. 141. I walked or took a city bus to John F. Kennedy High School. I rode the subway to Manhattan. When it came time for my first big trip, off to college in Michigan at age seventeen, I boarded an airplane. And when I arrived there, I discovered a dormitory hall-full of young men who loved to talk about cars: their cars, their parents’ cars, cars they’d worked on, cars they pined for, cars they’d stared at longingly in the glossy pages of magazines, and cars that whizzed by on the street as they stood there, talking about cars.

It was mysterious babel to me. Baseball and football I could talk about. Music? Sure. I could even gab about history a little bit if you pressed me. But the infatuation with cars was completely foreign. And it is a language I would never learn with any real fluency. To this day, when I enter that world, all I can manage to do is smile, order the first thing on the menu, and ask where the bathroom is. And even at that, half the time I end up pissing in the alley.

It’s not that we were a carless NYC family. In fact, my father had always owned a car. But that did not spring out of any desire. It was a necessity. He was a general contractor, so he needed something to haul his tools, materials, and workers in; something he could sling a 40-foot ladder onto. I grew up riding in work vehicles that stunk of cigarettes and were oft grumbled about.

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[Satellite photo of Manhattan on 9/11. The red circle is my own location at the time.]

by S. Abbas Raza

I hated Osama Bin Laden, and I suppose I probably had more personal reasons to hate him than most.

When I was just beginning grad school in the philosophy department at Columbia University, I met a remarkably self-assured young man who was an undergrad there at the time. We were both originally from Pakistan and I became a sort of mentor to him, despite the fact that most of the time he argued with me endlessly about almost everything. He was bright and vivacious, if headstrong, and a born leader. He was also very funny and made me laugh a lot. He took me to meet his parents and five-year-old brother at their hotel in midtown Manhattan when they came from Pakistan for his graduation. They seemed extremely proud of their oldest of two children. After graduating from Columbia, he got an MBA from Emory University, and then joined a bank.

Unsurprisingly, he rose through the ranks at almost unbelievable speed and was a senior executive by the time he turned 29. Still having the boyish enthusiasms of a young man, he bought a BMW 740 iL, his pride and joy, which we cruised around in on many an evening, with me at the wheel as often as not. He talked about getting married to his girlfriend, a lovely American girl he had met a year or so earlier. Soon after, on the bright and crisp morning of September 11, 2001, he awoke early to get to a business meeting at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. His last phone call was to his girlfriend. He said he'd call again once he got out.

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by Mohsin Rizvi

As the world celebrates the death of Osama bin Laden, I wonder if this reaction is worth a life so trivial. It is true that Osama bin Laden was the greatest terrorist ever, that he took thousands of lives, and orchestrated horrific acts of violence. However, it cannot be ignored that in the end, bin Laden was just one man… Nothing more, and nothing less…

I refuse to attribute all the torture and hardships the world has faced in the last decade to one person's actions and beliefs. The world is no better than it was while he lived. The American government still taps our phones, racially profiles people, illegally holds inmates at Guantanamo Bay, and still has troops spread out through the Middle-East. Sectarian violence still exists in Muslims countries, religious fundamentalists continue to impose their ideals through violence, and women are still universally denied equal treatment…

So why are we dancing at Ground Zero?

I recall all the sacrifices made by the American people to give their political leadership the power to successfully hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. I feel the consequence of those sacrifices everyday. The death of bin Laden is not an “accomplishment” of the American government, it is simply a promise being upheld by those we pay our taxes too. It's nothing more than a fair trade. Thats capitalism, it's the American dream. American citizens gave up their privacy, freedoms, money, and lives to get Osama bin Laden and some of us citizens are not going to say “thank you” for the government holding up its side of the bargain. We gave up a lot for the promise of “getting him”, and our sacrifices fueled a monster larger and more capable of destruction than one man's fanatic worldview.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

A man is hurtling towards you from some twenty paces away. He leaps to hurl a projectile at you with all his might. You can duck, you can flinch, or you can swat it away with your blade, stylish, balanced of body and mind, having yet again defended your wicket. There is tremendous fury and violence in cricket, only just restrained by the the spatial logic of the playing field and the ritual logic of each set of six balls, each over bowled by a different bowler.

The great cricketing theorist Douglas Adams was the first to explore the symbolic logic of the game. What are those three stakes, planted into the ground in a row, delicately supporting the bails above? Do they, for instance, relate to the fundamentals of architecture as expressed in the Stonehenge? My own view is that they represent a kind of abstracted straw or wooden man, his two legs and dangling middle stick now all that remains of his dismembered body, his stump. Each team must protect its carcass of a king from the slings and arrows of the opposing side.

Unlike baseball, which is played within a single Cartesian quadrant, excluding the howling crowds behind its two perpendicular foul-lines, the topography of cricket has a bipolar, side-switching logic. There are two stumps on either side of a cricketing pitch, which is twenty-two paces long, and two batsmen from the same team defend those wickets from alternating sides in subsequent overs. Members of the fielding team range all around them in every direction at various distances, resulting in a panoptic field of observation, evaluation and reaction which eventually extends to us spectators, sitting in thrall outside the boundary line.

The use of alternate ends of the cricketing pitch somewhat resembles the alternation of service in tennis and similar racquet sports, and the switching of courts at the end of every set. Still, no other game has precisely this kind of running, alternating, side-switching logic, and I have had to think hard to propose a possible source. I believe it could derive from the logic of medieval jousting, which required mounted adversaries to ride in towards one another, lances drawn, till one of them fell. One imagines their heralds and stewards playing with that armor at dusk, swatting back with wooden clubs the stones thrown upon the absent form of the knight. Or even an early game of cricket played by a two-man team, one bowler, one batsman, each bowler thundering in simultaneously from either end of the pitch to the other side's defending batsman, until one of them got lucky, and broke through to break the opposition's middle stump. This practice of simultaneous attack and defense eventually being unraveled over the centuries into the logic of 'innings.'

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Asymptotic reasoning is ubiquitous in mathematics and the natural sciences, representing both a general approach to problems as well as a collection of techniques. It is one way of answering the question, “Which features of the world are relevant for our understanding?” Often, the behavior of a system gets simpler as it gets larger: only some of the features that are relevant for understanding a small system are necessary for understanding a very large one. The averaging out of fluctuations in the long-term is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Asymptotic analysis attempts to describe the behavior of an object (function, physical system, algorithm) as some quantity gets very large or very small. It is thus fundamentally the study of particular sorts of approximations, albeit approximations that can be made as precise as one wants, and a guide to which features of an object can safely be ignored.

To start with a simple example, look at what happens to the square of a number and to its cube as the number gets bigger and bigger. Both the square and the cube race off to infinity, but one does so faster than the other. 1³ and 1² are the same; 2³ is twice as big as 2²; 3³ is thrice as big as 3² and so on. For any number N, N³ is N times as big as N², and as N gets really big the function N² is dwarfed by N³. So to see how the behavior of a function could become simpler as it approaches infinity, look at the behavior of

N³+N²

If we are thinking asymptotically, we would say that this function behaves like N³: for any degree of approximation we choose the contribution of N² will be irrelevant for large enough N. Here “large enough” depends on the degree of approximation we want. If we decide that irrelevant means “contributes less than 1% to the value of the function”, then N² is irrelevant once we reach N=100; if instead we decide that it means less than 0.01%, then we must wait till N=10,000, and so on. The crucial point here is that we can satisfy any desired degree of approximation, no matter how stringent.

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by Michael Blim

For America’s liberals, these are soul-trying times. The romance with Barack Obama is over. They have discovered, as one pundit in the Washington Post put it, there he is an Eisenhower Republican. In fairness to Obama, he never promised to be anything else, as perceptive commentators before the election noted. Yet, as the stuff of liberal wish-fulfillment, Obama could not be resisted: a self-identified African-American, a Harvard lawyer trained by some of the best minds liberalism still possessed, and a product of Hyde Park Chicago liberal patronage with some church-related street organizing thrown in, Obama embodied the dream of a new multicultural liberalism that would overcome social tensions by the force of his example. And liberalism would become the majority creed once more.

The economic crisis of the last three years has put paid to the wish, and the Obama administration shows every indication of putting an end to American liberalism, the one hundred-year plus political movement that sought a state dedicated to human improvement, equal opportunity, and the regulation of capitalism.

American liberalism arose at the turn of the 20^th Century when the middle class produced by our nation’s massive industrial great leap forward began to make money and to thirst for the power to remake American society in its own image. It strived to make an America that was educated, efficient, and fair. Convinced that social problems could be solved through scientific study and pragmatic policy-making that prescribed specific remedies, American liberalism sought to regulate business abuses, restore competition in markets, and to build, albeit incrementally, a welfare state. It sought the upper hand politically by eschewing social democracy, thus rejecting any real need for power sharing with labor and the working class. Ensnared by its own narcissistic self-regard, it imagined itself the guardian of the general interest; every other group or class was just a special interest.

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by Tom Jacobs

I stick a patch on my shoulder and I think of Einstein’s brain. It’s in a vat, the brain, that is. A brain in a vat. The body is long gone, but the brain remains. A controlled-release of nicotine enters my bloodstream and I also think of Dean Moriarty, the father I never found. I think of Einstein’s brain and of old Dean Moriarty, each barreling down toward the vanishing point of I-80, one beside the other, pursuing the ever-receding sunset.

Einstein’s brain travelled across country in a jar. His brain sat shotgun (well, in the trunk, actually, but it’s nicer to think of his brain sitting shotgun). Then there is Kerouac/Sal Paradise with Cassady/Moriarty, careening down I-80, the interstate that slices right through the US all the way out to San Francisco. And then back again, culminating at the? ass end of I-80, at the George Washington Bridge, the view of which was once afforded to me out the bedroom window of one of my first apartments in the city. I would look at the bridge and imagine the road beyond, and the bald head of the sun sinking into the earth, and think of “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.” My mind travels Westward into the night like Einstein’s be-vatted brain, but my body remains rooted in my apartment on 181st street. And really, my mind, too, is trapped in the envelope of my body, such as it is, that stares out the window imagining all the people dreaming.

Dickhead that I am, I don’t know if this is important or silly.

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by Sue Hubbard

Can art regenerate a community? Can building an architect designed gallery in a socially deprived area change its fortunes? Everyone wants a Bilbao Guggenheim. Almost overnight Bilbao was transformed from a culturally moribund commercial centre in an unfashionable corner of Spain’s Basque region to a must-see destination. After its opening in 1997 hundreds of thousands of tourists began to pour into the city just to visit Frank Ghery’s new building. Then came the knock- on effects: the new hotels, the expanding of the airport, the upgrading of facilities and extra employment and, hey-presto, Bilbao was changed forever.

It was a far sighted decision by the local burghers even though there was, at the time, much opposition. But the result is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful modern buildings you will see anywhere. Tate St. Ives, above Porthmeor beach, has also been a success. But here the project was built on an historic legacy, for St. Ives has, due to its especial clarity of light, had a thriving artistic community since the 19^th century. The tiny fishing village, a popular middle-class holiday destination, already attracted people who might be expected to visit a gallery.

But the opening of Turner Contemporary this week, in the rundown seaside resort of Margate, most famous in recent years as the childhood home of the artist Tracey Emin, has a bigger challenge on its hands.

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by Misha Lepetic

“The architect is primary… is the real cornerstone of any culture, of any society.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1958

What is the responsibility of the architect or designer within the contemporary context of urbanism? If we’re to begin with the preceding quote, taken from an interview with an astonishingly anti-urbanist Frank Lloyd Wright, it is an unconditional, Roarkian supremacy. If these sentiments had prevailed, of course, Le Corbusier would have ensured that today’s Paris would look very different.

Wright, his avatar Howard Roark, and Le Corbusier exemplify extreme, or perhaps extremely self-aware, instances of one of the great struggles in architecture: the uncomfortable fact that the world is full of people, and that architects are primarily educated in the total discourse of buildings. However, the increasing urbanization of the human race relegates the efficacy of architecting individual buildings as, at best, proofs-of-concept and as, at worst, vanity projects. And many such buildings placed in proximity to one another do not add up to a coherent urban solution.

This is not to say that architects and planners have not frequently thought on a comprehensive, urban scale. Christopher Wren’s plans for London following the Great Fire, mostly unrealized, and Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s revision of Paris, mostly enacted, show us otherwise. But these plans revolved did not concern themselves with the citizenry as such. In the case of Wren, the self-interest of the merchants and landowners in fact prevented the plan’s execution. And despite the net benefits, the social consequences of Haussmann’s plan for Parisian identity are still hotly contested: the destruction of over 20,000 houses and buildings was not just about making room for the wide boulevards, but also led to the displacement of untold thousands of the poor to the suburbs of Paris, while speculators grew wealthy from flipping the new apartments to the rapidly rising bourgeoisie (see Balzac’s The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau for a particularly wonderful account of pre-Haussmannian property speculation and bankruptcy).

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by Quinn O'Neill

As an atheist, I sometimes get asked if I’m afraid of what'll happen when I die. Naturally, I'm not afraid of going to Hell or any other supernatural place and I'm not afraid of being dead, but admittedly, there is something that scares me. I'm afraid that I could someday exist in (or as) another body.

My position is not so much that we can exist in more than one body but that we don’t know that we can’t, or even how probable it would be. To be clear, I'm not suggesting any kind of dualism or that we might be reincarnated with our current attributes and personality traits. Consistent with a naturalistic view of the world, I accept that consciousness and perception of self are generated by the brain, so when the brain dies there's nothing left – no thoughts, no personality, and no spirit. The chance of an identical physical copy of my brain arising again is very small, so perhaps I needn't worry.

But it’s here that the worry creeps in. Is an identical physical copy of my brain what it would take for me to experience being alive again? In order to establish that subjective consciousness is restricted to a single body, we'd have to understand how it works and we really don't.

From a naturalistic perspective, the brain is what makes us who we are. Presumably, if we could create perfect physical copies of ourselves right down to the wiring of our brains and the neural connections that store our memories, we could effectively recreate ourselves. But there’s a problem, because even if I could perfectly replicate myself and make a thousand copies, I would perceive only one of these as “self”. In other words, whatever makes me uniquely me is not something that I could even in theory share with an identical physical copy. The only thing that could distinguish me from such copies is position. Only the location of my perspective would be unique.

This is a bit of a conundrum. To an objective observer encountering me and one of my copies, there’d be two identical copies of me, each thinking itself the original. From my point of view, however, there’d be a big difference between the copies – I’d be one of them and the other would be someone else.

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Editor's Note: Akeel Bilgrami has kindly given us permission to publish here the text of a lecture that he delivered at The New School and which is also included in the Chomsky Notebook collection of writings.

by Akeel Bilgrami

Though there is much radical –and often unpleasant– disagreement on the fundamental questions around academic freedom, these disagreements tend to be between people who seldom find themselves speaking to each other on an occasion such as this or even, in general, speaking to the same audience. On this subject, as in so much else in the political arena these days, one finds oneself speaking only to those with whom one is measurably agreed, at least on the fundamental issues. As proponents of academic freedom, we all recognize who the opponents of academic freedom are but we seldom find ourselves conversing with them in academic conferences. We only tend to speak to them or at them in heated political debates when a controversy arises, as for instance at Columbia University over the promotion of faculty in Middle Eastern studies, or in those states where the very idea of a curricular commitment to modern evolutionary biology is viewed with hostility. I will not be considering such controversial cases of overt political influence on the academy. This is not because they are not important. The threats they pose are very real, when they occur, and the need for resistance to these threats is as urgent as anything in the academy. But they raise no interesting intellectual issues at a fundamental level over which anyone here is likely to be disagreed. If there is disagreement in a forum of the kind at which we are presently gathered, it is likely to be on relatively marginal questions, such as, for instance, whether academic freedom is a special case of the more basic constitutional right to free speech or whether instead it is a special form of freedom tied to the specific mission of universities.

What might a philosopher contribute to these more marginal questions? In this brief lecture, I would like to make a fuss about a standard argument for a conception of academic freedom which we all seem to subscribe to when it is coarsely described but which, when we describe it more finely, and look at the arguments more closely, is quite implausible and leads directly to thoroughly confused ideas about displaying ‘balance’ in our classrooms and our pedagogy quite generally. I will then use some of the points and distinctions I make in this critique to explore whether there is scope for locating more subtle and interesting (and actually more pervasive) kinds of threat to academic freedom than the obviously controversial ones that I mentioned above which all of us here, I assume, find an abomination, and which, as I said, raise no interesting issues for any of us, even if they ring urgent alarms. At the very end, I will venture to advocate imbalance of a very specific kind in the ‘extra-mural’ domain, when it is neither inquiry nor classroom curriculum that is at stake but the effort to engage the intellectual and political culture at large.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

Going through a difficult separation? Feeling lonely? Well I've got just the book for you. It's called After Kinship, and it's by Janet Carsten. She says that the focus on the affine pair as the basic unit of anthropological theory was really only a projection of mid-twentieth-century Euro-American ideology into an ethnographic field where bonds of kinship are by and large much more fluid than Lévy-Bruhl et al. were able to understand. I don't know why they keep this kind of stuff away from the 'self help' section of the bookstore. It cheers me right up.

I went to the Lawrenceville Petco and inquired about getting a cat to keep me company. “I'd really like a cat,” I said to the teen-aged employee, “but I'm worried about hygiene.”
“Cats are only as filthy as their owners,” she said, rehearsing some bit of wisdom she did not seem fully to comprehend.
“Well, suppose I'm filthy,” I replied.
“Oh. Maybe you should get, like, a hermit crab?”

I received a message from a former student. “Hey,” it started out, “I heard you're retired now. That's too bad! You were a great teacher!” For the record, I'm 38, and I'm on a temporary research sabbatical. And I am not a 'teacher'.

Facebook now has sidebar ads that are supposed to speak to the particular interests and desires of the social-networking site's individual users. Recently I've been getting an ad that beckons: “Hey Philosopher! Find your market!”

Now this is why I can't have a cat: Just today I discovered an uneaten basket of raspberries, purchased in January, at the bottom of my desk drawer. It was sitting on top of the copy of Being and Time that I've been carrying around with me for complicated reasons I need not go into here. Little remained of the raspberries, as they had been gradually replaced by thousands upon thousands of fruit flies. If I had a cat, I would have joked to her: Well look at that, countless generations of them have come and gone since January, and they still haven't outgrown their Heidegger phase.

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by Maeve E. Adams

“I think therefore I’m Liberal”; “I think therefore I’m Dangerous”; “I think therefore I’m Single”; “I think therefore I’m Vegetarian”; and my personal favorite “I think therefore I’m Ham.” These phrases—emblazoned on t-shirts, billboards and, in the case of the latter, the headers of blogs—offer up perverse reinventions of Renee Descartes’ oft-cited (and oft-misunderstood) theory of human consciousness and existence, articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

These modern slogans do not, however, make much sense if we try to see them as a logical extension of Cartesian philosophy. Descartes’ theory is not strictly partisan, for starters. His excursus is, in part, an attempt to make sense of what makes all (or at least most) humans human—what makes them more than “rocks and turnips” (44) or “blueberries and doorknobs” (78), as Jonathan Kramnick might say, with characteristically wry humor, if he were writing about Descartes.

Kramnick’s new book, Actions and Objects: from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), from which I have borrowed these phrases, is not strictly about Cartesian philosophy. Kramnick’s delightfully written and keenly insightful new book is, however, about a series of related philosophical conundrums concerning human consciousness that preoccupied a wide array of writers in the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These writers run the whole gamut, from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume to the poet known as Rochester and novelists Eliza Haywood and Samuel Richardson. In theorizing conceptions of consciousness, as Kramnick discusses, these writers debated attendant theories of existence, motivation, feeling and action that still preoccupy philosophers of mind today. In throwing a wide net, Kramnick’s book reminds us that these seemingly strictly philosophical questions were engaged by writers who came at them through a myriad of genres of writing.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

Like so many others in India, I grew up on tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the books of Enid Blyton. Well produced children’s books with an Indian context were rare, and now looking back I’m not sure as children we needed such a context. Most children’s books are lived out in world of fantasy, where more things are possible than we ever allow ourselves to imagine as an adult. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, related either as oral tales or in abridged and sanitized versions, fulfilled such a role admirably and even today I find the flying broomsticks, magic spells and talking animals of Harry Potter somewhat tame compared to all that I took for granted as a child.

In this world Enid Blyton fitted in admirably, I’d say Enid Blyton was a better children’s writer for those reading her in India than in England. For us the world she described was a land of fantasy as unreal and magical as Narnia or the Shires. Meals of tongue sandwich and lemonade at the bottom of the garden had a magical quality, now rather sadly and blandly dispelled after tasting tongue as an adult. In this magical world I now learn there were undertones of racism, but these were lost on us, a golliwog was just another inhabitant with no existence for us as a caricature. In the same way it was only as an adult that I registered that the Narnia books were an allegory, the Lion as a stand in for Christ was thankfully lost on us in India.

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