by Norman Costa

Scientific Psychology, an Oxymoron?

In the minds of many, including scientists from the more successful sciences, the field of psychology is not a science and may never be a science. The Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, was kind in his criticism of psychology as a science when he said that we have the form [of science] down, but we are not producing any laws of nature. In my view, psychology as a science has made some important contributions to describing mental life and behavior in animals and humans, but, on the whole, I tend to agree with Feynman.

I care about psychology as a science, very deeply. But, why should I care? Why should anyone care? Scientific psychology must care if we are to have confidence in our discipline as a science, in ourselves as scientists, and be respected by the larger scientific community as colleagues on an equal footing. For anyone who doubts that psychological science had a serious problem of credibility, consider the following:

1. The American Psychological Association (APA) did not issue a position in support of science in the classroom in the recent Dover, OH school case. The case involved the integrity of the school district's science curriculum for teaching of the science of evolutionary biology, and against the introduction of faith-based pretenses to science.
2. The ascendancy of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) is due, not in a small way, to the failure of mainstream psychology to embrace the mantel of science.
3. The de facto secession of Division 14 from APA and the creation an independent professional association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).

Students today are not as [insert your own text] as when I was a student.

I began teaching psychological research methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels after two careers in research psychology – one at IBM Corporation, and another as a social science research consultant. The new mission I gave myself was the training of the next generation of research psychologists. Very quickly, I fell in love with teaching, and I fell in love with my students (not inappropriately, I might add.) For the father in me, it felt like having my children back home again.

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Due to popular demand some further tasting from the part of the collection on Ethics. I know there is a mistake in the column. IT’S A JOKE.

Part one, Short Takes, can be seen here.

——————————————————

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.

—Katherine Whithorn

*

Waiter to a table of Jewish Women: Is anything all right?

*

Atheist’s notation in the Bible: If true, then important

*

To err is human, to forgive supine

—S. J. Perelman

*

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by Edward B. Rackley

Nature captivates in Thailand. Its beaches and islands are legend; its birdlife and tropical flora endlessly entertain. On this visit though, nature bored me. A relentless jetlag was partly to blame. Its disorientations so warped my perceptions and instincts that I acquiesced to its inversions, accepting the Thai night as my day. Also, I was hungry not for nature but for the artifice of human imagination: grand emanations of culture, artisanry, cosmology. Has our petty species generated anything that I’ve never seen, never imagined? In creativity is there redemption for Homo Faber? For answers to this question Thailand is a gold mine.

Heavily subject to international marketing strategies and thus cast as the ‘Land of Smiles’, Thailand wants desperately to be permeated by magic. Of all possible reasons to be ‘desperately seeking’, permeation by magic is worthy enough, and seemingly free of ulterior motive. Orientalism and its facile seductions be damned, I thought, after my first week in country. If this place holds even one treasure of the human spirit, its authenticity will be self-evident to the most gullible and the most jaded.

From where I live it’s an 18-hour flight to Thailand. I learned to stop fighting jetlag long ago; it is now my companion and confidant. Wandering Bangkok streets and alleys at 3 am, nothing remained of the diurnal parade of human pursuit to entertain me. Roaming dog packs and the occasional buzz of a moto taxi broke the surprising silence of a vast urban labyrinth. I was left with night’s shadows and breezes, long walks along empty boulevards and closed shop fronts, the constant hum of yellow street lamps and neon. Repetition sets in and one begins inspecting a city for its anomalies, its artifacts of human touch, the physical traces of the shopkeeper at home ensconced in dreams.

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By Randolyn Zinn

Rehearsal is everything and Frederick Wiseman knows it. As usual for this eminent American documentarian, his interest lies in the workaday world, but in his latest project he finds the harmony of place serving the artistic process. The opening shot fills the screen with a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of Paris as the white domed confection of Le Sacre Coeur entices the eye to the horizon line. Then the camera cuts to a closer view of the ninth arrondisement with its stately mansard roofs and street life before dropping down to gaze upon the facade of the 19th century Beaux-Arts Palais Garnier, home to the world's oldest ballet company.

YOU ARE THERE

Wiseman intercuts scenes of rehearsal with architectural snapshots of the busy hive that is the Palais Garnier – an apt metaphor because he finds an actual beekeeper harvesting honey on the roof. Multiple close-ups in underground quarters show lighting instruments rigged to pipe and thick ropes coiled in meticulous spirals on the floor. Just as meticulous is the student footwork in ballet class. Throughout, Wiseman cuts away from the dancers to admire the graceful curved balustrade of the central spiral staircase that connects cupola to basement. He stops in at the cafeteria at lunchtime, watches ballet shoes being dyed in the costume shop, and visits the empty opera house as a young man cleans its plush scarlet velvet seats. Meanwhile an underground stream (the legendary hiding place of the Phantom of the Opera) hosts not only living plants…but swimming fish. Wiseman sees everything.

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by Olivia Scheck

Saturday was the last game of the little league soccer season – trophy day. My friend Jordan had talked me into being his assistant coach for the league we’d both played in as kids.

To be honest, it was a disappointing year.

Practices were primarily spent rolling in mud, fighting over who would retrieve a lost ball, and pleading for practice to end early. In games, most of the kids avoided the ball like a booger on the finger of a schoolyard enemy. They were desperate to be put in prestigious positions, but didn’t do anything when they got there.

Increasingly frustrated, I took it upon myself to crack the whip: Laps for the losers during competitive drills, personal callouts for lazy play, and – the nuclear option – public demands for chatting children to “stop flirting”.

When one of our players would flee the ball in terror, I would fantasize about running a drill in which we pelted him with soccer balls. In theory this would teach the kids that getting hit only stings for a second, though I admit it’s not a proven method. Jordan convinced me not to test it.

For the most part, the kids we’re unresponsive to criticism and I could sense their parents’ disapproval when we gave them negative feedback during games.

Following our regular Saturday afternoon loss, I would rant to Jordan about the need to stop coddling our players, invoking maxims about life lessons learned on the playing field. Then, Jordan would remind me, “They’re 9.”

***

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by Sarah Firisen

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about corporate innovation; how to define it, how to inspire ideation and how companies can move forward in their implementation of ideas. And the more I read and think about innovation, the more I realize that something far greater is at stake here than just the ability of US companies to create new product lines and services during a recession. I want to make the case that there is a fundamental, philosophical problem with the US education system, and that if the current educational trends for most of the children in the US aren’t addressed, then the ability for this country to generate innovative scientists, politicians and business leaders out of future generations will be drastically undermined. The extent to which this is a valid concern was highlighted in the recent Newsweek-Intel Global Innovation Survey and its companion article.

Some of my basic premises are drawn from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both of which I thoroughly recommend. My premises are as follows:

A combination of technological advances and globalization have increased outsourcing and automation of tasks to the point where soon, any rule-based, linear thinking business activity that can be outsourced to a computer process or to another country will be. Countries, like China and India, have highly educated populations who are increasingly able and willing to perform the white-collar jobs of Americans and Europeans at a fraction of the cost, and these are only the most recently successful recipients of outsourcing, other countries are quickly catching up. Technological advances have meant that the outsourcing of this work can often be seamless and transparent to the end-user. In addition, time-differences enable companies to have a 24-hour workforce without paying anyone overtime to work a night shift.

The real opportunity the US has to continue to be a dominant economic force in the new economy lies with its proven track record for inventiveness and innovation. This NPR story is very illustrative of my point; while almost all of the components of Apple’s iPhone are made and assembled in Asia, the lion’s share of the profit from each sale remains in the US, “[Apple] gets as much as half the profit for every gadget it sells. That's because Apple creates and designs things — that's where the real money is. And the best jobs.”

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by Sam Kean

I’m hoping here, now, after a combined twenty-three months of their being dead, and two full months after the most recent death, that the statute of limitations has expired on de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and that I may be allowed to speak, if not ill of the dead, at least in a frank and semi-unflattering way.

Not that I want to, exactly. The thought of speaking ill-ish of these two men still rattles me, still stokes a bourgeois fear of being found out as less than cultured. Combined, they reigned over the Brahmin caste of American literary English users for close to a century (I’d pulled that figure out of the air, as hyperbole, before I realized it was practically true!), and while they maybe don’t have ghosts, they were grammatical prescriptivists and do have disciples, descendents, and defenders of repute, who are more vigilant and vengeful than ghosts ever were anyway. There’s also, admittedly, a sort of guild guilt. Both men were writers, fancy ones, deploying octosyllabics most of us would have trouble pronouncing if spelled out fo-net-i-cal-ly. They’re smarter than me; they spoke French and Latin and Sanskrit probably; and it just sounds so philistine, downright sans-culotte, to criticize someone for writing too well.

Nonetheless. With all due respect and paces to their skill and influence, when it came down to doing what they built their reputations doing—trying to putting the best words in the best order—William Safire and William F. Buckley struck me as pretty dreadful writers.

Ah.

My dislike for them isn’t personal, though I guess I had a (minor) run-in with Safire at least. After retiring from his New York Times column, Safire took a sinecure in the District of Columbia as head of a small foundation dedicated to promoting neuroscience. I interviewed for a sub-entry-level editorial job there once, and after two hour-long interviews with his underlings had to sit down one more time with “Mr. Safire” himself. His office was bigger than the rest of the building, I think; it had about a thousand books, and a fireplace, and leather couches. We settled down on one, him in a cardigan, me in a skinny tie, and he started the interview by mocking my facial hair. “What’s with the beard?” My eyebrows went up. He smirked. He followed up by asking what I’m pretty sure are illegal questions about my marital prospects and the steadiness of my relationship with my girlfriend.

I realized quickly he was just twisting my titty—prodding me to see if I was uptight—and though I ended up turning down the job, I walked out of there pleased to have met him. I never thought to hold a grudge. In fact, having encountered him only through his writing before, my estimation actually improved after he made fun of me. I never met Buckley, but from everything I’ve seen and heard he probably would have delighted in eviscerating me, too. (Something about my manner says I can take it, I guess, and something about my look or carriage or gait says I deserve it.) Probably Buckley would have done it a little more deftly if we’d ever sat down to chat—more epee than hammer; it’s hard to imagine Buckley’s gambit being making fun of my beard, however much he might have hated it—but my viscera probably still would have spilled out on the floor all the same, and I probably still would have liked Buckley for it.

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by Evert Cilliers

If you'd have told me that America would ever spritz $65 billion of its annual taxes and manpower into yet another country's civil war, I would've said you're articulating via the IQ of your sphincter. Wasn't our own Civil War painful enough?

If you'd have told me that this civil war was a fight over who controls the world's opium production, and that we'd picked the losing side in this battle of criminals, I would've said your cerebellum is on an intravenous drip of LSD spiked with toad venom.

That sort of dumbass bellicosity happened back in the 19th century, when Britain smuggled opium into China and got into two wars with China about it.

America is a dumbass nation, for sure: we use most of our spare time to follow the lives of pretty but dim bulbs in Hollywood, and millions of us will be reading a book credited to Sarah Palin, the current all-time queen of dumbosity.

But we can't be THAT dumb, can we?

Or that criminal. It would be like backing one side of the Mafia against another, where both are equally bad.

Yet we are.

In fact, we are responsible for the whole dumbolical return of Afghanistan to form as the major supplier of illegal drugs to a grateful planet of barbecued minds.

Before we got involved in Afghanistan, its opium industry was on its knees, down by 94%, because its crazy Taliban government, besides banning music and snuffing women who had sex outside of marriage, didn't like drugs either.

But we jumped in there, and toppled the Taliban from their puritan perch — something to do with the fact that they were harboring Osama Bin Laden, whose handover to us they were willing to negotiate, but our dumbfuck administration wasn't.

And so, without the crazy Taliban government around to tell them what not to do, the Afghan people got down to what they do best, which is growing opium, and they could again more or less feed themselves.

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Making Way
—Narragansett Bay 1960

We part from the dock
slow as disengaging lovers
one landlocked the other a
floater who won’t be
kept at bay

The diminishing pier slides back
its bollards and planks deploy
to some other place not here
but to a distancing otherworld—
the tether breaks
as stern-first we pass the
channel buoy

….Quarter back, the O-D says.
….Quarter back, aye sir,
….and we slip away

….Steer two one zero, half ahead.
….Two one zero, half ahead, aye sir,
….and we slow-slide down
….the gleaming bay

The sun’s so keen it indicates
a tern on the roof of a big estate
a half mile away
with its long lawn hill
off the starboard bow
which slopes down clear
through the wind-wove air
to a point where jades meet blues
…………….–which passes now
as we part the sea while
making way

Further south the sea’s first chops
begin to unsettle our sheltered
adolescent cruise

Near the harbor mouth all decks
rise then make their first
supplicating bows to whatever
god it is that intervenes
to call-off wrecks
—we’re juggled gently first in
Neptune’s law as
pitches rolls & heaves
meet yaws

Gray billows diesel from our raked stacks
Halyards snap against the mast’s steel
Gulls abundantly rise & reel
over the white chaos of our wake’s track

Sunlight splinters
into rippled billions
upon each breaker’s
sequined breast
before it folds
in a white rush falling
to the soul percussion
of a bow-wave’s
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,shush shush shush

by Jim Culleny; Nov, 2009

David Schneider

In September of 2008, we found a safe-house of ruination, and blessed it. My girlfriend and I had wandered over to the Bruckner Bar, Grill & Gallery, which over the past couple of years had become a hub for the South Bronx's rising art scene.

Inside, people were streaming out from the opening reception of a full-gallery exhibition unfortunately titled “The Catcher in the Eye,” a collaborative “visual novel” by Garrett Klein, Kenneth Park, Melissa Starke, Jon-Paul Rodriguez and Marcin Wlodarczyk. Astonishingly, no visual record of this exhibition seems to exist on the internet, so I'll try to describe what I recall from it.

The gallery's bare-brick walls formed a coherent visual narrative, wrapping around the room. On the near left, an enormous stylized image in bright reds and yellows stormed up the wall – an image halfway inbetween superhero comics and Asian Communist propaganda posters, leading to Garrett Klein's nervous assemblages. Then, toward the back, a handful of Starke's severe abstract expressionist works were hallowed with ornate gilded frames. On the back right, broken Classical columns and fractured lintels collapsed down upon a chaos of intricately-detailed, tangled, junkyard mosaics (I believe by Wlodarczyk). By degrees, they rose along the wall to adorn a hazy, golden icon. This latter radiated with a primitive holiness, as if the prehistoric Lascaux painters had received a vision of the Madonna and Child in a Dead Sea cave.

Overly readable? Didactically discursive? Perhaps. But in September 2008, as the Presidential campaign accelerated in a crescendo of cacophonous triviality, as the worldwide capitalist engine exploded with a sickening lurch, this room seemed – at least to me – a rare repository of all the horrors and hopes of the moment. Bathed in dim blue and red light, and dashed with glints cascading from a disco ball, the room appeared a secret chamber of safety, in which artists and patrons nodded to one another, acknowledging: we can yet create beauty and meaning from the wreckage, we can yet dance in the chaos.

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Michael Blim

As the battle of the bedpans drags on, consuming what little is left of the short attention span of the Congress, Democrats are taking up financial reform.

Representative Barney Frank is responsible for legislation in the House and Senator Christopher Dodd in the Senate.

Neither of them is exactly presenting a profile in courage. Frank has virtually lifetime tenure in the House. Fall-out from arrests of a callboy network being run out of his Washington apartment in 1990 triggered his only electoral close call. Seventeen consecutive congressional election victories have enabled him to amass a lot of political clout and his role as the Democrats’ pivot person on financial reform has made him a leading recipient of campaign contributions. The Boston Globe (October 23) reported that Frank had raised $1.2 million thus far this year, even though the next election is still a year away. He is likely to double his total and pick up a bit more over the next 11 months.

Barney Frank is often called the smartest member of the House, something he has not cared to deny. He is apparently so smart that he thinks he can outsmart the financial and insurance companies that account for his campaign largesse by taking their money and giving nothing back in return. “I’m casting the same votes I was casting 20 years ago,” Frank tells the Globe. He stopped taking money from the top ten banks that took government money beginning last fall, and he will be giving $500,000 of his stash to the House Democratic campaign fund.

As smart as Barney Frank may be, he appears to lack common sense, for he must be the last person in America to believe in a free lunch. Who is the greater fool, his corporate campaign donors, who believe they are getting something for their money, or those of us Frank asks to believe that the contributions don’t figure in his votes and those of the rest of the House Democratic Party for whom he plays Santa Claus?

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by Colin Marshall

Quoth Abbas Kiarostami,

I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. Those are the things I don't like in the movies. I think a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to the seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kind of films I like.

Both the filmmaker's followers and detractors would agree that, yes, this little speech does indeed encapsulate his cinematic sensibility. The pro-Kiarostami crowd gets hooked by the characters and images that keep them up at night and distracted in the morning, while those on the anti-Kiarostami side of the fence… well, they fall asleep. No living director seems quite so critically divisive: some eminent observers of cinema as sharp as Roger Ebert have expressed nothing more than bored irritation at his pictures, while others, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, have gone so far as to author tomes on the man and include no fewer than four of his films on their all-time top 100.

I submit that it all depends on how you, the viewer, want to experience cinema. While it's entirely valid to ask that a movie grab you and yank you for a couple hours into a spectacle, an utterly fantastical escape from life couldn't be more different from what Kiarostami's selling. Per the quote above, he doesn't demand the audience's attention. If the audience gives it, excellent; he'll serve up the substance. But it makes no nevermind to him if they look away for a while. You experience a Kiarostami film, you see what you can see and you hear what you can hear, but only later does it grow within your mind into an entity that will affect you for years to come. Compare this to, say, a Hollywood disaster blockbuster, the sort so terrified you'll stop watching that its every detail looms several stories tall, whose events seem dreadfully important at the time but which washes clean from your memory immediately after viewing.

That model assumes an impenetrable bulkhead between cinema and life. You buy your ticket in order to reside temporarily in a totally foreign artificial space, ostensibly jammed with more motion, more color, more thrills and much more CGI than the real one to which you'll shortly shamble back. In Kiarostami's model, cinema is inseparable from life: one is the other, the other is one, and each draws heavily from its counterpart. Nowhere in the man's filmography does this worldview shine through more brightly than in Close-Up, a cinematic imitation of real events in which a real man's love of cinema leads to a bit of real-life fakery and fiction that's ultimately reconstructed with the aid of reality itself. If you find that too straightforward, wait until you read the next few paragraphs.

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Left: Sophie Calle, Etoile dancer at the Opera de Paris, Marie Agnes Gillot, (detail) Take Care of Yourself, 2007.

Image copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris/Miami; Arndt & Partner. Berlin/Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY

Right: John Baldessari, Pure Beauty 1966-68, acrylic on canvas, 1152.5 x 1152.5 x 34.9 mm.

Image copyright John Baldessari, Courtesy of Baldessari Studio and Glenstone

Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel until 3^rd January 2010

John Baldessari at Tate Modern until 10^th January 2010

Sue Hubbard

What do you do when your lover jilts you by email? Take to your bed and forget to wash, wander around in your pyjamas, cut up his suits or send him a poison pen letter? If you are an artist there is another option. You can shame him by turning his self-justifying text into a large scale conceptual art work using over 100 different women as allies. That is just what the French artist Sophie Calle does in her work Prenez Soin De Vous (Take Care of Yourself) where she has invited lawyers, actors, accountants, singers and psychologists to comment on her lover’s text though the lens of their professional vocabulary . A composer turns the letter into a musical score; a translator asks why her ex-partner uses the formal vous rather than tu, and what this says about their relationship, whilst a rifle shooter peppers the email with bullet holes.

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by Zaneb Khan Beams

It’s 4:45 PM on Friday. I’m covering a colleague’s phone calls while she’s out of the country, and there’s a newborn boy who needs phototherapy. This means he needs to be in the hospital in what looks like a miniature tanning bed for at least one night and one day. So, I call his parents and tell them the test results- their baby has a dangerously high bilirubin level.

Bilirubin is the by-product of red blood cells recycled through the liver and GI tract. Newborns’ livers are not efficient at recycling red blood cells, and the bilirubin by-products can accumulate in their bloodstream, cross their fragile blood-brain barrier, and cause kernicterus, ( serious permanent brain damage), or, in extreme cases, death. Neonatal Physiologic Hyperbilirubinemia represents a “bread and butter” pediatrics challenge. High bilirubin levels are easily and cheaply treated with UV light rays.

These parents knew their baby might have high bilirubin. Still, when I tell the baby’s mother he has to go to the hospital, she bursts into tears. I ask her why, and she describes a two year saga of problems with her health insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield. Both parents in this family work in respectable jobs and receive health insurance “through their employer.” In other words, their employer negotiates a bulk rate for health insurance plans, and employees can buy insurance in bulk. Payment for the insurance comes out of their paychecks, and neither the employer nor the employee ends up paying income tax on dollars spent on health insurance. BCBS earns profits of about 30%. Win/ Win situation, right? Wrong. Blue Cross Blue Shield will pay for the medical care in the hospital, but not for being in the hospital. Room and board, at $600/ day, are not considered part of the baby’s treatment, and therefore not reimbursed.

Meanwhile, it’s almost close-of-business on a Friday, and I realize I need to get this baby home phototherapy equipment.

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Justin E. H. Smith

I.

In his Tristes Tropiques, composed in 1955, Claude Lévi-Strauss writes with characteristic humor of his decision, some years earlier, to study philosophy:

When I reached the top or 'philosophy' class in the lycée, I was vaguely in favour of a rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being 'advanced'… After years of training, I now find myself intimately convinced of a few unsophisticated beliefs, not very different from those I held at the age of fifteen. Perhaps I see more clarly the inadequacy of these intellectual tools; at least they have an instrumental value which makes them suitable for the service I require of them.

Later, in a 1972 interview, he confesses that his decision to study philosophy was motivated by a sense that this discipline, more than any other, would enable him to remain non-committal, to continue to develop all his other interests, under the big-tent of a vaguely defined cluster of intellectual projects called 'philosophy'. This understanding of philosophy, I think, remains significant for our assessment of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual legacy.

For better or worse, while his approach may have made sense in the Paris of the 1920s, as I can personally attest it certainly would not in the New York or California of the 1990s (when I was a student of philosophy). Here, a different conception of philosophy and its boundaries reigned, and still reigns. As Jason Stanley recently reflected at the Leiter Report blog:

Many academics use the term 'philosopher' not as a description of the people working on the set of problems that occupy our time, but rather as a certain kind of honorific. As far as I can tell, on this usage, a philosopher is someone who constructs some kind of admirable general theory about a discipline – be it cultural criticism, history, literature, or politics. So while it would be odd for a philosopher to call themselves a literary critic because they work on interpretation, it is not unusual for English professors to describe themselves as philosophers. In contrast, we philosophers do not regard the term 'philosopher' as an honorific. We tend to think that there are many people who are really truly philosophers, but are pretty bad at what they do. We also think that there are many brilliant thinkers who are not philosophers.

Stanley argues in another post that his own philosophical tradition may be distinguished from a rival tradition, represented by Walter Benjamin, that might better be called 'anthropology' than 'philosophy':

Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

Stanley makes two claims in these passages that interest me: first, that not just any abstract or broad-focused thinker may appropriately be called a 'philosopher', and, second, that much of the thinking that is called by some people 'philosophy', might better be called 'anthropology' to the extent that it is principally interested in questions of culture rather than, I take it, in transcultural features of the human mind and its connections to the world.

While I certainly know Stanley is a first-rate philosopher, I do not at all share his conception of what philosophy itself is. If anything, my own understanding of the meaning of 'philosophy' is the one at work not in the United States today, nor in France in the 1920s, but rather in the title of the distinguished journal of the Royal Society of London, the Philosophical Transactions, which, since 1666, has been featuring articles on everything from the reproductive organs of eels, to the smelting of metals, to the causes of comets, to the nature of the passions, to the existence of God. It seems to me that if Stanley wants to make the case for a narrower conception of philosophy, he needs not only to argue against the misguided deployment of the word that we've certainly all heard at dinner parties, but also to explain why the very most recent self-description of a certain academic discipline in a certain part of the world should be permitted to cancel out so much accrued meaning in a word that has migrated and mutated across so many centuries, languages, and continents.

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by Gerald Dworkin

Hemingway was thought to have written the finest, very short, story. It was a classified advertisement whose text was “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” I have always been attracted to very miniature versions of linguistic expression. It is interesting to seek the minimum number of words for various categories. So, for example, I have never found a better, shorter sentence that Ring Lardner, Jr’s “Shut up, he explained.” For five words, I have Woody Allen’s “ I am two with Nature.” but once one has that many words available there must be many others. Best short Seder text: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”

For many years I have been collecting aphorisms, jokes, witty remarks, etc. for a someday-to-be published Common-Place Book. It is divided into two sections.; one on general Philosophy and the other on Morality. I do not restrict myself just to short passages. But I do tend to favor brief encounters. Ideally the upper limit would be something like Nietzsche’s limit on aphorisms. “ It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book.” One of his best “All truth is simple…is that not doubly a lie?” comes in at ten words.

So today I present a sampling, a taste, a nibbling of very short takes on Philosophy. If there is sufficient interest I will follow up with material from the Morality section. Where I know the source I give it. Where I do not I welcome information as to the original. I divide them, roughly, into categories although they are obvious enough that they could be omitted.

Definitions of Philosophy

You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living.

Sydney Morgenbesser

The ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers.

David Hills

[Philosophy is] an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.

W. Sellars

Philosophy is the cure for which there is no adequate disease.

Jerry Fodor

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