Jaun Roberto Diago. Sin título (Untitled), 2011.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of this writing, 315,023 people worldwide have died from Covid-19. One of those 315,023 was the incomparable John H. Conway.

At the age of 82 and with health issues, Conway was well within what the CDC euphemistically describes as “people who are at higher risk”. It was perhaps not unexpected that someday soon he would no longer be with us, but it was a shock to the mathematical world, nonetheless. Conway’s mathematical powers, irreverent style, and forceful personality made him a well-known and seemingly permanent feature of the mathematical community for more than sixty years.

When I was a graduate student twenty or so years ago, John Conway came to my university to give a series of lectures. Like many math departments, we had an endowed fund to bring in eminent visitors who were well regarded as both researchers and speakers. In our case, the standard format was for two talks: one for undergraduates and one for the faculty. In truth, this more often ended up being one for graduate students and faculty, and one for specialists. Not surprisingly, many mathematicians aren’t the greatest at making their talks accessible.

As the OG mathemagician, Conway had no trouble being accessible, interesting, and entertaining. That said, I must confess that I have only the dimmest recollection of the talks themselves. But I do remember the talks for a quintessentially Conway reason.

At the time the department had an honorary T-shirt which was given to speakers as part of the introductory activities. Nearly every speaker made the same joke. Without fail they would chuckle and ask if they were to put the T-shirt on immediately. We would politely laugh as if we hadn’t heard the same joke told by the previous week’s speaker.

Conway being Conway, he skipped right to the punchline and beyond. Conway stripped off his shirt, strode barechested across the stage in front the entire math department, pulled the T-shirt on, and dove straight into the beginning of his first lecture. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

Stuck inside? Unable to travel? Have you considered traveling through time instead of space? Time travel is impossible, you say? Wrong. We are, each and every one of us, time travelers, traveling forward second by second, hour by hour, day by day into the future.

Why not consider traveling in the other direction? If you are afraid of traveling to the past because you fear paradoxes – killing your own grandfather, stepping on a butterfly while fleeing from a dinosaur, etc. – I have great news for you. My new theory of time travel will allow you to travel into the past without creating any paradoxes – guaranteed! (Time machine not included.)

Let’s not go straight to the big payoff. Let’s work our way up to it. Hannibal Buress has pointed out that when people go through something rough in life, they sometimes say, “I’m taking it one day at a time.” Hannibal says, “Yeah. So is everybody. That’s not a philosophy. That’s how time works. If there’s a way to go faster, let me know?”

I am here to help. You can move through time more quickly than your friends and family (that is, travel to the future faster than they do). Here’s how. Either go very fast or stand close to something really massive.

You might say, Tim, I know that it follows from Einstein’s general theory of relativity that there is no universal “now”, that simultaneity is an illusion, and that we all travel through time at different rates depending on our speed and proximity to extremely massive objects, but do you have any empirical evidence that this actually, really happens in the real world?

I’m glad you asked. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Something has happened in the last forty days. The planet has gone quiet, a vast, reverberating, gesticulating global chorus suddenly muted by something wee and invisible which is borne across continents, streets and rooms by friends and strangers. Mass extinction, once the whispered woe of a distant future, suddenly sounds louder and doable in the here and now. The world is compelled to gaze at its own mortality.

When the coronavirus forced us to retreat from daily life, the blanket of silence that fell was like the muffled air after a fresh snowfall—eerie, familiar, cozy even, and not entirely unwelcome. We are not the only beneficiaries of the newfound hush. Birds who have had to compete with our noise to sing to mates are suddenly alone on stage, ready for their seldom solos.

As a species, we are a noisy bunch, our decibels swelling with our need to grab attention where only the most aggressive bring home the prizes. We attach ourselves to machines that make even more noise than we do—cars, buses, trucks, trains, airplanes, bulldozers, amplifiers. And we fill the spaces in between with idle chatter, raised voices, music turned up high, leaf blowers, and hair dryers. Most are idle now, even cries behind closed doors are muffled. The soundtracks of our lives have moved into the adagio phase—softer, interim, slower. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The month of Ramadan is at once a time of respite from the external— when one’s focus shifts from worldly affairs to the spiritual— and a time to deepen one’s sense of compassion and fellow-feeling via the rigors of daily fasting, prayer, reflection and generous giving. It is a time to break free from day to day concerns and to pay attention to one’s lifelong inner journey, whether it is through revitalizing the connection with the Divine or investing in human relations: personal, communal, and global.

In the face of unprecedented grief, anxiety and uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, this Ramadan has been a rare opportunity for reflection. Where social distancing has taken away the comfort of breaking the fast in communal settings and sharing the challenge and peace of the sacred season with family and friends, it has shown a hitherto unknown way to experience this sacred time.

On a typical Ramadan day, I would wake up to make the pre-dawn meal, and get the family ready for the usual morning routine— school and work, balancing the day between Ramadan demands and the family’s routine demands such as work deadlines, tests, after-school activities and work-related social commitments that required us to participate in a state of fasting, feeling exhausted and isolated. Being able to share with others, often only on weekends, the singular sense of contentment that comes from Ramadan-fasting always makes the challenges feel worthwhile.

This Ramadan, we are cut off from loved ones and friends; we cannot invite anyone or visit the mosque for special prayers and have festive Iftar meals together. While the daylong hunger and thirst of every Ramadan is a bodily reminder of those among us who struggle with basic needs, this year I’m also reminded of those who live under lockdowns imposed by military occupations. The idea of a lockdown suddenly feels much more immediate, more oppressive. How does one bear curfews that go on for months and months— the uncertainty, the impossibility of accessing ordinary necessities such as food and medicine, of gathering for prayers, weddings and funerals? Read more »

Flowering trees in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in April of 2020.

by Michael Klenk

The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated talk of the systemic- or societal relevance of institutions and professions. Quickly, attributions of systemic relevance have become a matter of distribution of resources. In Germany, for example, a union recently demanded extra financial support for systematically relevant professions. Whether your profession is deemed systemically relevant may thus be of material consequences for you, and eventually for the constitution of our societies.

But in my previous post, I raised a question about the societal relevance of academic philosophy. Academic philosophers do not predict the virus’s spread like epidemiologists. They don’t take care of patients in hospitals like nurses, and they do not stack the much-desired toilet paper into supermarket shelves. What, then, is their societal relevance?

As we will see, there is little hope for providing an a priori argument for the societal relevance of academic philosophy. But, in an interesting twist, the way of thinking that leads to that conclusion is paved by philosophy. At the end of this post, I’ll briefly consider what this means for questions about societal relevance in general and how it reflects back on the value of philosophy. Read more »

by Cynthia Haven

What is worse – coronavirus itself, or the social and economic catastrophe that comes with it?

René Girard, one of the leading thinkers of our era, argued that the biological and social aspects of a plague are interwoven: he points out that historians still debate whether the Black Death was a cause or a consequence of the social upheavals in the 14^th century.

The Stanford professor, who died in 2015 at age 91, has been called “the new Darwin of the human sciences,” but he began as a literary theorist. His work, beginning in the 1960s, offered a new concept of human desire: our desires are not our own, he said, but are “mimetic.” As social creatures, we learn what to want from each other. Imitation leads to competition, which leads to conflict, which then spreads contagiously throughout a community. Eventually, the community targets one person or group to blame for the disorder, someone like Oedipus. The targeted scapegoats are punished, expelled, or in the past, often killed. Girard began in literature, but quickly took on anthropology, sociology, religions, and more. And while he initially wrote mostly about myths in archaic societies, he eventually became an observer of contemporary culture, focusing on rivalry, violence, and warfare today.

Towards the end of his life, he wrote about the social ramifications of natural disasters, and plagues are no exception. Certainly our desires and hostilities have proven as contagious as COVID-19, which has in many ways fueled and exacerbated them, and variously targeting presidents, governments, protestors, and the Chinese for blame.

In 2005, Girard met with Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age; Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, and The Dominion of the Dead, for a two-part interview on Harrison’s celebrated “Entitled Opinions” radio and podcast series, available on iTunes.

The full transcript is among the interviews included in the Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy, edited by Cynthia L. Haven, published this month by Bloomsbury. Read more »