'In Defence of Honour'

Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, interviewed by Julian Baggini at TPM Online.

#Honor

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz reviews Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa, at the London Review of Books.

"In an 1841 essay endorsing the 'pacification' of Algeria, Tocqueville wrote: 'Men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women and children … These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people that wants to wage war on the Arabs is obliged to submit.' Fanon, who believed that what had been removed by force should be taken back by force, did little more than turn Tocqueville on his head."

#Revolution

'Plato for plumbers'

Mark Bessoudo's "Writers' Award XI 'technology'" winning essay at New Philosopher.

"Like other engineering students in Canada who are close to graduating from university, I participated in a ceremony called The Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer, a peculiar and somewhat secretive tradition (developed by the British writer Rudyard Kipling, no less) which culminates with each student receiving an iron ring.

"Legend has it that each ring is made from the iron of a bridge that collapsed (twice) into Quebec’s St. Lawrence River in the early 20th century. The disasters were blamed on a combination of negligence, structural deficiencies, and faulty calculations. In all, almost 90 people were killed.

"The ring is therefore meant to be worn as a reminder of our professional commitment to public safety and to maintaining the highest standards of ethics."

P.S. See "Quebec Bridge" at Wikipedia.

#Good

Cargo Cult Science

Some remarks on science, pseudoscience, and learning how to not fool yourself, by Richard P. Feynman, 1974 commencement address at Caltech.

#Science

After the Great Flood of Florence

'Letter from Florence' by Marco Grassi, On the wreckage and recovery of art works in the Arno River flood of 1966, at The New Criterion.

#Art

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics

Steven Weinberg at The New York Review of Books.

"The introduction of probability into the principles of physics was disturbing to past physicists, but the trouble with quantum mechanics is not that it involves probabilities. We can live with that. The trouble is that in quantum mechanics the way that wave functions change with time is governed by an equation, the Schrödinger equation, that does not involve probabilities. It is just as deterministic as Newton’s equations of motion and gravitation. That is, given the wave function at any moment, the Schrödinger equation will tell you precisely what the wave function will be at any future time. There is not even the possibility of chaos, the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that is possible in Newtonian mechanics. So if we regard the whole process of measurement as being governed by the equations of quantum mechanics, and these equations are perfectly deterministic, how do probabilities get into quantum mechanics?"

#Physics

Voice of Civilization

Essay by Algis Valiunas on Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at The Claremont Review of books.

"What then is Gibbon’s ideal of civilized humanity? In 'the love of pleasure and the love of action' one finds the animating passions of 'the most virtuous and liberal dispositions.' 'The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised, would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.' For Gibbon intellectual pleasure enjoys pride of place in humanity perfected. 'The acquisition of knowledge, the exercise of our reason or fancy, and the cheerful flow of unguarded conversation, may employ the leisure of a liberal mind.' And these noblest pleasures were naturally condemned by the unnatural 'severity of the fathers, who despised all knowledge that was not useful to salvation, and who considered all levity of discourse as a criminal abuse of the gift of speech.'"

#History

Sartre's Muse

Corey Mohler at Existential Comics, with Jean Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

#Liberty #Will

The Rules of the Game: A New Electoral System

Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen at The New York Review of Books.

"Are there election methods that always (i.e., for all rankings that voters might conceivably have) give us a clear-cut winner, respect everyone’s vote, and avoid vote-splitting (or equivalent conditions)? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Some sixty-five years ago, the economist Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that no electoral method can satisfy all three requirements (although there are many rules that satisfy two out of three—for example, plurality rule respects everyone’s vote and produces a winner, but often leads to vote-splitting). [footnote omitted] The natural follow-up question is whether there is an election method that satisfies these requirements more often (i.e., for a wider class of voters’ rankings) than any other. Here, fortunately, there is a clear answer: the solution is the classic method of majority rule, strongly advocated by the Marquis de Condorcet, the great eighteenth-century political thinker.

"Instead of limiting a voter to choosing a single candidate, Condorcet proposed that voters should have the option of ranking candidates on the ballot from best to worst. The winner is the candidate who, according to the rankings, would beat each opponent in a head-to-head contest."

#Democracy