March Madness: The Overrated Philosophers Bracket

Eugene Wolters posted at Critical Theory. (via Josiah Neeley Facebook)

Digging Up a New Past

Carnes Lord with a review essay on alternative theories of pre-history

"and the two major limitations of this literature. The first is, indeed, amateurism. Though many of these authors have done an impressive amount of homework, and often manage to master a much wider range of materials than the average academic archeologist, they tend to lack method and discipline, and they can be cloying in providing ambient color and the personal element. The second is their tendency to drift off into the fever swamps, from global conspiracy theory to New Age fascinations of various kinds to Dan Brown-style excursions into Freemasonry. This is too bad, because I'm pretty sure they are onto something."

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Essay by John P. A. Ioannidis at PLOS Medicine (via The Economist)

Astronomers discover echoes from expansion after Big Bang

Irene Klotz and Sharon Begley reported at Reuters on the detection of evidence of gravitational waves.

"Gravitational waves are feeble, primordial undulations that propagate across the cosmos at the speed of light. Astronomers have sought them for decades because they are the missing evidence for two theories.

"One is Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, which launched the modern era of research into the origins and evolution of the cosmos. The general theory explains gravity as the deformation of space by massive bodies. Einstein posited that space is like a flimsy blanket, with embedded stars and planets causing it to curve rather than remain flat.

"Those curvatures of space are not stationary, Einstein said. Instead, the gravitational waves propagate like water in a lake or seismic waves in Earth's crust.

"The other theory that predicted gravitational waves is called cosmic inflation. Developed in the 1980s, it posited that in less time than the blink of an eye after the Big Bang, the infant cosmos expanded exponentially, inflating in size by 100 trillion trillion times."

'Renewing the West by Renewing Common Sense' July 17–20, 2014, Huntington, New York

Telos Press posts on

"an international congress to discuss the revolutionary proposal 'Renewing the West by Renewing Common Sense'"

The Center for the Study of the Great Ideas is among the co-sponsoring organizations.

Location: Seminary of the Immaculate Conception, 440 West Neck Road, Huntington, Long Island, NY 11743

Dates: Thursday afternoon July 17, 2014, to Sunday morning July 20, 2014

The post provides details on topics, registration, schedule, lodging, and costs.

Stop Defending the Humanities

Simon During reviews The Humanities and Public Life (2014), edited by Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett, at Public Books.

"Of course, those of us in the humanities who love and breathe them, whose institutional (but not just institutional) lives are formed in relation to them, who would like more people to join them and so become more like us, to think and feel and talk like us, who may even find the 'meaning of life' articulated from within them, find the prospect of their fading insupportable, heartrending, unimaginable. But that offers no substantive public reason to maintain them, just as it turned out in the end to be no reason to maintain all the more or less similar worlds that have disappeared over the centuries, before and after modernity: the worlds of the aristocratic honor code; the world of older humanisms and the 'republic of letters'; the worlds of industrial working-class solidarity; the world of Scholasticism and the trivium; the worlds of old Anglican rural, parochial, and liturgical life, and so on."

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

How to Permit Your Mammoth: Some Legal Implications of "De-Extinction"

This article by Dr. Norman Carlin, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; Ilan Wurman, J.D., Stanford Law School; and Tamara Zakim, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; was published in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, January 2014.

"... For the most part, we assume that if de-extinction can feasibly be accomplished, someone will undertake the effort if for no other reason than because it would be irresistibly thrilling to do so. Jurassic Park itself may be unattainable, but a somewhat more plausible Pleistocene Park, populated with mammoths and aurochs, would generate nearly as much popular excitement. Other motivations for pursuing de-extinction might include the reintroduction of 'keystone' species for purposes of reviving whole ecosystems, with substantial environmental benefits.

Therefore, this Article explores the implications of de-extinction under existing law. ..."

(via Nathaniel Rich in The New York Times)

What’s gone wrong with democracy

An essay at The Economist

"Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it?"

Beyond Naturalism: On Ronald Dworkin

Michael Rosen at The Nation reviews Religion Without God, by Ronald Dworkin.

"... I am at one with Dworkin in thinking that even a fully secular individual should contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder but with reverence and gratitude. Still, behind me I hear a voice—a Nietzschean one, perhaps—that tells me that what Dworkin and I are looking at is no more than a penumbra, the few rays that remain in the sky after the sun of revealed religion has set. If that is so, then the coming night may be dark indeed."

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Professor of freedom

Jason Kelly writes in the University of Chicago Magazine on Earl Shorris, who "established a free humanities course to help impoverished adults escape the 'surround of force' that restricts their lives," The Clemente Course in the Humanities.

Only human

Jason Kelly interviews Russell Tuttle, author of Apes and Human Evolution, in the latest issue of the University of Chicago Magazine.

"In his book, as he has throughout his career, Tuttle extracts data from fragmentary remnants in the fossil record and competing scientific interpretations to address a big question: 'What makes us human?' ...

"Figure 13.4, titled 'In Conclusion,' shows a bonobo on the left and a human on the right. A bubble above the bonobo reads, 'We feel, fear, and think.' Above the person: 'We feel, fear, think, and believe.'

"'That’s the whole conclusion of the book,' says Tuttle, who rejects a commonly held notion in evolutionary biology that equates humans and apes. The symbolic language unique to Homo sapiens, he writes, makes it possible 'to convey information and to share ideas and beliefs'—the basis of human culture. Morality and ideology emerge from that cultural framework, shaping political, spiritual, moral, and social notions, which make up the belief systems that define human life. By contrast, Tuttle adds, 'no one has shown that chimpanzees in nature have pervasive shared symbolically mediated ideas, beliefs, and values.'"

Seven out of eight college grads in the U.S. read a book last year

The above is among the statistics in A Snapshot of Reading in America in 2013, from a report by Pew Research Center.

The Scale of the Universe

An interactive demonstration, by Cary Huang, at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Common sense and the precautionary principle

Adam Korbitz argues,

"[Cass] Sunstein has pointed out that 'better safe than sorry' is more or less common sense.

"The problem comes when we have no reliable data or evidence to support our choices (as in the Active SETI controversy), or when we act contrary to the data we do have because of fallacies or ingrained psychological prejudices. For instance, scientists years ago developed a form of GMO rice called Golden Rice that could effectively wipe out Vitamin A deficiency in much of the developing world, potentially saving millions of lives every year and saving millions more people from childhood blindness.

"Yet today, Golden Rice – like many GMO foods – is effectively banned because of the political lobbying of anti-GMO organizations. It has nothing to do with the safety of the food. There’s no evidence it is not safe. In this way, the anti-GMO movement is very similar to the anti-vaccine movement, and similarly anti-science."

Augustine's World

Robert D. Kaplan at Foreign Policy on What Late Antiquity says about the 21st century and the Syrian crisis.

A Cockeyed Optimist

David Leonhard reviews The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, by Angus Deaton, at The New York Times.

"Deaton, a respected professor of economics at Princeton, does not stint on describing the world’s problems, be they income inequality in rich countries, health problems in China and the United States or H.I.V. in Africa. Large sections of the book revolve around such troubles and potential solutions. Yet Deaton’s central message is deeply positive, almost gloriously so. By the most meaningful measures — how long we live, how healthy and happy we are, how much we know — life has never been better. Just as important, it is continuing to improve."

The Philosophy of Death

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set.

"One hundred years ago, in 1913, Miguel de Unamuno published a book called The Tragic Sense of Life. It was considered — in his time — to be a masterpiece, an influential work of early existentialist philosophy. But The Tragic Sense of Life is more (or you might say less) than a work of philosophy. It is a deeply personal account of one man’s anguish in the night."

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Trouble at the lab

At The Economist, a briefing asserts "Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not".

Plato’s Apology: In Defense of Virtue in the Face of Death

From the Institute of Catholic Culture, Prof. John Cuddeback's presentation on "Plato’s Apology: In Defense of Virtue in the Face of Death", November 17, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. EST, and again at the same time on November 24, 2013.

Get Happy!!

Jackson Lears, at The Nation, reviews several recent books on how to achieve happiness.

"The worldview of the happiness manuals, like that in other self-help literature, epitomizes 'the triumph of the therapeutic' described some decades ago by the sociologist Philip Rieff: the creation of a world where all overarching structures of meaning have collapsed, and there is 'nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.'"

A Man of Ideas: The Legacy of Mortimer Adler

Andrew Svenning at The Catholic World Report.

"More than a decade after his death, Dr. Adler’s work of bringing philosophy to everyone continues. Max Weismann discusses the mission of the 'Philosopher at Large' and his own work at the Center for the Study of the Great Ideas."

#MortimerAdler #philosophy

Resolved: Natural Law Should Inform Constitutional Law

Fifth Annual Rosenkranz Debate, at the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention—2012:

The Natural Law Challenge, by Hadley Arkes

Natural Law Jurisprudence: A Skeptical Perspective, by Alex Kozinski

in The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, Volume 36, Number 3 – Summer 2013

Un Cammino Attraverso la Commedia

Scott D. Moringiello took a Journey Through the Comedy of Dante, two cantos a day for 50 days, at dotCommonweal.

Just don’t think about it

Benjamin Kunkel reviews Introduction to Antiphilosophy, by Boris Groys, at the London Review of Books.

"for him Stalinism succeeds the avant-garde just as a guest accepts an invitation. Far from betraying the avant-garde, Stalin merely scuttled a transitional movement in order to fulfil on the grandest scale that movement’s goal of unifying art and politics. Much of the classical avant-garde, Russian and otherwise, had after all demanded, in reaction against the sterile autonomy of l’art pour l’art, ‘that art move from representing to transforming the world’: ‘Under Stalin the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life of a society was organised in monolithic artistic forms.’ These forms, Groys concedes, were ‘of course not those the avant-garde itself had favoured’. Throughout he writes about Stalinist cultural policy with a hair-raising mixture of political neutrality and aesthetic appreciation."

How to Get a Job With a Philosophy Degree

Susan Dominus in the education issue of The New York Times

Dissent of Man

John G. West reviews Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, by Thomas Nagel, and Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution, by Rebecca Stott, at the Claremont Review of Books.

"For all of the discussion and debate provoked by his book, he ultimately offers a rather simple, if profound, objection to Darwinism: 'Evolutionary naturalism provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability, and in doing so undermines itself.' In other words, if our mind and morals are simply the accidental products of a blind material process like natural selection acting on random genetic mistakes, what confidence can we have in them as routes to truth?

This objection is not new. Indeed, it reaches back to Charles Darwin himself. Darwin published a lengthy tome, The Descent of Man, purporting to prove that his theory of unguided evolution could explain basically everything, including man's mind and morals. Yet in his private writings, he expressed a lingering reservation over the impact of his theory on the trustworthiness of reason. In a letter written in 1881, he disclosed that 'with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?'"

The letter mentioned is to William Graham, July 3, 1881, available at the Darwin Correspondence Project.

A Case for the Quaint: The Great Ideas Program

Robert M. Woods posts at The Imaginative Conservative,

"... I share with you, some parts of a quaint tool that accompanied The Great Ideas Program [when] first published in 1959. Keep in mind that the booklet, The Great Ideas Program Family Participation Plan was published in that same 1959. ..."

Hidden Truths

Steven B. Smith reviews Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West, by Harry V. Jaffa with Thomas L. Pangle, John A. Wettergreen, Robert P. Kraynak, Michael P. Zuckert and Leo Strauss, and The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, by Laurence Lampert, at The New York Times.

Thug Notes

Classical Literature. Original Gangster. By Sparky Sweets, PhD. Viewer discretion is advised. (via Beboti)

Bright Spots in the Bubble: The Case of St. John’s College

Roger Kimball posts after a campus visit.

... "What sets St. John’s apart is not only the curriculum but the pedagogy. ... The St. John’s approach is deeply Socratic, which means, in part, that questions, not answers, have priority.

"That, as anyone familiar with education-speak knows, is just the sort of thing that college PR departments specialize in saying. Next to the promise that they teach 'critical thinking' (what Jacques Barzun more accurately described as 'directionless quibble'), talk about favoring questions over answers is something educationists love to broadcast.

But at St. John’s it actually works, chiefly, I suspect, because what goes on in the classroom is firmly anchored to the work before the class. ..."