And the thing is is that this isn't Google. This isn't information. These aren't financial stats; this is culture. And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know, what would it look like?
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair....
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
In common with so many other émigrés, Gellner served in the war (in his case in a Czechoslovak armored unit), and he was grateful to Britain for defeating Nazism and offering him a home after the end of hostilities. Unlike many such émigrés, however, he showed no interest in acquiring the outward trappings of social success and acceptance. Instead, as Mr. Hall shows, Gellner made his watchword "cold intellectual honesty." This was matched by a strong dose of warm and passionate courage.
Gellner was by training and profession an anthropologist. He began his career by conducting fieldwork among the Berbers of Morocco, sometimes accompanied by his intrepid wife, Susan. But Gellner was really a classic polymath whose interests ranged across several disciplines at a time when it was still (just) possible to feel a mastery of more than one field of study. Gellner launched forays into philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis and history.
The fields might have been diverse, but the method of inquiry was similar in each case: analytical rigor combined with a strict commitment to reason. Those who knew Gellner recall that this commitment could result in truly nerve-racking conversations, in which they found themselves under relentless interrogation as Gellner tried to get to the heart of a problem. There was not much small talk, and there was nowhere to hide as he chipped away at the position of his interlocutor—or, to put it another way, his opponent. As one might imagine, Gellner did not suffer fools gladly. He told the assembled doyens and divas who constituted the celebrated Cambridge History of Political Thought school, for example, that there were simply too many of them.
When he started his writing career, Gellner's targets were mainly on what was perceived to be the right side of the cultural-political spectrum: In particular, Gellner attacked the philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin for their romantic traditionalism...
Gellner was at odds with Oakeshott's belief that only tradition could guarantee civilized rule and Oakeshott's related claim that the imposition of rationality would lead to fanaticism. As for Berlin, Gellner was a critic of his argument for value- pluralism, which Gellner saw as something that could be achieved only at the expense of reason. In Berlin's hands, as Gellner saw it, "the history of ideas," Mr. Hall writes, "became something of a game, in which thinkers were damned as dangerous because anti-pluralist or praised for endorsing the incommensurability of values." Gellner was particularly angered, Mr. Hall says, that "a fellow exile from the disaster zones of Europe" (Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire) could be "so infuriatingly complacent."...
Gellner's most celebrated demolition was of the literary critic Edward Said (1935-2003). When Said accused Gellner of writing about North Africa without having a command of the native language, Gellner was too modest to respond that he was in fact conversant in the language of the Berbers. He did, however, make a strong case that the whole theory of "orientalism"—Said's idea that Western interpretations and depictions of the East were designed not to understand the East but to control it—was based on erroneous assumptions about the political power of literature. The viceroys of India, he pointed out brutally, were not known for eagerly scanning the pages of late-19th-century literary magazines....
"No nation," he once wrote, "is fit to rule itself. . . . [Nations] fight each other, and they oppress their own minorities." For this reason, and others, Gellner was no Zionist; he did not believe that his Jewishness determined his identity. He was prepared to fight for Israel, he quipped, but not to live there...
As Mr. Hall demonstrates, Gellner believed that there really was a clash between "liberty and pluralism," on the one hand, and "authoritarianism and oppressiveness" on the other. In a passionate riposte to Noam Chomsky, who had accused him of ignoring Western crimes, Gellner charged that his critic had "obscured" the fact that "the survival of freedom and accountable, limited government is an enormously important value even when some of its defenders are occasionally tarnished."
He had separate reputations as scholar of Islam, theorist of nationalism, philosopher of history, and historian of ideas. He ended his career in Prague, the city in which he had grown up as a boy, though in his final years he was most interested in developments in Russia. His status as public intellectual rested on this background, that of a multilingual polymath, a modern philosophe. He was sometimes cited as one of the last great thinkers from Central Europe whose Jewish background meant a direct experience of the twentieth century's horrors....
I found him to be an exceptionally attractive human being: witty, extremely kind, modest, and blessed with a genius for creating something of a tribe around himself, cemented by an endless stream of postcards – sent, one felt, to counteract a sense of loneliness.
In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics. He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
First exhibited in 1893 in Berlin, The Scream was the culmination of Munch's magnum opus, a series of paintings called The Frieze of Life. This depicted the course of human existence through burgeoning love and sexual passion to suffering, despair and death, in Munch's highly original, proto-expressionist style.
His titles, from Death in the Sickroom, through Madonna to The Vampire, suggest just how directly and unironically he sought to depict the anxieties of late-19th century Europe.
But against all Munch's images, it is The Scream which stands out as the work which has seared itself into the Western imagination. It remains widely celebrated for capturing the torment of existence in what appeared to many in Munch's time to be a frightening, godless world.
Munch himself endured a childhood beset by illness, madness and bereavement. At 13, he was told by his father that his tuberculosis was fatal. But he survived and went on to become a major figure first in the Norwegian, then the European, avant-garde.
He became involved with two of the great playwrights of the period. He collaborated with his fellow countryman Henrik Ibsen and became a close friend of the tempestuous Swede August Strindberg. He admired the work of Post-Impressionist painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom influenced his art.
Munch's own influence resonated through the 20th century, from German Expressionism to Andy Warhol and beyond. His work, particularly The Scream, remains powerful today.
Time and again, the reader wonders just how much van Gogh and his brother trust each other. In the letter of August 14, 1879, for instance, he complains that Theo has advised him to give up his quest to be an artist. "And, joking apart, I honestly think it would be better if the relationship between us were more trusting on both sides," van Gogh suggests, before apologizing for the possibility that so much of the family sorrow and discord have been caused by him. These look and sound like letters to his brother, but in essence we are reading fund-raising proposals....
So what did van Gogh see as his own strengths and weaknesses? In an early letter to Theo (May 8, 1875), he quotes Renan: "Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest, he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness, and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on." This is a vision he lived. But at what cost? In one of his late letters to his brother (July 2, 1889), van Gogh says that he was "infinitely too harsh . . . in claiming that it was better to love painters than paintings." The reader now has to ask similar questions. Van Gogh becomes less likable and more lovable, more familiar and yet somehow ever stranger. In reading and studying these books, we can at once achieve both ends.
A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss, in studying the mythologies of primitive tribes, transformed the way the 20th century came to understand civilization itself. Tribal mythologies, he argued, display remarkably subtle systems of logic, showing rational mental qualities as sophisticated as those of Western societies.
Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the common aspects of humanity’s attempts to understand the world. He became the premier representative of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations.
His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.
...With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.
But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In his view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools. This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
As she entered the train, she noticed a man standing and reading “History of Philosophy, Volume IX.” That impressed her.
“I infer that people who read philosophy are people who think about life and wonder about it and just don’t take everything at face value,” she said. “I like that in a person.”
After silently willing him to look her way (he did not), she finally gathered the courage to ask him about the book. Mr. Laite, now 48, and she began chatting about whether reading philosophy had actually changed their lives. (She said yes; he was unsure). When he noted that there was a Monty Python ditty, “The Philosophers’ Song,” she sang it aloud.
Soon her stop came, and she suddenly faced a problem: should she stay and chat, or exit the train? She chose the latter, but just as the doors snapped shut she called out her e-mail address and said, “If you have any more book recommendations, let me know.” ...
Still, he Googled her that night and found a photograph of her holding one of her birds (she lives with four parrots and two dogs in her one-bedroom apartment). “I wanted to continue the conversation,” he said, and e-mailed her the names of his favorite books, including “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis and “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki...
The depth of their feelings tickled each of them, because on the surface they are opposites. Mr. Laite lives his life largely in books and movies and has a “spartan routine that would put a Samurai to shame,” said Ms. Feldman, whose apartment is the color of Pepto-Bismol, with a pink chandelier shaped like a giant octopus, expensive art commingled with paint-by-numbers paintings and a vast array of vintage memorabilia....
They were married March 29 at Providence, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, which was decorated with all sorts of kitschy memorabilia, most of it culled from the bride’s private collection. The wedding had a “party like it’s 1929” theme, Ms. Feldman said. “A soulful era of contrasts: innocence and sin, optimism and cynicism, soft hearts and hard times.” The approximately 90 guests, were encouraged to dress in period costume and they posed for mug shots. Then, a 1930’s-style fedora perched on his head, Mr. Laite stood with his bride before Jen Laskey, a Universal Life minister, and recited his vows in gangster-ese: “You make me smile with my heart.”
Commenting on the bride — her tattoos winking out from her vintage-style wedding gown, her hair piled high like Lucille Ball — Lisa Beebe, a colleague of Ms. Feldman’s, said, “She has a look that’s very brash, but she’s the sweetest, gentlest person.”
“I see beyond the nerd in him, he sees beneath the gaudy in me,” the bride said. “For the first time in my life, Jeff makes me feel fully seen, fully accepted, fully loved.”
Among Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart.
Yet even while probing and sifting, Dyson is always whimsically gazing into the beyond. As a boy he sketched plans for English rocket ships that could explore the stars, and then, in midlife, he helped design an American spacecraft to be powered by exploding atomic bombs — a secret Air Force project known as Orion. Dyson remains an armchair astronaut who speculates with glee about the coming of cheap space travel, when families can leave an overcrowded earth to homestead on asteroids and comets, swooping around the universe via solar sail craft. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Bio-tech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children, along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.
These ideas attract derision similar to Dyson’s essays on climate change, but he is an undeterred octogenarian futurist. “I don’t think of myself predicting things,” he says. “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.” Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination’s ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. “You point Freeman at a problem and he’ll solve it,” Goldberger says. “He’s extraordinarily powerful.” Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate. Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
Despite commissioning the Sistine Chapel, Pope Julius II is better known as a warrior than a scholar. But when he did put down the sword and pick up a book, he would have done so under a magnificent if slightly unexpected fresco. It is called The School of Athens, it was painted by Raphael in 1509 and it sits in a room in the Vatican that housed Julius’ private library.
The School of Athens depicts an imaginary scene in which all the philosophers of antiquity are gathered together. At their centre stand Plato and Aristotle, deep in discussion. Plato is pointing at the sky and Aristotle at the ground.
In that pairing of gestures, Raphael captured something essential about the philosophies of these two men, but he also revealed much about his own time. That such a pagan pair could be found beside a Pope in private tells of the complexity of intellectual life at the time when classical learning was reborn in what we now call the Renaissance.
I shall argue that sometimes it is morally permissible not to be sorry when bad things happen. It is even permissible to be happy about it. But how CAN morality say this? ["On Not Being Sorry About the Morally Bad", p.59]
10 Moral Paradoxes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Fortunate Misfortune
2. The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement
3. Two Paradoxes About Justice and the Severity of Punishment
4. Blackmail: The Solution
5. The Paradox of Nonpunishment
6. On Not Being Sorry About the Morally Bad
7. Choice-Egalitarianism and the Paradox of the Baseline
8. Morality and Moral Worth
9. The Paradox of Moral Complaint
10. Preferring Not To Have Been Born
11. A Meta-Paradox: Are Paradoxes Bad?
12. Reflections On Moral Paradox
Postscript: The Future and Moral Paradox
A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents.
'If in fact you just simply want to make a lot of money,.. would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about the economy or would you rather have a mind that is brilliant about understanding human psychology'
One of the beauties of “Encounters at the End of the World” is that all the furry and floating animals are no more wondrous than the bipeds tramping through and around McMurdo: the linguist turned philosopher, the banker turned bus driver and the female adventurer who, for drama and odd entertainment, likes to have herself zipped up in a carryall bag. (She’s her own baggage.) Mr. Herzog opens his mind, heart and eyes to all these wayfarers who — despite the persistent strain of melancholy that touches each and every person who appears on camera — seem eerily at peace at the bottom of the world. One reason may be that, like Mr. Herzog, more than a few evince a deep-felt pessimism about both the present and the future.
If this were a nature documentary like any other, the casual talk about global warming and other calamities might cast shadows across this bright expanse. But there’s something about Mr. Herzog — including the accidental if now well-practiced comedy that colors even his most dramatic pronouncements — that inevitably keeps his pictures from growing too dark. One reason is beauty, which in his hands has a way of keeping the worst at bay; it is, after all, hard to fully despair in the face of so much of the natural world’s splendors. Another reason, I think, has to do with Mr. Herzog’s seemingly unshakable faith in human beings, who for all their misdeeds at times reach a state of exaltedness. They soar — just like that jellyfish.
