Philosophical notes…
Rowan Williams on Contemplation
“… contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome - http://bit.ly/Q3kErr
Banning Panhandling
“‘Our sense is that cities are responding to the increasing number of chronically or visibly homeless people due to the economic crisis,’ said Heather Maria Johnson, a civil rights lawyer for the group. ‘Rather than addressing the issue of homelessness, they are adapting measures that move homeless people out of downtowns, tourist areas or even out of a city.’”
Reinventing the Book
“‘I’m finding my literary skills incredibly valuable in software development, which is not something I would have expected. ... My ability to very precisely verbally describe how a reader engages a text, what a reader needs, turns out to be a huge asset in software development.’”
"Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book," The Atlantic, http://bit.ly/SKMSNj
IOT on the Ontological Argument
“In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy.”
Melvyn Bragg discusses the Ontological Argument on the BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time, http://bbc.in/STH9Q1
The Writing Revolution
“For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.”
A Portrait of Kermit Oliver
A thoughtful biographical essay on the artist designer for Hermès, a recluse who works the nightshift as a postman. Tremendous talent tinged with terrible tragedy.
“‘What was the purpose of everything that’s happened?’ Kermit said, his voice rising. ‘Some ancient writings feel that the God of this world is not the God that created it.’ He closed his eyes and paused. ‘Let me put it this way: Do you think God created tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis and everything as a punishment for people? Or is that just coincidence?’ Kermit stopped, suddenly reticent. He sat still, but his long and weathered hands twisted and turned in his lap. He wrung them out like a dishrag. ‘Life is chaos,’ he said. He looked out the window. ‘Some of us survive it. Some of us don’t.’ ”
Structuralism's Samson
“The ghosts of ideas and people move in and out of time and mind, liable to appear in quotidian moments. Shortly after first sitting down to begin this conversation, Macksey asked his guest for a match. A shuffling through the stacks of papers and books that cover the table in his library soon followed. His guest found a match‑book and held it up. “No, they’re empty,” Macksey says, before noticing the script logo of a Swiss tobacco manufacturer on the cover. “They’re Davidoff. I haven’t had Davidoff since Jacques Derrida was here.””
Your Brain on Pseudoscience
“An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.”
How to make a book disappear
“An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There’s no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers’ websites, to expunge it from a publisher’s online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It’s ugly. For all kinds of reasons.”
The longest political pamphlet ever
“The particular furor over the dictionary—from which Skinner’s book takes its title—was partly due to a messy press release that declared “ain’t gets official recognition at last.” The press release left out that the dictionary also noted that ain’t was “disapproved of by many” and “substandard.” (“Ain’t” had also appeared in many earlier dictionaries.) Still, reviewers had a grand time with headlines such as “Ain’t Nothing Wrong With the Use of Ain’t” amidst a nationwide clutching of the pearls: gutter talk had invaded Webster’s! The New York Times called for the entire edition to be scrapped. Dwight Macdonald, seeing Webster’s Third as an incarnation of the middlebrow takeover of America’s intellectual culture, wrote a coruscating 20-page smackdown in The New Yorker.”
"The War of the Words: How to Update a Dictionary," - http://bit.ly/RKNZHr