Notes about researching and teaching philosophy…
Embodiment
“Starting as early as the 1970s, some cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and linguists began to wonder whether meaning wasn’t something totally different from a language of thought [Call it Mentalese, whichtranslates words into actual concepts: a polar bear or speed limit, for instance]. They suggested that—instead of abstract symbols—meaning might really be something much more closely intertwined with our real experiences in the world, with the bodies that we have. As a self-conscious movement started to take form, it took on a name, embodiment, which started to stand for the idea that meaning might be something that isn’t distilled away from our bodily experiences but is instead tightly bound by them. For you, the word dog might have a deep and rich meaning that involves the ways you physically interact with dogs—how they look and smell and feel. But the meaning of polar bear will be totally different, because you likely don’t have those same experiences of direct interaction.”
Benjamin Bergen, "Embodied Cognition," Scientific American - http://bit.ly/UjP0tQ
White Christmas
Summer Christmas is a southern hemisphere event. No bundling up to build snowmen. Rather, Australians strip down to as little as is legal and hop into the sea. Not noble firs, but barbecue's alight to grill prawns and Moreten Bay bugs. Choirs sing carols of silent and holy nights alongside those of green gullies, cool streams and brown paddocks. Although you'd think that sun, sand and surf would not make for a white Christmas, I awoke this year to the Australian equivalent. An overcast sky, mist, and humidity diffused the intense light of dawn into a singular seascape. It made me think of Rothko paintings, especially "Untitled 1, 1969." Some years ago I heard an art critic summarise Rothko's work as follows:
“I’m not afraid you won’t think this Mark Rothko beautiful, but what I am afraid, a little, somebody might think it’s just beautiful. Lovely colors. No meaning. But meaning is what he was all about, and he would have been furiously angry if anyone thought that, and told you so in suitably salty language. It was subject matter that mattered most to him. And the subject matter was the emotions. Not small, personal emotions – up today, down tomorrow – but the great timeless emotions. How we feel about death, and courage, and ecstacy. He was convinced that if you would just encounter his paintings, that emotion would be communicated to you with absolute clarity. So to achieve this he painted very large. Because in a small painting – big you, little painting – you can control it. But with a large painting, it controls you. You’re taken into it. Unless of course you look at it from a distance, that killing, assessing look. So to combat that, he insisted that always the light be very dim, so you couldn’t actually see the thing until you were right up against it. And then something does begin to happen. He painted with very thin mists of paint, feathering it on, breathing it on. And you are taken up, out of yourself, into something greater, something transcendent and majestic. If you can think of a religious painting without religion, this is what you experience here. It’s so timeless, that when I’ve had this encounter, I feel to return to the world of time, I have to shake my head and bring myself down to earth again.”
I've always thought that such an oceanside morning likely inspired the timeless transcendence of this painting. It seems the Pace Gallery in London had the same idea, juxtaposing Rothko's work with Hiroshi Sugimoto's photos in an exhibition, "Dark Paintings and Seascapes." So too, apropos Christmas, Rothko's work aspired to the religious beyond religion. This is a trick theologians have been keen to emulate, and the trend goes back to romantics such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, who wrote about our "sense and taste for the infinite" in his On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. In any case, my ghosts of Christmas past haunt me here, if only to remind me that there are many ways to celebrate the beauty and mystery of the season.
On Techno-Utopianism
“Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality. Some say as early as 2020, others as late as 2045. One of its chief proponents, Ray Kurzweil, was on NPR recently talking about his plans to begin resurrecting his now dead father digitally.”
"What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?" Smithsonian Magazine - http://bit.ly/12SyHrU
Secret Reading Lives
“‘There’s such an increasing awareness today of nontextual uses of books,’ [Price] says. ‘Now that the textual meaning of books is migrating online, all that’s left is an empty shell.’”
"Secret Reading Lives, Revealed" The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/TsxUtw
Who are Mooc's most likely to help?
“Here’s the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all.
”The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous,” says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. ...
Getting them to and through college takes advisers, counselors, and learning-disability experts — a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention conversation has had a “tech guy” fixation on mere content delivery, she says. “It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it.”
Amid the talk of disruptive innovation, “the real disruption is the changing demographics of this country,” Trinity’s president says. Waves of minority students, especially Hispanics, are arriving on campus, many at those lower-tier colleges, having come from schools that didn’t prepare them for college work. “The real problem here is that higher education has to repeat a whole lot of lower education,” Ms. McGuire says. “That has been drag on everyone.””
Edward Tenner, "Who are MOOCs Most Likely to Help?" The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/VTn8uR
How we read
“Whereas I don’t believe I have read a single work by a milkman lamenting that most people now buy their milk from a shop instead of having it delivered, books fretting over the death of print form one of the genres of the moment.”
Andrew Martin, "How We Read," Financial Times - http://on.ft.com/T9MR3h
Fukuyama and Habermas
Interesting short interview of Jürgen Habermas by Francis Fukuyama:
“Allow me to address the normative and empirical aspects of your question separately. The idea of “shared sovereignty” – shared between Europeans in their role as EU citizens and these same people in their role as members of one of the participating nation states – must be developed from the roots of the constitution-building process. This idea has an important implication for how we should conceive of the future shape of a democratized Political Union. If we are to cease shirking the question of the “finalité” of the unification process, we must lay down the correct parameters... For the purpose of democratic legitimation it would be sufficient that a European government be responsible in equal measure to the Parliament and the Council in which the national governments are represented. From an empirical perspective, your question puts a finger on a sore point. It is true that the citizens will always have closer ties to their nation state than to the European Union; however, the fact that, to date, insufficient mutual trust has developed among the European peoples is also a consequence of the failure of the political elites. The latter have so far evaded all European themes; in their national public arenas, they make “Europe” responsible for unpopular decisions in which they themselves have participated in Brussels.”
"The European Citizen: Just a Myth?" The Global Journal - http://bit.ly/VAVTEQ
Philosophy as an Art of Living
“All things considered, we should not lose sight of the fact that what I’ve described above is only one way of conceiving the relation between a philosopher’s work and her life. While predominant among the ancient philosophers, as well as among some modern ones (Montaigne and Nietzsche, for example), the understanding of philosophy as an “art of living” is far from characterizing mainstream academic philosophy in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries... However, things are not always that simple. In 1927 Martin Heidegger published Sein und Zeit, one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century; some say the most important one. Only a few years later Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. His political involvement is often cited as one of the most serious mistakes a philosopher can ever make. We are shocked, and rightly so. And, yet, where does our shock come from? From the fact that some German called Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party or rather from the fact that a great philosopher by that name did it? If the latter, why exactly are we upset? Isn’t there at work, in our disappointment with Heidegger’s lamentable political options, an expectation, if an obscure one, that a philosopher’s life should be lead philosophically?”
Costica Bradatan, "Philosophy as an Art of Living," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/WOT6cD
Empathy and Outrospection
“Cognitive empathy… is about perspective taking, about stepping into somebody else’s world, almost like an actor looking through the eyes of their character. It’s about understanding somebody else’s worldview, their beliefs, their fears, the experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at themselves. We make assumptions about people. We have prejudices about people, which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality. We use labels, and highly empathic people get beyond those labels by nurturing their curiosity about others… I think we need to think about bringing empathy into our everyday lives in a very sort of habitual way. Socrates said that the way to live a wise life was to know thyself, and we’ve generally thought of that as being about being self reflective, looking in at ourselves. It’s been about introspection. But I think that in the twenty-first century we need to recognize that to know thyself is something that can also be achieved by stepping outside yourself by discovering other people’s lives. And I think empathy is the way to revolutionize our own philosophies of life, to become more outrospective and to create the revolution of human relationships that I think we so desperately need.”
