Philosophical notes…
On Extremism
“Obama, after all, faces two overlapping but distinct challenges. One is an ideology: the totalitarian, even genocidal, vision espoused by ISIS. The second is a tactic: terrorism, which is available to people of all ideological stripes and which grows more dangerous as technology empowers individuals or groups to kill far more people far more quickly than they could have in ages past. Instead of assuming that these threats are the same, we should be debating the relative danger of each. By using ‘violent extremism’ rather than ‘radical Islam,’ Obama is staking out a position in that argument. It’s a position with which reasonable people can disagree. But cowardice has nothing to do with it.”
Peter Beinhart, "What Does Obama Really Mean by 'Violent Extremism'?" - http://theatln.tc/1MPL7Wt
On Philosophy of Information
“We used to think that power was about either the creation or the control of things, that it was about the means of production of goods. That’s what Marx thought. It was not about the production of experiences or services. Then society switched to a focus on power being expressed through the control of information. Once control of information is recognised as a source of power, then any powerful entity wants to control this information. Governments and empires all want to control information. What we’re seeing today is the very beginning of another switch, from power over things, to power over information, to power about the questions that shape the answers that give the information about things. If you take the view that semantic information is broadly speaking delivered as a question plus an answer, then those who control the questions shape the answers. That’s the new power we need to understand and manage properly today.”
On Philosophy of Technology
“What was also fascinating in this book [Philosophy of Technology: 5 Questions] was how little discussion there was in philosophy of technology circles about the internet –philosophers of technology completely missed the train on the internet. I haven’t seen any good books, or any books frankly, which engage with new media or blogs or social networking or privacy, let alone transparency or WikiLeaks from the philosophy of technology perspective. For me it is kind of sad that probably one of the most important issues of our day is neglected, with most philosophers of technology still arguing about the clock and the wheel. I don’t know if the internet isn’t too big a subject, and we need a separate independent field, something like philosophy of the internet. It boils down essentially to whether the internet is so unique as a technology that it even defies the conventions of philosophy of technology as a field, and whether it requires its own set of principles and assumptions.”
On Impressive Philosophers
Just came across this Philosophy Bites podcast that compiled responses to the question, "Who is the most impressive philosopher you've met?" 38 minutes of philosophers' answers gives you a sense of recurring criteria, such as wit, breadth, clarity, incisiveness, generosity, and humility, and a few names are repeated such as John Rawls, Derek Parfit, Hilary Putnam, and even Derrida gets a mention.
On Phenomenology
“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss phenomenology, a style of philosophy developed by the German thinker Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the 20th century. Husserl’s initial insights underwent a radical transformation in the work of his student Martin Heidegger, and played a key role in the development of French philosophy at the hands of writers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology has been a remarkably adaptable approach to philosophy. It has given its proponents a platform to expose and critique the basic assumptions of past philosophy, and to talk about everything from the foundations of geometry to the difference between fear and anxiety. It has also been instrumental in getting philosophy out of the seminar room and making it relevant to the lives people actually lead.”
"Phenomenology" BBC Radio 4 In Our Time - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ykk4m
On Simulated Homelessness
“SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own. You can read all of these proposed final solutions in Matteo Bittanti’s How to Get Rid of Homelessness, ‘a 600-page epic split in two volumes documenting the so-called “homeless scandal” that affected 2013’s SimCity...’ For Bittanti, it’s impossible not to see the connections between the homeless problem in the Bay Area and the way it’s portrayed in SimCity. ‘That is, can we fix homelessness in SimCity, or because we haven’t fixed homelessness as a problem in real life, therefore we are bound to lose?’ Bittanti asked. ‘Is SimCity a reflection of what’s happening in reality, and therefore is very realistic, or is it a programming issue?’”
"Is 'SimCity' Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?" - http://bit.ly/1872KnE
Hitchcock's Holocaust
“In 1945, overseen by Alfred Hitchcock, a crack team of British film-makers went to Germany to document the horror of the concentration camps. Despite being hailed as a masterpiece, the film was never shown. Now, in a documentary called Night Will Fall, the full story of its creation and suppression is being told.”
"The Holocaust Film That Was Too Shocking to Show" - http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/09/holocaust-film-too-shocking-to-show-night-will-fall-alfred-hitchcock
I Am Not Charlie Hebdo
“Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people. Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct. The massacre at Charlie Hebdo should be an occasion to end speech codes. And it should remind us to be legally tolerant toward offensive voices, even as we are socially discriminating.”
David Brooks, "I Am Not Charlie Hebdo" - http://nyti.ms/1yHtC90
On Meritocracy
“The Latin deservire means ‘to devote oneself to the service of.’ In Vulgar Latin, that came to mean ‘to merit by service.’ We need to revive that notion of “democratic merit.” Democratic merit would provide access to education to those who serve the goals and contribute to the conditions of a thriving democracy. It does what our current meritocracy fails to do: creates an incentive system that emphasizes not just the possession of individual talent and related personal success but also the ability to collaborate and the commitment to building a better society for more people.”
Lani Guinier, "The Tyranny of Meritocracy" - http://chronicle.com/article/The-Tyranny-of-Meritocracy/150983/
On Religion and Media
“Recall that the earliest products of the Gutenberg printing press were indulgences and, eventually, the Bible. Knowing what a medium does at its outset doesn’t define its history. Rather, it just indicates the energy with which it began. We may see the Internet as an openness, an availability, a potential divulgence of privacy and overexposure of self. But what if it all is just song and dance relative to its basic proposition, namely that none of us never ever get to know what is really going on? The digital is a new beginning; the digital is a place to hide. In between those two propositions is the work of many humanists, not least of which, perhaps most of all, is the student of religions.”
Kathryn Lofton, "The Digital Is a Place to Hide," The Immanent Frame - http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2015/01/07/the-digital-is-a-place-to-hide/