On Locke's Entanglements

“Such attention to historical context matters. These complex debates over justice shaped the early modern world, and continue to shape ours... Liberalism arose in reaction to slavery. It sought inclusion, and defined rights with broad promises, albeit ones that could be opened to exclusions. Indeed, one could argue that the breadth of such promises made racism (and other forms of prejudice) necessary in order to once again justify hereditary hierarchies. But for many others, it opened wide promises of inclusion. The theory itself was one that strained for relative equality under the law for all those who could give meaningful consent. The similarity of these disputes to ones we conduct today becomes more apparent with such context. For example: do rights inhere in all human beings or only in citizens? Abstract philosophical debates emerged from real dilemmas but also helped to shape policies that affected millions of people’s lives. They still do.”

Holly Brewer, “Does Locke’s Entanglement with Slavery Undermine His Philosophy?” - aeon.co/essays/does-lockes-entanglement-with-slavery-undermine-his-philosophy?

On Equal Dignity

“Religious privilege of this sort was never intended for all belief systems, but rather for one type of religion. Sure, its advocates will on occasion rope in representatives of non- Christian faiths to lend the illusion of principle to their cause. But the real aim and effect of the religious liberty movement is to advance their idea of religion at the expense of everyone else. If your religion or deeply held moral beliefs include the view that all people should be treated with equal dignity, then this religious liberty won’t do anything for you.”

Katherine Stewart, “Whose Religious Liberty Is It Anyway?” - nytimes.com/2018/09/08/opinion/kavanaugh-supreme-court-religious-liberty.html. This is a helpful summary of what is at stake in current debate in the United States (and Australia) concerning religious liberty. As the author here is clear, what is meant by “‘religious liberty’ is its opposite.” The aim of its proponents is to foster the rise of religious discrimination of a variety of sorts by religious people against other differing sects, as well as non-religiously affiliated people who don’t fit key racial, gender and/or other categories. It seems to me that disagreement on the basis of religious belief in democratic societies does not entitle people to deny their fellow citizens equal dignity under the law. This implies both that we develop the capacity to discuss religious viewpoints in more rigorous ways, as well as that we do so fully acknowledging the fact of plurality.

On an Avalanche of Speech

“For the longest time, we thought that as speech became more democratized, democracy itself would flourish. As more and more people could broadcast their words and opinions, there would be an ever-fiercer battle of ideas—with truth emerging as the winner, stronger from the fight. But in 2018, it is increasingly clear that more speech can in fact threaten democracy. The glut of information we now face, made possible by digital tools and social media platforms, can bury what is true, greatly elevate and amplify misinformation and distract from what is important... It’s not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree—eventually, at least some of the time—on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn’t mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform. But democracy can’t operate completely unmoored from a common ground, and certainly not in a sea of distractions.”

Zeynep Tufekci, “An Avalanche of Speech Can Bury Democracy,” - politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/05/too-much-free-speech-bad-democracy-219587

On Deleting Digital Hashem

“This presents a challenge for Jewish law to come to grips with the increasing centrality of digital text. It is a longstanding prohibition that one cannot erase Shem Hashem, the holy names of God (or G-d, for those who feel the prohibition extends beyond Hebrew). Writings containing the names cannot be destroyed or mutilated—or taken into the bathroom, for that matter—but must be stored in a geniza for later burial. This restriction has had the happy side effect of giving us archival treasures like the Cairo geniza, whose hundreds of thousands of manuscript fragments fueled the histories of S. D. Goitein and others. But what are we do to with monitors, hard drives, and Kindles? Bury them all? Halachic consensus has tended to be pragmatically permissive, ruling that there is no prohibition on the erasure of God’s names on a screen, on a disk, or in some other digital form. But there has been little agreement on exactly why there is no prohibition.”

David Auerbach, "Deleting the Digital Name of God." - tabletmag.com/scroll/269413/deleting-the-digital-name-of-god. Interesting brief summary of debates about disposal of sacred digital texts in Jewish thought. Hashem is the Hebrew term which literally translates as "the name" and is typically read in place of the tetragrammaton or other name for God in a given text. Much depends on how the technology displays the name it seems. An unmentioned complication is that parts of the Cairo geniza cited above have been digitized. For instance, scholars at the University of Manchester recently collaborated with the Rylands Library collections. Details on the project and many of its 15,000 fragments can be viewed here. The Rylands library museum also displays a number of Torah scrolls where the name of God has been carefully cut out of the text in order to desacralize them. For those interested in the wider practice of ritual disposal across religious traditions, a helpful monograph on the subject can be found here: The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions. 

Reading Room of the John Rylands Library

On Mountain

“Gradually though, the dragons and divinities were put to flight and our feelings toward mountains underwent an astonishing change. Fascination replaced trepidation. Adventure replaced reverence. As cities grew and we insulated ourselves away from nature the mountains called us back. The magic of mountains strengthened: their fierce beauty; their power to enchant; their challenge. We went to places that were intimidating and uncontrollable, that inspired in us the heavy blend of pleasure and terror, which we came to call the sublime. This search for the sublime drew us outwards and upwards. The great peaks of the world began to exert a force upon the imagination. A siren song that was easy to hear, hard to resist and sometimes fatal. But legends of death in high places spread the spell of the mountain wider still. ”

Airan Kang, The Critique of Judgment 2010, on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Narrator (Willem Dafoe), Mountain - madmanfilms.com.au/mountain/. This is a snippet of the transcript from the film now available on wider release in iTunes. It was performed live at a number of venues last year by the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Having seen it in Newcastle, I was struck by its use of the Enlightenment era concept of the sublime quoted above. One of the sublime's notable definitions occurred in Immanuel Kant's 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment, much cited to this day for its influence upon later aesthetics. While perusing the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia some years ago I was similarly struck by Airan Kang's The Critique of Judgment 2010, which quotes Kant's work through a digital stack of books. The excerpt is from § 23: "For the beautiful is directly attended with a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is thus compatible with charms and a playful imagination." I've also been writing on later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida's reflections on Truth in Painting. Derrida particularly questioned whether Kantian sublimity locked beauty too much away into the interiority of human subjectivity. For instance, at another point in § 23, Kant wrote, “All that we can say is that the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind.” Much more could be said here about the human capacity to experience beauty and transcendence, but the sentiments were echoed time and again in the film. "Because the mountains we climb are not made only of rock and ice but also dreams and desire. The mountains we climb are mountains of the mind." If you've ever wondered what is happening when music and art make your spine tingle, then consider Kant's sublime. If you've forgotten what that feels like, then take a moment to watch this film. 

On Artifacts

“The contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most mundane, biologically based activities, such as eating, sleeping, and sex, depend on engagement with artifacts. Moreover, many of the plants and animals we encounter on a daily basis qualify as biological artifacts... But unlike language—which also pervades human life from top to bottom—artifacts as such are not the subject matter of any well-defined area of philosophical research. This is as much the case today as it has been throughout the history of Western philosophy... Philosophy of technology might have played this role, but historically it has not done so. Although its roots reach back to the 19th century, philosophy of technology became a widely recognized specialization only in the second half of the 20th century. This early phase was dominated by so-called ‘humanities philosophy of technology...’ Heavily influenced by Martin Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) seminal essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ this strain of philosophy of technology focuses primarily on the cultural and social effects of industrial and post-industrial technologies.”

Beth Preston, "Artifact," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -  plato.stanford.edu/entries/artifact/. This is a helpful and newly revised introductory summary of gaps in philosophical studies of the artifactual nature of human life. My last book Writing Faith, sought to go some way in charting new directions in this field with reference to the history of religious books.

On Dewey's Bad Decimals

“The Dewey Decimal System has evolved and improved significantly since its original publication in 1876. While it is a useful tool for efficiently organising libraries, it is also an invisible tool reinforcing social inequalities that place greater value on knowledge produced by, for and about straight white men. Next time you go to find a book, think about where you’re looking, and who created the path to that information.”

Maria O'Hara, "Bad Dewey," - goldsmithslibraryblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/04/bad-dewey/. Brief comment on Melvil Dewey's system for organizing books (not to be confused with the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey).

On Museum Hours

“An art student worked here for a while. I liked him, he was a punk kid, just as I’d been once. He thought the museum was a bit ridiculous. He said when he looked at the paintings, he mostly just saw money, or more accurately, things standing in for money. I guess this is what he’d learned at university. He said this was clearest in Dutch still lifes which were essentially just piled-up possessions of the newly rich of that time. He said these were no different than if someone today were to paint a pile of Rolex watches, champagne bottles, and flat-screen TVs. That they were the rap-star videos of their day. And he said they were only less subtle versions of all the other commodities the museum was hoarding, and this was just part of the way things were disguised in the time of Late Capitalism. He didn’t hold it against the museum personally, but he went on like that. I asked him why he always used the term ‘Late Capitalism,’ and how people knew it was so late, and if it wasn’t more troublesome if what existed now was early. He knew a lot more than me but he didn’t seem to have an answer for that. He was also unhappy about the cost of museum admission. I agreed it would be nicer if it was free, but he was a big fan of the movies and I had to remind him they cost as much and he never complained about that. ‘Yeah, you can’t win,’ he said, ‘but maybe someday everyone will lose less and museums and movies could both be free.’”

Children's Games, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Oil on Panel, 1560

Johann [Bobby Sommer],  Museum Hours - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268732/. This is a quote from a slow and rather moving film. It shows wondering, wandering people flowing through lives that at any moment can become curated artworks. It seems to ask the viewer to take the time to cultivate the eyes to see. Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum is as important a character as the actors. The film features a number of captivating renaissance Bruegel the Elder paintings from the museum's exhibitions. A chronological list of his paintings can be found here and the Kunsthistorisches Museum can be virtually explored here. Breugel's paintings of sixteenth century Dutch crowds are, for me, a precursory to Manchester's twentieth century urban artist, L.S. Lowry. IMDB summarizes the film this way: "When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Art Museum becomes a mysterious crossroads that sparks explorations of their lives, the city, and the ways in which works of art reflect and shape the world."

On Diogenes

“Yet his [Diogenes the Cynic] cleverness in debate, his witty asperities, and his cussed integrity evidently made him beloved by Athenians. He also has modern appeal—not as a Mr. Natural avant la lettre, but rather as an opponent of all things tribal and provincial. When asked where he came from, he declared (using the Greek term cosmopolites), ‘I’m a citizen of the world.’ When asked what he found most beautiful, he said, ‘Freedom of speech.’ As a model of his philosophy, which emphasized praxis over abstract theorizing, he made a strong impression on his biographer, who concludes, ‘Such were his views and he clearly acted in accordance with them.’”

Jim Holt, "Lovers of Wisdom" - nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/lovers-of-wisdom-laertius-philosophers/. Interesting summary of a recent translation of Diogenes Laertius's third century CE Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Laertius is not to be confused with the fourth century BCE Diogenes summarized above. But his account of past philosophers nonetheless continues to inspire us "to ponder what some future Diogenes Laertius might make of the present philosophical era. Which figures would strike him as models for living? Whose dramatic public gestures, whose devastating coruscations would he record? Who would strike him as a 'philosopher' in the original Pythagorean sense: a lover of wisdom?"

On the Daimons' Wisdom

“If the laws are so easy for factions and plutocrats and autocrats to seize, why do we think laws are fit to rule at all? How can so frail a thing as civil law be trusted to protect our livelihoods and our borders, keeping citizens safe from each other’s bad humors? The answer is that laws can rule if we equip them to—but not by themselves. Even the kingliest laws need constant support from citizens who understand their human origins and all-too-human vulnerability. Plato expressed this through a myth. When men first walked the earth, the god Cronos gave them a race of wiser beings, the daimons, as rulers. When that age vanished in the mists of time, human beings made laws in imitation of the daimons’ wisdom, which was second-best after that of the gods. These legislative efforts have always been flawed, often fatally. They are, after all, only a thirdhand imitation of reason and justice. But they are still the best we humans can do.”

Erica Benner, "The Daimons’ Wisdom: How do you preserve the rule of law when tyranny is on the rise? Lessons from the Florentine republic." - laphamsquarterly.org/rule-law/daimons-wisdom