On Greek Learning

“I have offered here three snapshots, each one of which could be expanded into very long and intricate histories. But my point is a simple one. In late antiquity, the Renaissance and the 19th century, the study of the Classical past was a fundamental and instrumental force in changing the shape of Christianity, and in revolutionary ways. For late antiquity, the study of Classics was integral to the formation of Christianity as a theological and critically sophisticated intellectual enterprise. For the Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greek learning fuelled the transformational violence – intellectual and physical – of the Reformation and the foundation of Protestantism. For the 19th century, Classical philology and critical history challenged the status of the texts of Christianity, and drove the doubts and transformations of secularisation, with continuing and profound purchase on contemporary culture.”

Simon Goldhill, '“What Did Classics Do to Christianity?” - https://antigonejournal.com/2022/06/classics-christianity/

On Personal Libraries

“Now I use ‘The Library of Babel’ as a metaphor for the landscape of my own library. My books are not organized alphabetically, or, for the most part, by genre. The arrangement seems to have been made entirely at random, unless you know the quirk by which it was conceived. Books are placed next to one another for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together... I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke. ”

Leslie Kendal Dye, “The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story,” https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/06/personal-library-book-organization-system/661326/. My library is mostly organized on affinities and historical relations. Kant lives next to Hegel and Kierkegaard, Derrida has a home above Heidegger. A collection of book historians live in the living room. Barth lines the top of a few shelves, which is a joke about critics who saw his project as a cathedral in the clouds.

On the Evolution of Writing

“In a small West African village, a man named Momolu Duwalu Bukele had a compelling dream. A stranger approached him with a sacred book and then taught him how to write by tracing a stick on the ground. ‘Look!’ said the spectral visitor. ‘These signs stand for sounds and meanings in your language.’ Bukele, who had never learned to read or write, found that after waking he could no longer recall the precise signs the stranger revealed to him. Even so, he gathered the male members of his family together to reverse engineer the concept of writing. Working through the day and into the following night, the men devised a system of 200 symbols, each standing for a word or a syllable of their native Vai language. For millennia, varieties of the Vai language had been passed down from parents to children—but before this moment no speaker had ever recorded a single word in writing. This took place in about 1833 in a region that would soon become the independent nation of Liberia. Vai, one of about 30 Indigenous languages of Liberia, has nearly 200,000 speakers today in the Cape Mount region that borders Sierra Leone… Unlike ancient peoples, early Vai script adopters recognized the social, cultural, and political importance of writing and applied the new script straightaway to a wide array of practical concerns. From shopping lists to high literature, their constant use gave it regular opportunities to change and adapt quickly. Every time Vai writers dashed off a note or wrote out a homework exercise, they introduced tiny personal idiosyncrasies, some of which were assimilated by readers and reproduced, while others failed to catch on. The bottom line: Written letter shapes evolve over time, but so do the purposes and technologies of writing itself. The continued endurance of the Vai script of Liberia is a monument to the brilliance of its first creators who retrieved writing from a dream, then let it free to trace its own successful path.”

Piers Kelly, “What the Vai Script Reveals about the Evolution of Writing,” sapiens.org/language/vai-script-evolution/. Such accounts of the relation between orality and writing always reminds me of Derrida’s early Of Grammatology. As I noted in my recent Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, “Derrida’s expanded notion of writing undercuts any privileging of written cultures precisely because language itself always already includes the logic of writing. Deconstruction applies to any culture with linguistic signification and its multiform relation to material artifacts” (p. 117). Derrida discussed these interconnections in terms of his notion of “arche-writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 60). What’s often missed is that he developed it as a “new concept . . . which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing” (Of Grammatology, p. 56). It seems to me to be an underutilized empirical resource when considering the evolution of writing.

On Cohen's I and Thou

“It is an intriguing [Aristotelian] illusion that the solitary thinker, in his state of eudaemony, is most likely to attain full selfhood. We [Jews] know, however, that the isolated self exclusively engaged in thinking cannot be an ethical self. The ethical self must be engaged in action. For this self, there exists no I without a Thou. Reah means ‘the other,’ the one who is like you. He is the Thou of the I. Selfhood is the result of an unending relation of I and Thou as well as its abiding ideal. True, the ideal remains the ideal, as the task [of ethical action] remains the task. But an ideal is an ideal only because and insofar as it asks to be emulated so that I may approximate it. And a task is a task only because I am charged with it, because it is incumbent upon me. By working at this task, I work on myself, toward my selfhood. In short, selfhood ensues from the interaction between I and Thou.”

Hermann Cohen, “I and Thou: Selfhood through Ethical Action (1908)” in Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1971), p. 218. An interesting historical note on the origins of I-thou relations in European philosophy. Cohen was a major figure in Neo-Kantian thought at the University of Marburg and the first Jewish full professor appointed in Germany. Generally popularized by Martin Buber’s 1923 I and Thou (Ich und Du), the terminology was later repeated by various others such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Sanctorum Communio. I came across Cohen’s use of the terminology years ago while researching Barth’s Neo-Kantian background, illuminated helpfully by Simon Fisher’s 1988 Revelatory Positivism? Barth's Earliest Theology and the Marburg School. I had been hunting down various Neo-Kantian texts via interlibrary loan, one of which still had the library records in its front matter. As an indication of how few read through this material, I was the first since Fisher to check the rare German text out of Oxford’s Bodleian library. As it happens, I’m writing a lecture on Buber for this semester’s Philosophy of Religion course, so wanted to cite the context after Kant where the problem of a groundless ethical ego arises. Cohen’s 1908 note arose from his study of Maimonides, and was then taken further again in his 1919 Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (pg. 15-16ff).

On Robopoetics

“Frost’s diction hones our cognition, schooling us to see the world in a fresh way. None of that is possible with gpt-3. Short for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer,’ the model is unique not simply because of what it does, but also how it does it. It learns about language from watching grammar and syntax in action. The algorithms effectively train themselves. They pick up patterns in the data and, through a relentless process of trial and error, approximate them. That’s how, under the right conditions, gpt-3 can parrot impressively realistic paragraphs of text. Its credibility, however, drops to zero the longer you spend with it. Eventually you realize it is vacantly yoking bits of colloquialized detritus, bobs and tags of speech. Of course, the system makes a nice show of making sense, so we forgive its failures. But the failures are no less real: malfunctioning tones, misfires of inflection. gpt-3’s output is a shell of hyperactivity with nothing inside—a mesmerizing mix of materials without a center, language on autopilot. This is what led the MIT Technology Review to call gpt-3 ‘a fluent spouter of bullshit’ and the researcher Timnit Gebru to warn against giving too high a mark to the program, citing the human tendency to ‘impute meaning where there is none...’ For gpt-3 to pull off the real thing will require that algorithms not only move data, but are moved by it; that they not only consume our experiences but feel the fleetingness of our lives. How do you confer knowledge of mortality? There is no computational shortcut for that. Compressed into Frost’s choice of ‘appall’ was a lifetime’s insight on loss. This is why poetry, unlike so much else our species has mastered, cannot be copied. It’s an artifact of introspection that can only be mastered by our species. There is no superhuman way to write poems because we write them by virtue of being what a computer isn’t: human.”

Carmine Starnino, “Poetry and Digital Personhood,” newcriterion.com/issues/2022/4/poetry-digital-personhood. An interesting summary of recent natural language processing developments. While not cited, it echoes debates about the way poetry is endemic to human being after Martin Heidegger’s work. This was a point taken forward in Hubert Dreyfus’s What Computers Still Can’t Do. At issue is the degree to which human minds are, in essence, not reducible to computation. The point made in the essay above is similarly that the pursuit of robopoetics is a red herring. Nonetheless, the essay cites the more interesting question which is the degree to which AI can be applied to manipulate human behavior, nonetheless. While incapable of poetry, computational approaches to language are beginning to excel at exploiting natural human empathy and emotions. In another register, it is interesting how so many video games have trafficked on the human feeling of frailty or what Heidegger referred to as the poetics of being towards death. The anxiety built into the video game is often precarious lives lost. While incapable of replicating Frost’s poetry, they nonetheless excel at generating clickbait.

On Abecedarian Reading

“Reading, as Alberto Manguel elaborates in his book A History of Reading, came before writing. Ancient astronomers read the stars. Ancient hunters read animal tracks. Ancient diviners read the guts of sacrificed animals. Even today, reading is not entirely about reading writing. Farmers read the sky to ascertain the weather. Card players read the faces of their opponents. Lovers read each other’s faces. All these readers ‘attribute meaning to a system of signs and then decipher it’ (Manguel). Still, the best part of reading is reading books. Books written by writers.”

Priscilla Long, “On Writing: An Abecedarian,” hudsonreview.com/2022/01/on-writing-an-abecedarian/

On the Academic Social Contract

“As such, it must begin with the University of Berlin, which was established in 1810 as an institution with the dual tasks of knowledge creation and dissemination (that is, research and teaching). Here scholars were free to pursue Wissenschaft, or scholarly research, in exchange for training a new civil service and an army that would serve the needs of the state and the aspirations towards nationhood. I would add further that if the academic social contract is constant, the partners of it evolve with time. As the society that the university served evolved, the university co-evolved into such forms as the central state university in Berlin, the land-grant university in California, and the privately funded urban university in Baltimore, and each time, the academic social contract was reconstituted. The premise is that once an academic social contract was exhausted, academic entrepreneurs rushed in to find new partners, formulate new ideas, and establish new institutions—sometimes even outside the university.”

Emily J. Levine, “University at the Crossroad,” jhiblog.org/2022/01/26/university-at-the-crossroad-an-interview-with-emily-levine/.

On Reading Critically

“Reading can make you feel close to someone without actually knowing them, a precious gift in a lonely world. But if the pleasure of reading is feeling connected to a distant stranger, then the pain of watching people read badly is its opposite: a severing of shared humanity. A cold, demoralizing reminder that we never can look inside each other’s minds, no matter how we try.... But what we love is never free of flaws. Every day of the last two years, we’ve seen the devastating consequences of combining a torrential flow of information with lousy reading and thinking. We have to do better, and that’s not just some vague call to arms I’m plunking in here at the end because I’ve used up my brain for the day and want to go to bed. Reading better, thinking better, is quite literally a matter of survival in the time of Covid and climate change, in these days when we’re reflecting on the first anniversary of disinformation-powered insurrectionists breaching the U.S. Capitol. It’s no longer enough to see a headline, feel a feeling, and go off. ”

Kate Harding, “Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?” - damemagazine.com/2022/01/07/have-we-forgotten-how-to-read-critically/. A lighthearted screed on why reading and writing remain important in digital information cultures. Quiet inspiration as another academic year is set to begin in Australia.

On Grief

“One of the Metropolitan Museum’s crown jewels, ‘The Death of Socrates’ by Neoclassical master Jacques-Louis David is a magisterial canvas that speaks to the grandeur of noble sacrifice, with clean brush strokes and a symmetrical composition. David bathes the condemned philosopher in incandescence, left hand raised in salute as his right reaches for the cup of hemlock; his students and friends turn away, distraught, some weeping in disbelief. On the left, the painter has placed Plato, sitting grimly with brow furrowed—an artistic license, since the younger man wasn’t present. The tension between the defiant Socrates and his anguished followers infuses the scene with pathos and resolve. As Michael Cholbi observes in his clear-eyed, meticulously argued study ‘Grief: A Philosophical Guide,’ this emotion has long been neglected by Socrates’ heirs, relegated instead to literature and art, and later to psychoanalysis and neurobiology... David painted ‘The Death of Socrates’ in 1787, on the eve of the French Revolution; the canvas can be interpreted as an allegory for the twilight of monarchy and an elegy for France’s Ancien Régime. In just a few years the austerity of Neoclassicism would give way to a turbulent Romanticism. ‘Grief’ implicitly calls for a revolution in how philosophy understands itself: It must seek new tools to sustain us through consequential inflection points, such as the long tail of our current pandemic. This time, with feeling.”

Hamilton Cain, “‘Grief’ Review: What We Learn From Loss” - wsj.com/articles/grief-review-what-we-learn-from-loss. I’ve been teaching a course on suffering that addresses this topic. It is interesting that Socrates’s example has left such little fodder for further thought on human experiences so common to us all.

On Open Libraries

“In 1598, the University of Oxford received an extraordinary proposal. Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat and Oxford alumnus, offered to restore the dilapidated university library, entirely at his own cost... The convulsions of the sixteenth century left a lasting impression. In 1605, Francis Bacon thanked Bodley for building ‘an ark to save learning from the deluge.’ Scholars on the continent, Catholic and Protestant, felt similarly, and by around 1600, universities, new and old, began to acquire libraries. Yet the purpose of these institutional libraries, what books would be in them, and, crucially, who would pay for them, were contentious issues, in many cases inadequately resolved... Thomas Bodley was without doubt a visionary. A child of exile during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, he had seen many scholars scattered to the winds, their libraries confiscated or abandoned in their haste to depart. He enjoyed a superb education in Geneva and Oxford that had instilled in him the value of books, but he also understood that libraries could not survive if one did not plan for their future, so that the initial enthusiasm did not die with its founder. Bodley, it seemed, had learned the lessons from the failures of earlier collectors: he ensured that his library would be provided with a substantial endowment, of land and property rents, to acquire books. This was key if the library was to remain supplied with the latest scholarly publications; he was rightly convinced that it was the absence of this provision that had caused so many ambitious library projects to atrophy... Bodley was adamant in his instructions that the library should never be closed, and this too was followed to the letter.”

- https://lithub.com/before-oxfords-library-was-the-finest-institutional-library-in-europe-it-was-kind-of-a-dump/. This is an excerpt from The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur de Weduwen (2021).