On Library Myths

“But the library’s reputation as a magical irreplaceable repository of unique items only became solidified after Carl Sagan said on a TV programme that was broadcast worldwide... In eight minutes of television, Sagan invented out of thin air the myths: that the library was a unique institution, with no parallels; that lots of knowledge was lost along with the library; that Hypatia’s death had something to do with the library’s destruction; for that matter, that Hypatia had anything at all to do with the library. All of these are pure fiction, without any basis of any kind. Sagan also repeats a bunch of myths that he didn’t invent: that religion caused the onset of a ‘Dark Age’ and centuries of superstitious ignorance; even the idea that there was still a library in the temple of Serapis when it was destroyed in 391 CE, which is doubtful. How influential is Cosmos? Insanely influential. I talked about this a little back in 2016, but it bears repeating. Many articles, books, documentaries, and videos about the history of science still have no hesitation over citing Cosmos as the only authority they need. This is crazy, because at least half of what Sagan says about history is outright false, but his authority is still seemingly unimpeachable today, forty-two years after the programme first aired.”

Peter Gainsford, “The Library of Alexandria and Its Reputation” - http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2022/11/alexandria.html.

On Apologies

“Rituals of atonement and forgiveness lie at the heart of most religions, a testament to the human capacity for grace… Apology, though, has a different history… The practice of establishing and enforcing strict requirements for public apology is not a human universal. It happens only here and there, and now and again. You see it in fiercely sectarian times and places—like twenty-first-century social media, or seventeenth-century New England… For the things they said—words whispered, grumbles muttered, prayers offered, curses shouted—dissenters, blasphemers, and nonconformists in seventeenth-century New England faced censure, arrest, flogging, the pillory, disenfranchisement, exile, and even execution… Demanding public apologies on daytime television and deeming those apologies insufficient was an occasional thumb-wrestling match between two seven-year-olds sitting on a green vinyl school-bus seat on the ride to second grade compared with the daily, Roman Colosseum-style slaughtering that takes place online. It’s not that people don’t do and say terrible things for which they ought to atone. They do. Some of those things are crimes. Many are slights. Very many are utterly trivial. A few are almost unspeakably evil. But, on Twitter at its worst, all harm is equal, all apologies are spectacles, and hardly anyone is ever forgiven.”

Jill Lapore, “The Case Against the Twitter Apology,” - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/14/the-case-against-the-twitter-apology-matthew-ichihashi-potts-forgiveness-danya-ruttenberg-on-repentance-and-repair. The concluding chapters of Arendt’s The Human Condition, focuses on the broad need for forgiveness in political life.

On Printing Religion

Here’s a recent interview on my book Printing Religion after the Enlightenment for faculti.net - https://faculti.net/printing-religion-after-the-enlightenment/. This is an interesting new repository of brief academic summaries.

On Historical Empathy

“Well, to think responsibly about the past requires thinking oneself into the minds of people who no longer exist, who lived in a world that neither you nor I have ever visited, and who inherited assumptions from their predecessors that are quite different from what we have inherited from ours. What is sometimes called the historical imagination is required to set aside one’s own assumptions about what’s right and wrong—or at least explicitly to acknowledge those assumptions—and to try to see the world through the eyes of people whose attitudes one might find loathsome. That’s not easy to do, but every good historian makes an effort to do that. Now, that doesn’t mean that one suspends judgment and comes away without any preference for one point of view or another. What I’m trying to say is that we can be critical and even ashamed of much of our history and, at the same time, accept that it’s our history rather than to say, you know, this has nothing to do with me because I am indignant or outraged by it. I think it helps to acknowledge that posterity is likely to judge us as fallible or foolish or worse, just as we are inclined to judge our predecessors.”

Andrew Delbanco - https://www.neh.gov/article/open-questions-andrew-delbanco

On Plurality

“All people are different people.”

— Ted Lasso

A pithy summary of the intersubjective imperative of Hannah Arendt’s vita activa. Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance can also be felt in such aphorisms.

On Looking at Consciousness

“To the man with a scanner, everything looks like a brain. But of course, there are other tools for exploring what consciousness might be — not just what it is for, but what it is like... But what of Thomas Nagel, whose classic essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ set the parameters of House’s search? It’s true that a number of neuroscientists and their readers have contested Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat, and that this subjective dimension of consciousness is inaccessible to objective study. One can imagine why practitioners dedicated to just such studies might object to such prima facie limits. But House adopts Nagel’s perspective, albeit without naming him. ‘The one and only thing we know for certain for every one of us,’ House writes early on, is that ‘there is something that it is like to be us.’ And for both men, that ‘something’ remains just beyond the grasp of anyone but the person experiencing it. Subjective knowledge of me never evolves into objective knowledge of you. Try as we might, ‘we can only ever scratch the surface of what really goes on inside’ others. While this view leads Nagel to pessimism, House holds out hope that if we just keep scratching, we’ll bridge the divide and explain what it is like to be a bat — or any other conscious being.”

Henry M. Cowles, “What Is It Like to Have a Brain? On Patrick House’s ‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness,’” https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-is-it-like-to-have-a-brain-on-patrick-houses-nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-consciousness/. The need to bring together first person phenomenological analysis of consciousness with third person neuroscientific scanning the brain remains a vital future task it seems.

On Philosophical Style

“While there’s a role for philosophy written in this way, Setiya’s specific subject seems to me to demand something else. When someone’s trying to make me feel better about the dead-serious subject of life’s shittiness, I want them fully engaged in the task, and I want the delivery to recall to me what isn’t shitty about life: what’s beautiful, vivid, and free. The most beloved philosophical pessimists — Schopenhauer, Aurelius, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus — paradoxically pull this off. They’re each distinctively themselves on the page, and their conviction that the world is shot through with ugliness and futility is conveyed in such artful, unfettered language that the medium serves, at least partly, to undermine the message. Reading them is like watching someone teeter on the edge of a crater, then dart back at the last minute, with a skip and a chuckle. The abyss is still there, they’re already sliding back toward it, we know it’ll get them, get us all, in the end — but what a line, what a moment, what a flex! It makes you glad to be alive, just to have witnessed it. ”

Helena de Bres, “The Philosophy of Shittiness: On Kieran Setiya’s ‘Life is Hard,’” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-philosophy-of-shittiness-on-kieran-setiyas-life-is-hard/. Interesting summary of the recent “Life is Hard.” The reviewer echoes a sentiment that arises in the Suffering: Comparative Studies course I have been teaching this semester. It compares similar philosophers in a way that allows students to delve deeply into their respective talent for facing the edge of the cliff, but pull back to affirm life’s beauty and freedom.

On Library Museums

“The most touching piece in the gallery, however, contains no intelligible message at all: a tiny square of paper preserves a young child’s shaky-handed attempt to write the alphabet, its margins given over to a forest of zigzags and doodles where concentration had flagged. I thought of this child when I myself recently began to study Hebrew: a thousand years and thousands of miles removed, we were united in our attempt to yoke unfamiliar letters under mastery. But absent learning a new writing system later in life, it takes artifacts like this one to make legible something that the average adult’s effortless literacy overwrites in the palimpsest of human experience: the relationship to language one had as a child, when reading was still wondrous and difficult and strange, a tussle with an angel you’d yet to get the better of; the days of scrawling letters backward, sideways, on wide-ruled paper and with crayons held with the whole fist. Like a modern genizah, the library museum is a physical manifestation of the preciousness of the written word, a reminder of the love and devotion that thousands of years of human culture have paid to a genre of object that is passing increasingly out of this world. Leaving that exhibition, I thought of the books I had on my shelves, of the book I was carrying for the journey home, of the books that have accompanied me every day of my life. Dog-eared, underlined, water-warped after a sudden rainstorm, with birthday wishes or author signatures or notes for school written in, they spoke as only a physical object could—not just of themselves but also of my own life. Perhaps as reading happens increasingly in a digital form, what we lose is this: the meaningless things that in sum become meaningful, those aspects of a book’s significance that exist beyond words.”

Erica Eisen, “Ode to the Library Museum,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/24/ode-to-the-library-museum/

On the Crowd and I

“Set to Tognetti’s rhythmically dynamic reworking of the music of JS Bach, Mela reflects on pilgrimage and the ways we are drawn to celebration. Rufus Blackwell’s footage takes us to the Kumbh Mela festival in India, where millions gather to bathe in the holy water on the banks of the Ganges. We travel to the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, a buddhist celebration in Thailand, and the Coachella Festival in the US, revealing in the color, energy and joy of shared communion.”

“Concert Program: The Crowd and I [featuring music by Beethoven, Chopin, Ives, Shostakovich, Sibelius and Richard Tognetti],” Australian Chamber Orchestra, https://www.aco.com.au/whats-on/2022/the-crowd-and-i. I had the chance to visit the recently renovated Sydney Opera House this weekend for the ACO’s Crowd & I performance. This is one in a series set to video such as their previous Reef (2013), Mountain (2017) and River (2021). This edition juxtaposed the vastness of space and the Australian Northern Territory’s Tanami Desert with the intimacy of the human gaze between strangers in New York, Tokyo subways, British football fans and the eyes of masked medical workers. Crowds themselves featured as mosh pits, traffic riddled freeways, refugee camps, riots, peaceful protest movements and religious festivals. The final movement took the audience on a high speed train journey from Tokyo to Kyoto accompanied by the solo piano Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1 by Frederic Chopin. The visualization of so many divergent facets of human encounter emanated a rather ghostly spectral quality. It was both disorienting and cathartic after the pandemic. One moment of levity used polka to transform a football match into a coordinated dance. It made me think of the intersubjectivity of Hannah Arendt’s vita activa.

On the Philosophy of History

“Hegel [1770 - 1831], one of the most influential of the modern philosophers, described history as the progress in the consciousness of freedom, asking whether we enjoy more freedom now than those who came before us. To explore this, he looked into the past to identify periods when freedom was moving from the one to the few to the all, arguing that once we understand the true nature of freedom we reach an endpoint in understanding. That end of history, as it’s known, describes an understanding of freedom so far progressed, so profound, that it cannot be extended or deepened even if it can be lost.”

Melvyn Bragg, “Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” BBC4 In Our Time Podcast - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017k8w