Kai-Fu Lee, “We Are Here to Create,” https://www.edge.org/conversation/kai_fu_lee-we-are-here-to-create. Interesting conversation with a pioneer of artificial technology from March 26 2018. An engineer with a deep understanding of how AI works, Lee highlights the narrowness of AI and its key differences from human cognition, thinking and consciousness. His conclusion is also worth noting: “I don’t have the solutions, but if we want to come back to the question of why we exist, we at this point can say we certainly don’t exist to do routine work. We perhaps exist to create. We perhaps exist to love. And if we want to create, let’s create new types of jobs that people can be employed in. Let’s create new ways in which countries can work together. If we think we exist to love, let’s first think how we can love the people who will be disadvantaged.”
Julien Baggini, “Five Books on How to Think,” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/how-to-think-julian-baggini/.
Keith Ward, “On ‘Comparative Theology,’” - https://philosophyofreligion.org/?p=525740. This is an excerpt from an interesting blog on the future of philosophy of religion, which just posted a series on comparative work. I’ve cited Ward’s approach in the past as part of the outline of a model for comparative political theology in deliberative democratic societies. It recognizes that religious ideas often interact in ways that require great comparative care and sometimes result in irresolvable differences. As Eric Steinhart on this same website also argues, “comparison reveals difference rather than unity.” Also worth noting in this context is Timothy Knapper’s post on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion project, which now hosts a unit in the American Academy of Religion annual conference program. I’d just add that my own approach locates the comparative task in the deliberative democratic context of building up citizen capacities to encounter differences and respond to religious strife. I’m writing a textbook this year on Understanding Religion through the Eyes of Others (Routledge, 2024) that develops this approach to studying diverse religious thinkers with these comparative concerns in view.
David Wootton, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/february-2023/the-enlightenment-as-reading-project/. Interesting review of Gary Kates’ recent The Books that Made the European Enlightenment. It highlights the need for ongoing innovation in studies of complex interactions between readers, writers and publishers, one that can be quite difficult given some of the information isn’t easily available. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that Darnton’s “communication circuit” and later Thomas Adams and Nicholas Barker’s “socio-economic conjuncture” both recognized the need for apprehending these complex interactions. As I wrote recently, “Darnton placed the book’s production in the exterior circle surrounding intellectual influences, political and legal sanctions, and publicity that overlaps with the economic and social conjunction. By contrast, Adams and Barker invert that relation. Their model’s center is the publication, manufacture, distribution, reception, and survival of the artifacts themselves. The former model maps the book-culture relation as a centrifugal interaction where written artifacts radiate out from the culture. The latter provides a centripetal relation whereby the artifacts themselves are impacted by the culture.” Printing Religion after the Enlightenment, p. 136. It is worth noting that what goes assumed in much cultural history is the model of the human mind itself, which relies on enlightenment epistemologies increasingly questioned by recent cognitive science. Hence, there is a need for new history of the book engaged with situated cognition.
David Marchese “The Digital Workplace is Designed to Bring You Down,” nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-newport-interview.html. Interesting interview on the need to rethink how we work towards producing things of value in digital workplaces of which universities are increasingly akin. The three principles identified are apropos in my view. Doing fewer things and obsessing over quality are key, but there is a lot that goes into establishing daily practices that support a longstanding natural pace of work. It made me think of bird migration, a mammoth global scale task for some species. Yet when watching them in their element, they seem free and in concert with each other as they move through space and time. Imagine writing the next book with that coincidence of liberty and distraction free purpose. While our current digital predicament carries its own difficulties, it’s also worth noting that the “demon of distraction,” has longstanding historical antecedents as noted in the recent review article of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction here: .wsj.com/articles/the-wandering-mind-book-review-medieval-history-the-demon-of-distraction-11674232751.
Jonathan Rose, “The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book’ Review: Our Back Pages” - https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-oxford-illustrated-history-of-the-book-review-our-back-pages-11671809077.
David Nirenberg, “The World John von Neumann Built” - https://www.thenation.com/article/society/john-von-neumann/.
Giosuè Baggio, “Finding Language in the Brain” - https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/finding-language-in-the-brain/
Peter Gainsford, “The Library of Alexandria and Its Reputation” - http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2022/11/alexandria.html.
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.