March 2012
29 posts
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The Fourfold Root of Love
In The Symmetry of Our Affections I suggested that the rarity of ideal love is to be attributed to the difficulty of finding purely symmetrical affection between two persons, and I noted that the one-sided recognition of the perfect object of our affections is precisely half of that symmetry, and is a condition that ought not to be despised on that account.
Reflecting on this further, I...
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Cassini spacecraft captures Saturn moon geyser... →
Astrobiology in the news: previous investigation of the moons of Jupiter for life-friendly environments have focused on Titan, which has an atmosphere (and, it appears, weather), and Europa, which latter is an ice-clad moon. Deep below the surface of Europa it is likely that there is a ocean of liquid water, since the enormous gravity of Jupiter squeezes Europa and this changing pressure warms the...
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France's enduring nuclear deterrent →
This BBC piece by Jonathan Marcus, BBC Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent, goes into a little more detail than is typical for the popular press, and is worth reading. Also, it made me aware of the Francophone think tank, La Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique.
For many Americans, France symbolizes everything that they have in mind when they speak of “Europe” in derogatory terms...
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dre4mcatchr asked: what do YOU believe moral sense to be? and in what ways do you believe you can be a more moral person? what is morality to you anyway?
gregrlawson asked: One final thought on religion, or at least a Deity with an interest in human concerns. Could Darwinian evolution (and the absence of deity imposed morality) lead humans to transcend the Thucydidean triangle of honor, fear and interest? If not, could we fall victim to the Fermi Paradox, especially as our technology outstrips our ethics and capacity for restraint (for technology is a truly...
gregrlawson asked: Pardon my continuation of my earlier response to your questions regarding religion and morality. You may find these blogs at Darwinian Conservatism interesting in what they say of the religious longing of Nieztsche and (dread neocon) Leo Strauss. By the way, no longer anonymous. I figured adding myself to Tumblr couldn't hurt.
Anonymous asked: Thanks for responding to my queries regarding the theological foundation for morality. I take your point that we do not know that "God" is external to us. I also take your point that human equality need not, and one may argue is not, the sine qua non of morality. My fear is that in the absence of deity imposed order, we may lose all order as Dostoevsky implies. Morality may not...
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Commodity Music and Factory Farming
or, How Industrialization Changes Everything
I’ve mentioned in previous posts how much I enjoy the comments on websites like Youtube that allow visitors to leave their two-cents’ worth. One of the most common form that comments take is that of saying how wonderful the music of the past was, while bemoaning the poor state of contemporary popular music.
It would be easy to dismiss...
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100 Year Starship: An interstellar leap for... →
The BBC has just posted a story by Sharon Weinberger about the DARPA/NASA 100 Year Starship Study (100YSS). This is more detailed than most of the stories on the 100YSS that have appeared in the popular media.
I spoke at the 100YSS symposium last year on, “The Moral Imperative of Human Spaceflight.” This, however, was on the “Religious and Philosophical” track of the...
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The End is Near: Millennialism in our Time
There is a long history of human expectation of the end of the world. Almost every religious tradition has both a cosmogony and an eschatology, neatly summing up the world from beginning to end, alpha and omega.
It has been suggested that human thought is essentially narrative in character, and if this is true then it stands to reason that when thought advances to the point at which it can form...
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Intellectual Personalities
Just because individuals share a passionate interest in ideas, or in a particular subset of ideas, does not mean that they share anything else. Intellectuals, like anyone else, have their sympathies and antipathies, their likes and dislikes — and, as we all know, de gustibus non est disputandum. Personalities play no small part in the history of ideas, so it is important to be clear about...
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Japan's obsession with perfect fruit →
There is a famous passage from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in which he describes the impracticality of a wine industry in Scotland:
The natural advantages which one country has over another, in producing particular commodities, are sometimes so great, that it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very good...
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Human beings: a solar species
Contemporary cosmology is being expressed more and more often in terms of energy flows. Here is an example from Eric J. Chaisson:
Whether living or nonliving, complex systems are open, ordered, nonequilibrated structures that acquire, store, and express energy. Energy does seem to be a common feature among such organized structures; energy flow may well be the most unifying process in...
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Cartesian Formalism
One of the biggest and yet one of the least recognized blunders in philosophy (and certainly not only in philosophy) is to conflate the formal and the informal, whether we are concerned with formal and informal objects, formal and informal methods, or formal and informal ideas, etc. (I recently treated this topic on my other blog in relation to the conflation of formal and informal strategy.)
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China's death row TV hit: Interviews Before... →
It would be difficult to find a more perfect exemplification of Durkheim’s functionalist theory of social deviance than this popular television show in China that features interviews with the condemned. If you read the linked article by James Jones you will find that all the cases featured on the now-discontinued television program were selected to underline a moral lesson.
Sociologists...
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Lying and Other Virtues
Lying to spare the feelings of another — therefore lying from an impulse to do good — is a familiar part of human experience, and I am sure that everyone reading this has experienced it, or at very least experienced the dilemma. Some moralists affect to condemn lying even when undertaken for the good of others, and certainly there is a profound moral discomfiture whenever we arrogate...
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The Exaptation of the City
One of the most interesting urban spaces I have ever visited is the city of Split in Croatia, on the Dalmatian coast. The distinctive feature of Split is that the Roman emperor Diocletian had a palace built here for his retirement, incorporating his mausoleum, and this both sturdy and beautiful Roman construction has survived the centuries remarkably well, with the city of Split growing within,...
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Repressionomics -- can 'financial repression'... →
This BBC article is quite fascinating and I encourage its readership — with certain reservations. While I immensely enjoyed this BBC piece, it nevertheless incorporates the weakness of systematically failing to distinguish between formal and informal policy — i.e., between objectives consciously pursued and objectives that emerge despite the fact that they were not envisioned as an...
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A Thought on Urban Design: Embodied Choice...
One of the great weaknesses of urban design is to act as though (and, not incidentally, to plan as though) a particular way of life follows from the built environment in which that life is lived.
Initially, the exact opposite is the case: a built environment follows from a way of life; indeed, a built environment is built in response to better accommodating a particular way of life.
Note that...
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The Eye of the Other
It is when we look into the eye of the other that we recognize the consciousness of the other. Even if we feel that the reality of other minds is beyond philosophical demonstration, even if we are skeptics of other minds, it would be extraordinarily difficult to look into the eyes of another and not experience that immediate reaction of recognition of another mind.
When we look not only into...
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Cape Town, South Africa →
Almost exactly a year ago, when I started this second blog, one of my sisters was in Africa, and among my first posts was a picture she sent me of a leopard in a tree. Now, a year later, a couple of my sisters are in Africa. Here are her blog posts so far from the trip:
Swellendam to Inverdoorn: Through the Waboomsberg
Cape Agulhas
Cape of Good Hope
Cape Town to Simon’s Town
Cape Town,...
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Kantian Non-constructivism
Kant is not infrequently called a “proto-constructivist,” by which is meant that Kant staked out positions that are constructivist in spirit but which preceded the explicit formulation of constructivism by more than a hundred years. I believe that there are good reasons for calling Kant a proto-constructivist, given his insistence upon the exhibition of objects in intuition. I have...
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I dreamed of Gödel...
The night before last I slept a hard, dreamless sleep. I expected the same last night, but as it happened it felt as though I had had eventful, colorful dreams throughout the night (or, rather, throughout the morning). Just before I awoke, I dreamed of Kurt Gödel.
I dreamed I was at a conference at which Gödel was supposed to speak (what was that Durkheim had to say about dreaming of those who...
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Segmented sleep: Ten strange things people do at... →
While this BBC story claims to be telling the “side” of people who stay up at night, it is an absolutely typical pathologicalization of those of us who stay awake all night long.
The article has as its premise “ten strange things people do at night,” but no one seems to thought to have interviewed people to write an article about “ten strange things people do during...
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A Clausewitzean Conception of Philosophy
I have been listening to Daniel N. Robinson’s Teaching Company lectures Consciousness and its Implications, and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve been planning on brushing up on philosophy of mind for a manuscript I’ve been working on, but this has had unintended consequences of giving me a lot of new ideas, and my manuscript has been neglected while I work on these new ideas.
Here...