Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away” is published by Atlantic Books

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/...n-teach-us

EXCERPT: The philosopher and mathematician AN Whitehead described the history of philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato”. Do you agree with him?

If that were the case, what a silly field philosophy would be! A 2,400-year-old man had all the answers? I would like to think that what he meant was that this methodology, this view of maximising coherence, was begun by Plato and that he also formulated questions from a wide range of different areas of inquiry—mathematics, epistemology, metaphysics and political theory—and saw their commonality. In that sense, you can say that all philosophy follows in Plato’s footsteps.

Was Plato a “Platonist” in the modern sense of being committed to a claim about the existence of abstract entities, numbers for example?

The one area of philosophy in which Platonism is constantly referred to is philosophy of mathematics. There was apparently a survey done by the American Mathematical Association and something like 98 per cent of mathematicians described themselves as “Platonists”. There is [in mathematics] very much a sense that you’re discovering rather than inventing. So this is a kind of commitment to the existence of the abstract, but necessarily in insolation from the physical—the structure of physical reality is given by the abstract, but the abstract can’t be reduced to sensory particulars. So it doesn’t have to involve a commitment to a kind of Platonic “heaven” that Russell, for example, makes fun of; it can be the claim that reality can’t be intelligible without referring to abstractions which cannot themselves be reduced to anything other than themselves.

Was Plato a Platonist? Well, there’s the Platonism of the forms which I think he gave up. In the Parmenides, he really criticises the theory of forms. It’s interesting that Socrates is a young man there and he can’t answer Parmenides’ questions. In the Timaeus, which is one of my favourite dialogues, it’s not the forms, it’s mathematics that is the key to intelligibility.

Every theoretical physicist I’ve ever known has believed that not only is reality given to us in the language of mathematics, but that when we have two empirically adequate theories, you go with the one that has the most beautiful mathematics—that’s in the Timaeus too. That’s a Platonism that’s still working. When my scientist friends say that the structure of reality is given in the most beautiful mathematics, I say to them, “That’s a metaphysical argument you’re using right there.” Steven Weinberg said of string theory, “Maybe it’s not true, but we’re going to find some application for it, because never in the history of science has it been the case that such beautiful mathematics didn’t somehow reveal reality.” Whoah! That’s Plato!

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/...witnesses/

EXCERPT: This year marks the centennial of the presumed death of Bierce, Civil War soldier, journalist, and author of The Devil’s Dictionary, a wickedly witty book of social commentary disguised as definitions. He’s still best known for his fiction: his fastidiously plotted horror tales and the dark, vivid stories—including the often anthologized “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”—that drew from his early war experiences at Chickamauga, Shiloh, and Kennesaw Mountain, where he was wounded. In 1913, at the age of seventy-one, the famous writer saddled up a horse and rode into Mexico, not speaking any Spanish, in order to cover the Mexican Revolutionary War, perhaps to participate in it, perhaps to interview Pancho Villa. As newspaper accounts of his time reported, he disappeared without a trace....

I never really got into to superhero comics. I preferred Casper, Hot Stuff, and Wendy. Then I got into Eerie and Creepy and all those old horror comics. I was before my time. Now they're called graphic novels.

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...le-on.html

EXCERPT: I'm not hatin' on hatin'. I want to be clear about that up front. Condemning rotten behavior is a crucial moral activity, and Facebook is a powerful means of doing so. My friends' Facebook condemnations of sexism and racism and ableism, for example, have increased my awareness of those issues. And yet... condemning people's bad behavior on Facebook is almost too fun, in a way that niggles at me somehow. Why is it so fun, and what do its pleasures reveal about it? ...

http://mindhacks.com/2014/10/15/a-rush-o...the-brain/

EXCERPT: An article from Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry that discusses the concept of ‘moral disability’ and brain trauma in Victorian times includes a fascinating section on what was presumably thought to be the science of ‘knocking some sense into the brain’. The piece is by medical historian Brandy Shillace who researches Victorian scientific ideas and how they affected society. Sadly, the article is locked (quite rightly, humanities can kill if not used correctly) but this is the key section...

http://www.people.com/people/package/art..._peoplemag

EXCERPT: As Halloween approaches, we were swapping ghost stories around the ol' PEOPLE offices. Though we're based in New York, staffers here come from all over, and so it got us thinking about what we like to call the Haunted States of America: What "ghost story" defines your state? This infographic is assembled from a variety of sources – in some cases, it's the "most famous" ghost in each state, in others, it's the one we found the most interesting....

This question was asked by late puzzle master Martin Gardner:

"Imagine heating a metal ring enough so it expands. What happens to the hole, does it get bigger or smaller?"

"On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or "ice-pick" lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.

Freeman, equal parts physician and showman, became a barnstorming crusader for the procedure. Before his death in 1972, he performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states.

One of Freeman's youngest patients is today a 56-year-old bus driver living in California. Over the past two years, Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy."

http://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my...ys-journey