http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...110414.php
EXCERPT: If you took the junk from the back of your closet and combined it with the dirty laundry already on your floor, you would have an even bigger mess. While this principle will likely always hold true for our bedrooms, it turns out that in certain situations, combining messes can actually reduce the disorder of the whole. An international team of researchers from Slovenia and Iran has identified a set of conditions in which adding disorder to a system makes it more orderly. This behavior is known as antifragility, a concept introduced recently to describe similar phenomena in statistics, economics and social science....
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/...rain-study
EXCERPT: Working shifts significantly damages people’s ability to think and remember, and doing so for at least a decade “ages” the brain by an extra six and a half years, new research has found. The findings are the latest to link working outside normal hours to an increased risk of health problems. Other studies have suggested links with cancers, heart attacks, strokes, ulcers and metabolic diseases such as diabetes....
http://plus.maths.org/content/black-hole...x-regained
EXCERPT: [...] The black hole information paradox passed into physics folklore, with Hawking famously making a bet with Caltech's John Preskill in 1997 that black holes do obliterate information. But in 2004, Hawking conceded that his prediction had been wrong and that information could, in fact, escape — apparently resolving the paradox and sidestepping Banks, Susskind and Peskin's hot Universe problem. But Hawking never fully explained what was wrong with his original argument. [...] While Giddings thinks that Hawking was right to say that information isn't lost in black holes, he notes that we still lack a full explanation of what happens to information. To really understand how information survives, Giddings argues, we have to throw out our familiar conception of space-time...
http://theweek.com/article/index/271006/...-was-right
EXCERPT: [...] In the 12 years since this conversation (or one very much like it) sparked a million ill-informed, fantastical hit pieces on [Leo] Strauss for his insidious influence on the administration of George W. Bush, a series of Strauss' students and admirers have stepped forward to defend his work: Steven Smith, Thomas Pangle, Catherine and Michael Zuckert, Peter Minowitz.
There's much to recommend in each of these books. But for my money, the best by far is Arthur Melzer's just published study, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. And yes, I would have come to that judgment even if I hadn't studied with the author in graduate school. Melzer has written the most compelling, surprising, and persuasive defense of Strauss's thought that I have ever read. It deserves a wide and appreciative audience. And if it gets one, the consequences could be enormous.
Because if Strauss was right in the way he interpreted the Western philosophical tradition, then much of modern scholarship — and, by extension, our civilization's understanding of its intellectual and political inheritance — will need to be radically revised....
http://chronicle.com/article/Seeking-a-C...ge/149707/
EXCERPT: [...] The American public seems, from cursory glances at headlines and polls, more divided than ever on the basic existence of climate change, in spite of scientists’ many, many warnings. Their message, the attendees fretted, simply wasn’t getting through.
This worry wasn’t just about climate change, but also stem cells. Genetically modified food. Vaccines. Nuclear power. And, of course, evolution: Challenging scientific reality seems to be an increasingly common feature of American life. Some researchers have gone so far as to accuse one political party, the Republicans, of making "science denial" a bedrock principle. The authority attributed to scientists for a century is crumbling.
It is a disturbing story. It is also, in many ways, a fairy tale. So says Dan M. Kahan, a law professor at Yale University who, over the past decade, has run an insurgent research campaign into how the public understands science. Through a magpie synthesis of psychology, risk perception, anthropology, political science, and communication research, leavened with heavy doses of empiricism and idol bashing, he has exposed the tribal biases that mediate our encounters with scientific knowledge. It’s a dynamic he calls cultural cognition....
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/249094
EXCERPT: How a teacher of philosophy turned one writer into a poet. [...] Wittgenstein, of course, wrote very little about literature and even less about poetry. His efforts were principally directed toward clearing up philosophical dilemmas brought about by linguistic confusions. Most often, these confusions result from misleading analogies between different meanings of the same word. This conviction is so strong throughout his later work it compels him to devote much attention to the word “meaning.” His most famous remark on the subject occurs in Philosophical Investigations:
For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer.
The second half of this remark is misleading out of context, for the overall thrust of Wittgenstein’s discussion in this portion of the Investigations is against the picture of meaning as primarily a matter of names and things. Implicit here is a critique of Saussurean linguistics in making the signifier/signified model the paradigm of meaning. He’s not suggesting such a model is never an appropriate explanation of meaning, but rather that it only sometimes is. Naming is only one way we use words.
But as Guetti points out in relation to the first half of the remark quoted above, Wittgenstein’s sense of “use in the language” is more active than simply equating a name with its bearer:
It will soon become clear that “use” for Wittgenstein is a quite restrictive concept: it is “use in” specific verbal situations and exchanges and sequences, and “use” to do or to achieve something, “use” that always has consequences. It is this practical and purposive “use in the language” that becomes more and more unquestionably, as his arguments develop, the measure of meaning. But that observation still does not communicate the strength and even the severity of Wittgenstein’s formulation. For if “use in the language” is not, as we might initially have supposed, “all sorts of things,” then a great deal of verbal behavior—all such behavior, for example, that seems purposeless or inconsequential or, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “idling”—cannot be considered “meaningful.”
“The consequences of this exclusion,” Guetti continues, “are enormous for how we think about language, and especially for how we conceive linguistic process in literary studies.” Certainly they were for me. What Guetti writes above seems very simple, but in the context of literary studies—where interpretation of “meaning,” however defined or ill-defined, remains the prime directive—it is difficult to conceive of a more radical proposition.
For it is tantamount to saying, among other things, that works of literature have no meaning; that is, the “meaning” we speak of in literature is different in kind from the meaning of a word or a sentence in the context of a purposeful, real-world exchange. In the latter, the use of words has consequences, in that it gives rise to action, whereas in literature—even literature that seeks to inspire readers to political action—words lack direct application.
When we speak of “meaning” in relation to literature, we quite often mean something like “significance” or “point,” but when we speak of, say, the meaning of a line of poetry, or a phrase within a line, we mean something more like interpretation or paraphrase. And this is where confusion is liable to arise, for we can also interpret or paraphrase a meaningful expression. But the difference remains, for, absent a need for clarification, we can use a meaningful expression as is, and there are “measures of meaning” with such expressions—actions, consequences—that literature lacks....
http://www.publicbooks.org//fiction/the-salinger-riddle
EXCERPT: [...] Everyone knows that [J.D.] Salinger was a notorious recluse, renouncing public life in 1953. But we have also discovered he was a misanthrope, and would have quickly hung up had a reader called to speak with the creator of Holden Caulfield. Now that the private side of his withdrawal has come to light, the array of eccentricities and bad behaviors found there has come to dominate our attention. Initiating the shift were two memoirs in 1999 and 2000: the first by a former lover, Joyce Maynard, and the second by his daughter, Margaret. Each depicted an often cruel and distant man. In their wake came several biographies, the most recent of which is 2013’s oral biography Salinger, a nastily inflected version of these earlier laments, by David Shields and Shane Salerno (accessorized by a television documentary produced by Salerno). Unremittingly snide and censorious, they seem to have appropriated the pain that these two women suffered through direct experience.
From these accumulated grievances a portrait of Salinger in New Hampshire emerges: except to a handful of old army buddies and editors of the New Yorker, the writer was grumpy and self-absorbed, a hypocrite and misogynist. He was obsessed with purity, preaching detachment and spiritual fastidiousness while chasing women often less than half his age, blind to the destruction inflicted on his family by his own egomania and selfishness.
Everyone knows that Salinger was a recluse, but we have also discovered he was a misanthrope.
He insisted on spending most of his time writing in a small cabin in the woods, literally detached from his family, often ignoring them. He reserved his loyalty and love for the fictional Glass family. Yet more perverse was his refusal to publish after 1965, dedicating those labors to posterity and locking his manuscripts in a vault. More Glass stories and a war novel are among the works evidently slated for publication, perhaps starting in 2015.
[...] Salinger’s literary achievement is scandalously underappreciated, his considerable intellectual distinction smothered by clichés: the Glasses as drowning in cuteness, sainthood, and hothouse self-regard. (Janet Malcolm’s persuasive 2001 dissent, “Justice to J. D. Salinger,” is an exception to the rule.) By the early ’60s, the die was cast—in 1961, Irving Howe called him “the priest of an underground cult.” The next year, Mary McCarthy accused him of depicting the Glass family as a “closed circuit” of narcissism. Whether an in-group or “cult,” the point was to mark off a fanatical readership of “well-scrubbed” apolitical rich kids, too self-involved to rebel or conquer, merely “bright, ‘cool,’ estranged.”
This critique from the left doubtless helped to sink Salinger’s reputation among academics in succeeding decades....
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontolo...ommitment/
EXCERPT: Ontology, as etymology suggests, is the study of being, of what there is. The ontologist asks: What entities or kinds of entity exist? Are there abstract entities, such as sets or numbers, in addition to concrete entities, such as people and puddles and protons? Are there properties or universals in addition to (or instead of) the particular entities that, as we say, instantiate them? Questions such as these have divided philosophers down the ages, and divide them no less to this day.
Meta-ontology concerns itself with the nature and methodology of ontology, with the interpretation and significance of ontological questions such as those exhibited above. The problem of ontological commitment is a problem in meta-ontology rather than ontology proper. The meta-ontologist asks (among other things): What entities or kinds of entity exist according to a given theory or discourse, and thus are among its ontological commitments? Having a criterion of ontological commitment for theories is needed, arguably, if one is to systematically and rigorously attack the problem of ontology: typically, we accept entities into our ontology via accepting theories that are ontologically committed to those entities. A criterion of ontological commitment, then, is a pre-requisite for ontological inquiry.
On its face, the notion of ontological commitment for theories is a simple matter. Theories have truth conditions. These truth conditions tell us how the world must be in order for the theory to be true; they make demands on the world. Sometimes, perhaps always, they demand of the world that certain entities or kinds of entity exist. The ontological commitments of a theory, then, are just the entities or kinds of entity that must exist in order for the theory to be true. End of story (compare Rayo 2007: 428).
But complications arise as soon as one tries to specify a theory's truth conditions: different accounts of truth conditions lead to different accounts of ontological commitment. Moreover, theories couched in ordinary language do not wear their truth conditions—or their ontological commitments—on their sleeves. Thus, the need arises to find a criterion of ontological commitment: a test or method that can be applied to theories in a neutral way to determine the theory's ontological commitments....
