Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, in conversation with Jordan Peterson. I wrote about McGilchrist in 2012: Intuition and the two brains. Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have …
I’ll be giving the talk below to an audience of oligarchs in Los Angeles next week. This is a video version I made for fun. It cuts off at 17min even though the whole talk is ~25min, because my team noticed that I gave away some sensitive information :-( The slides are here. A Brief …
Sometimes we forget … forget to take a break, forget to get outside, and forget to reflect on our individual and collective pasts. After an intense three days of talks at EMBO—hearing about exciting work by diverse and superb biologists in 13-minute chunks (plus Q&A); seeing dear friends Santiago Elena, Sebastian Bonhoeffer, and Roy Kishony; …
In early November last year, I returned to the Leviathan. In it, Thomas Hobbes grapples with the question of sovereignty and considers the human condition in a state of nature in which there is: …no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of …
A homage in the guise of an essay, this is the story of the last course Reiner Schürmann taught. As a text, it attempts to describe, situate, and come to terms with the power of Schürmann’s teaching in the context of his last lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. But if it is to be …
The more fundamental unsolved problem is why the progressive project collapsed in the first place. How could something at the seeming height of its power; in control of the EU, the US Federal government, the UN, the press, the academe and industry collapse in one fatal year? The globalist conference in Davos still doesn’t …
Shortly after Barack Obama won the 2008 Iowa caucuses, I wrote a blog post entitled Toward a Mature Politics that began with the Kantian idea that enlightenment requires us to relinquish our self-incurred immaturity. Then, as now, I associated petty hyper-partisan politics with adolescence; and I saw in Obama’s candidacy the possibility of a more …
I was up early as usual yesterday morning to sneak in a little quiet reading time before heading off to set up for our local monthly recycling drive we’ve been operating for 28 years. It was chilly (14 degrees) and dark when I loaded up our 1999 Ford Ranger, 4-cylinder truck with our material before …
With the new year comes the deluge of resolutions. This ritual of new beginnings affords us an opportunity to begin anew, for, as the ancient proverb reminds us, “well begun is half done.”1 Of course, now that we are 15 days into 2017 and the new semester is upon us, old habits reassert themselves as …
This NYTimes Magazine article describes the implementation of a new deep neural net version of Google Translate. The previous version used statistical methods that had reached a plateau in effectiveness, due to limitations of short-range correlations in conditional probabilities. I’ve found the new version to be much better than the old one (this is quantified …
Well I haven’t exactly been silent in recent years, but I think the circumstances we are in call for being unafraid to stand up to forces that are dragging us toward our collective demise, but also to offer alternatives that redirect us towards a more just and peaceful future. It will be 50 years …
The English philosopher Frank Ramsey gives us the following: If a man has a cake and decides not to eat it because he thinks it will make him ill, we can judge him mistaken even if he does not eat the cake. But being mistaken does not does not also make him crazy (Ramsey would …
This is the text of the response I made to Emanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014) at the 2016 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existentialist Philosophy in Salt Lake City on October 21, 2016. It is the continuation of a 25 year …
In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, there is a famous passage in which he reminds us that “to be happy takes a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a person blessed and happy” (Nic. Eth., …
As the handful of readers who have visited this blog a few times are likely to notice, I write a lot of things sparked largely by what I read. While some of those reflections are sparked by essays, articles, blogs or shorter pieces, the majority I believe ( although I haven’t done a content analysis …
I was reading from the pile of books stacked nearby earlier this morning, John Harris’ How to Be Good: The Possibility of Moral Enhancement (Oxford University Press, 2016) It’s a philosophical treatise that I bumped into on the new book shelf a few weeks back. As I was reading it, I kept reflecting on, “why am …
Does the hero die a hero, or does she survive?In our worship of the mortal champion for good, is it imperative that the hero dies in the at, or do we need her to live?What is this uniquely human construct of the hero? Why is it important for us to imagine the hero? Is the …
We’ve been doing “ways of knowing” in my class at Michigan State, and I’ve been resisting the temptation to drag my undergraduates through a tangent on Sophocles. Blog readers are not so lucky. You’ll recall Sophocles’ play about King Oedipus from your freshman class on world literature. The plot gets rolling because Creon, his brother-in-law and …
Institutions of higher education across the country have long talked about diversity and inclusion. Many have established offices of equity or inclusion and hired staff to ensure that the institution is living up to its promise to foster an inclusive culture. At Michigan State University, inclusiveness is one of the three core values by which we define ourselves, …
We’ve arrived at the fifth Sunday in January. Both of my regular readers know that I am now contractually obligated to come up with one more “food ethics icon,” and that given the parameters laid out on January 3, it has to be a full-bore, no-questions-asked philosopher. (For stray web browsers who just happened to …
A couple of weeks back when I decided to dedicate this year’s series of blogs on “food ethics icons” to full-bore, no-one-would-raise-an-eyebrow-about-me-calling-them-philosophers philosophers, Aristotle was one of the guys I had in mind. He certainly meets the no-eyebrows-raised criterion. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that all philosophy is a footnote to …
I have been owning up to this affliction in each of the introductory department meetings I have had with faculty across the College during my first semester as Dean. Of course, the more cynical among you will see such a confession as yet another mode of administrative manipulation. How can a Dean, so often the …
My second “food ethics icon” for 2016 is John Stuart Mill. Mill is a pretty interesting figure in his own right and certainly one of the most important individuals of the 19th century. Mill inhabited a rarified intellectual and political environment from his London birth in 1806 to his death from a severe skin infection …
Newcomers to the Thornapple Blog may not know that January has been “food ethics icons month” ever since 2011. We started out with some very well-known names and by 2013 we were doing rock-star farmers. Last year the theme was population growth. This year I’ve decided to focus on some bona fide philosopher types, people …
Although Aristotle is often thought to give canonical voice to the priority of vision as the most noble of the human powers of perceiving, this article demonstrates that in Aristotle, touch has a priority vision lacks. By tracing the things Aristotle says about touch in the De Anima and specifically the manner in which he …
Two books completed recently share some common ground although using different lenses to see it. George Rupp, former Harvard Divinity School dean, President of both Rice and Columbia University and most recently president of the International Rescue Committee, has penned Beyond Individualism: The Challenge of Inclusive Communities (Columbia University Press, 2015). The chapters are largely …
Why do anything at all? This blog post is a collection of videos and images that I have collected over time that speak to the pointlessness of trying to find an answer to this question and how one question, even if answered, leads to many more. This is the kind of stuff that brings together Feynman, xkcd, …
This is story of an un-keynote that began in discussion with @BillHD. The conceit was this: Could we create an un-keynote experience in which members of the community would be encouraged to explore the question: Is Reading Writing? This was the design: Tweets were pre-written with images of slides that presented content about my enhanced …
It has been a month without a post. Between a vacation without information technology and without a visit from the Muse, ideas simply sauntered through the consciousness without pausing. This entry does indicate that information technology is at hand, but whether the Muse has visited can be best be determined by the reader. The post …
Tree in the Botanical Gardens at Michigan State University The places we inhabit habituate us. The virtues they cultivate are grounded in the values they embody. In 1855, a natural opening in the oak forest of the Burr farm was selected as a fitting site for the creation of the Michigan Agricultural College (M.A.C.) …
A tweet by Nate Brixius (@natebrix) led me to read the article “The Natural Order and Divine Order of Optimization” published by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a rebuttal/counterpoint to a New York Times Magazine article titled “A Sucker is Optimized Every Minute“. The former sings the praises of optimization (somewhat) and the latter vilifies …
Well, I spent a few hours reading Aristotle this week, and you know that spells trouble for both readers of the Thornapple blog. I just couldn’t resist Googling ‘incontinence’. It turns out that Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for ‘incontinence’. Who knew? One link refers to a 1981 album by Fad Gadget. I’m sorry, but …
Here I am blogging from the KLM Crown lounge at Schiphol again. The robots in Cupertino think it’s still Saturday night, but here in Holland we are well on our way to Sunday morning. So it’s time to think about the Thornapple blog. The night before last I checked in at Chino Latino in Nottingham …
When I was a sophomore in college there was a good-looking fellow among my circle of friends who must have had some deep insecurity buried in his persona. He was constantly embellishing accounts of his various comings and goings with feats of amazing ability and encounters with celebrities that we all knew were very unlikely …
If Amartya Sen deserves to be called a food ethics icon for dismantling the idea that the total amount of food produced provides a good index for understanding the ethics of hunger, we should probably look the source of that idea for our next entry for “food ethics icons month”. Is there anyone out there …
Nov. 2, 2014 So here it is just two days after Halloween night, and I’m thinking that both readers of the blog are probably sitting there munching on little tiny candy bars as they peruse the blog this Sunday. Of course there’s the chance that you aren’t reading the blog on it’s posting date, but …
One of the things that I had to learn in order to become a certified Doctor of Philosophy in the discipline of epismetology was how to use the word “reductionism” in utterly confounding and totally obscure ways. Like, “Reductionism is a program of research dating back to the 17th century where the goal was to …
I met Gyorgy Scrinis in Melbourne a couple of years ago. He was complaining more than a little bit about Michael Pollan’s appropriation of the word “nutritionism” and with it some of Scrinis’s key ideas in Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. At the time I met him, all I knew of Scrinis’s work was …
This podcast is an excellent discussion of some foundational questions in economics and human behavior, as explored in the work of Adam Smith. (The abstract below does not do the interview justice.) Russ Roberts and Mike Munger on How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life EconTalk host Russ Roberts is interviewed by long-time EconTalk guest …
I just came across what has become one of my favorite “JFK” quotes, a paragraph likely written by Ten Sorenson, Kennedy’s chief speech writer. The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth — persistent, pervasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches …
As threatened a few weeks back I’m on a jag about food sovereignty. I decided that the best way to approach this topic would be to read up on the way that food showed up in the lives of history’s great sovereigns. I pulled my copy of Selected Lives by Plutarch down from the shelf …
Open Culture recently dug up a 1993 documentary on Foucault, titled Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil. As described by Josh Jones, the documentary “explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture.” Given how often Foucault appears on syllabi in …
Early last week, I completed the paperwork to enroll in an independent study class focusing on moral and civic education. This is an exciting step for me since I’ve always been fascinated with questions of right vs. wrong and I’ve long believed that education has an important responsibility to help students ask these questions and …
There is a lot of debate these days about the value of the Philosophy. Many people doubt it is relevant. A few years ago Stephen Hawking made headlines by telling the audience at a Google conference that Philosophy is dead.Most of us don’t worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must …
[This post is the text of a talk that I presented on October 18, 1998, in East Lansing, Michigan, as part of a forum on “Our Evolving World: Challenge to Mind and Spirit.” This document is in the public domain and may be used without charge and without permission, provided the source is acknowledged.] Preface …
I have a robot on my phone that buzzes me once a day to deliver a word. I don’t mean that the robot offers an update on happenings around or some message of prospects & aspirations such as one might get from a human being in response to the question “What’s the word?” I do …
There is a paradox in high education On the one hand: college increases the earning power of students; people who graduate from college make significantly more money than people who do not. (The Payscale numbers discussed in the second post in this series quantify the degree to which this is the case for US colleges …
A few weeks ago I was paying a few bills online when I noticed that we had a small balance at the dentist’s office. I called the office to arrange payment, and it got me thinking about all of the times I’ve visited the dentist. Though many loathe and fear visiting the doctor charged with …
So goes the start of a well known Buffalo Springfield song at the height of the Vietnam War. I had started another blog earlier today and let it settle before going back to edit. Looks like it will have to set a little longer as I read or viewed several powerful presentations today that I …
How would THIS GUY think about THIS SITUATION? In his Excellent Biography Einstein: his Life and Universe, Walker Isaacson, describes Einstein’s peculiar method of argumentation. You might start out with a clear cut disagreement: you on one side, him on the other. However, after a few minutes, you might notice that Einstein was no longer …