Plato and flat elements of earth 😷

Sir Warwick's daughter, Mrs Annalise Thomas, read from the book he had been working on for the past five years, Purpose, a synthesis of his thoughts on theology and religions. He wrote: 'I prefer an incomprehensible God to a meaningless world', and quoted from the Sanskrit Upanishads: 'Now a person consists of purpose. According to the purpose a person has in this world, so does he become on departing hence. So let him frame himself for a purpose.' Having noted that, Sir Warwick went on to define his purpose: 'How can I say what I should aim at? To live beyond my understanding. To act beyond my love. To serve beyond my life.'

A new magazine? In this economy? Inque isn’t like other magazines — for starters, it’ll have  one only jeden issue per year 

Slovak American Andy Warhol's artistic legacy is secure, in part because he recognized the durability of cynicism. Nihilism never goes  out of Fashion

Aristotle defended slavery, Kant and Hume were racists, Wittgenstein was sexist. Is it possible to set aside those positions? Is it wise?  

Depends on the Philosopher  

To identify as a philosopher and “insane” isn’t quite oxymoronic, but it is certainly something that I didn’t want to risk until very recently.

Those are the words of Paul Lodge, professorial fellow in philosophy at Oxford University, in a recent interview in the “Dialogues on Disability” series at Biopolitical Philosophy

To Identify as a Philosopher and ‘Insane’

LOTS OF DISEASES SEEM TO HAVE INFLAMMATORY ROOTS: Drugs for inflammation might help with severe depression, study says.

Plato, 360 BCE: “the element of ‘earth’ is cubical in form” — geophysicists & mathematicians, 2020 CE: “Ummm, yeah. He nailed it”

“It is not only that the benefits of reading Aristotle counteract the costs, but that there are no costs” — Agnes Callard (Chicago) on literal speech, messaging speech, and “cancel culture”

“Doctoral students’ prodigious intelligence consigns them to a life of ‘purgatory’ as they pursue largely unattainable dream jobs and reject more realistic careers as failure” — many young academics are “victims of their own ‘above the data’ brains”, according to a study of “quit lit”

Nostalgia doesn’t need your memories — Felipe De Brigard (Duke) on the evidence for, and implications of, revising our traditional understanding of nostalgia

Did you attend a protest recently? Your face might be in a police database. — Evan Selinger (RIT) and Albert Fox Cahn on a new way “protesters are risking their safety and wellbeing standing up for justice”

Are the great thinkers all dead? Why? — Michael Huemer (Colorado) shares some possible explanations

“Transitional justice provides an important lens for ongoing national conversations in the United States about police brutality and racial injustice” — Colleen Murphy (Illinois) explains 

When is the conjunction fallacy not really a fallacy? — to answer this, keep in mind there’s sometimes a tradeoff between being “accurate” and being “informative”, says Kevin Dorst & Matt Mandelkern (Oxford)

“Games are a part of an under-respected, and under-theorized, category of art — what I call the arts of action” — C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the philosophy of games

Even when we’ve “engaged seriously with the other side’s arguments… we make mistakes that we can’t correct by sincere engagement with opposing viewpoints” — “I think this happens a lot in philosophy,” says David Christensen (Brown) in an interview all about disagreement

“Anyone with Hume’s intelligence would recognise the enormity of slavery. But Hume sought to benefit from it.” — Felix Waldmann (Cambridge) on Hume’s connections to slavery

How can mathematics inform philosophical inquiries? — Silvia Jonas (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy) takes up that question and others

Philosophers in non-academic careers — a new series at the Blog of the APA

“How do we respond to linguistic and stylistic diversity?” — Martin Lenz (Groningen) on language, diversity, and teaching

HISTORY SHOWS AGAIN AND AGAIN HOW NATURE POINTS UP THE FOLLY OF MAN:  ‘Man cannot win against nature’: Amid catastrophic floods, China’s dams come into question.