Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good

 

“I've never wished a man dead, but I've read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

— Mark Twain

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The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and was clearly heard 3,000 miles away.

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history.

1. Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good by Krista K. Thomason, Anxiety: a Philosophical Guide by Samir Chopra, and Anxiety and Wonder: on Being Human by Maria Balaska are together reviewed by Jane O’Grady at The Times Literary Supplement. 
2. Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexander Lefebvre is reviewed by Galen Watts at The Point.
3. What are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman is reviewed by Jay Caspian Kang at The New Yorker. 
4. Moral Feelings: Moral Reality and Moral Progress and Analytic Philosophy and Human Life by Thomas Nagel are together reviewed by Jane O’Grady at Philosophy Now.
5. Awkwardness: A Theory by Alexandra Plakias is reviewed by Miranda France at The Times Literary Supplement.
6. How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold: Tale of a Redemption by Philipp Felsch is reviewed by Peter Salmon at Jacobin. 
7. The Prison Before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy by Jacob Abolafia is reviewed by Clive Stafford Smith at The Times Literary Supplement. 

Compiled by Michael Glawson

BONUS: No moral worth

1. The owl problem: how many Barred Owls may be killed, if any, to save the Northern Spotted Owl? — Jay Odenbaugh (Lewis & Clark) discusses the matter on NPR’s “On Point”
2. “Stebbing… suggests a project for analytic moral and political philosophy very different from what developed in post WWII era which often abstracted away from such richly empirically embedded social theory” — Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the moral philosophy Susan Stebbing
3. Arguments against censoriousness shouldn’t depend on the idea that “knowledge requires ‘attempted debunking’” — Brad Skow (MIT) on a popular kind of argument for freedom of expression
4. “Technology addiction has affected students’ general agency when interacting with information” — Megan Fritts (Arkansas Little Rock) is the featured in an article on students and LLMs after a tweet of hers about the topic went viral
5. “His interminable questioning, his striving for the truth, and his exposure of others’ hypocrisy had to be unquestionably political, or else, why would he be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the state?” — Joel Christensen (Brandeis) on Socrates and complaints about the politicization of higher ed
6. “Some of my classmates in the PhD program… would tell me that I was getting A’s while they were getting B’s because, as one of the only women in the program, it wouldn’t look good if I were to fail” — Carol Hay (UMass Lowell) on her path into philosophy (at first-genphilosophers)
7. “We should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously” — Alexandra Plakias (Hamilton) explains why

1. “Researchers will now try to use the [“nuclear clock”] transition to observe whether the laws of physics vary over time” — “There’s something special about the isotope thorium-229”
2. A philosopher creates a “silly” online game intended to work like Magritte’s “Treachery of Images” to raise questions about representation — Nele Van de Mosselaer (Tilburg) explains why
3. Want to know whether anyone has worked on some scientific problem, and what they learned? Ask “Has anyone?” — part of a project to develop AI scientists
4. “The circumstances for studying philosophy in a college… are in the midst of great change” — and “the history of philosophical study in the US offers some insight into what this great change might look like,” says Joseph Keegin (Tulane)
5. The philosophy of history in ancient and medieval China — how different is it from modern Western approaches? — Esther Sunkyung Klein and Aidan Ryall (ANU) discuss this on Australian public radio
6. “Attacks on voting, and democratic systems generally, almost invariably center on universities, and vice versa” — Jason Stanley (Yale) on “why fascists hate universities”
7. “One might say it’s just introspectively obvious that these experiences are unified… [but] it seems at least conceptually possible that the act of introspection creates unity where none was before” — Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) on the unity of consciousness