Category: ideas

Many laypeople, and more than a few logicians, consider logic “an umpire, a neutral arbitrator between opposing theories, imposing some basic rules on all sides in a dispute. The picture is that logic has no substantive content, for otherwise the correctness of that content could itself be debated, which would impugn the neutrality of logic.” Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson explains why this is – illogical.

“The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.”

Glass, steel and concrete – building materials born out of other disasters – didn’t serve Japan well during the earthquake and tsunami. Architect Kengo Kuma has some other ideas about how to build for a country plagued by natural disasters.

“The dream of using computers to translate human language goes back to the very early days of computing, when computers still used vacuum tubes. But it has consistently proved elusive.”

“Regifting is often presented as synonymous with tackiness, but the taboo on the practice is partly the result of a misunderstanding: Recipients of gifts think the givers are far more offended by regifting than they truly are. Givers assume that they’ve passed on ‘title’ to the gift and that recipients can do what they wish with it. Receivers, meanwhile, feel constrained by the giver’s original wishes.”

“For a long time, many English speakers have felt that the language was going to the dogs. All around them, people were talking about ‘parameters’ and ‘life styles,’ saying ‘disinterested’ when they meant ‘uninterested,’ ‘fulsome’ when they meant ‘full.’ … To others, the complainers were fogies and snobs. The usages they objected to were cause not for grief but for celebration. They were pulsings of our linguistic lifeblood, proof that English was large, contained multitudes.”

“One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, nihilism was born. Its midwife was the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose greatest work, Fathers and Sons, appeared in the spring of 1862 and heaved the immense figure of Yevgeny Bazarov into the world. Doctor by vocation and nihilist by avocation, Bazarov today would scarcely recognize what has become of the philosophy he launched. Nihilism is not what it once was and we are marking the most meaningless of anniversaries.”

In a sermon last month (in the lead-up to the referendum on marriage equality), North Carolina pastor Sean Harris, ‘Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist.’ Why do we associate a limp wrist with male homosexuality?”

Things got a bit heated at The Chronicle of Higher Education when one of its contributing bloggers, in an attack on the discipline of African-American Studies, mocked the research in some dissertations that had been featured in a Chronicle article – without having read any of the papers she was attacking.