David Linden

An new interview with neuroscientist David J. Linden provides some physiological context and grounding for reconsidering and thinking anew about what it means to be human.

From the Point of Inquiry introduction:

Click here for the complete Point of Inquiry introduction and links to the interview and the iTunes subscription page for P.O.I.

David Linden’s The Accidental Mind provides more evidence for the essential role and function of narrativity or, in Linden’s words, the “always-on narrative creation system in the left cortex” in cultural evolution — especially in relation to myth, religion, scientific methodology, and the arts in general.

Taking into account the physiological can only further our understanding of how myths, religions, scientific theories, and aesthetic values have changed and evolved in the past and what directions and forms they might take in the future.

Steven Pinker

from the TED.com introduction:

“Steven Pinker’s books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds — the patterns in which our brain cells fire — predispose us each to think and behave differently.

His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.”

Click here to go to TED.com for more about Steven Pinker.

Every year, for the past 9 years, after graduation ceremonies, I take a short drive to Santa Monica and wait out rush hour by walking the Santa Monica Pier and hanging out on the Third Street promenade. Walking into the Thunderbolt bookstore I was astonished to find Jesus holding a bag imprinted with an album cover of the late 60’s, early 70’s band, It’s a Beautiful Day. Clicking the image will take you to a gallery of the Thunderbolt Bookstore photos I took that night.

It's a Beautiful Day bag

David Linden’s The Accidental Mind provides more evidence for the essential role and function of narrativity or, in Linden’s words, the “always-on narrative creation system in the left cortex” in cultural evolution — especially in relation to myth, religion, scientific methodology, and the arts in general.

Taking into account the physiological can only further our understanding of how myths, religions, scientific theories, and aesthetic values have changed and evolved in the past and what directions and forms they might take in the future.

Gerald Graff

In his early books, Literature Against Itself (1979) and Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987), Graff took as his main subjects literary theory and the institutional history of departments of English and literature, respectively. Literature Against Itself continues to be of interest and value for its discussion and analysis of competing schools of literary theory; and the historical narrative of the history of the post-secondary teaching of English that informs Professing Literature continues to enlighten anyone interested in curriculum design and canon-making. But perhaps these two early books can also be appreciated for their having afforded Graff the opportunity to work out the foundational arguments and historical perspectives that enabled him in his later books — Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992) and Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003) — to effectively argue and explain why students across the curriculum would benefit from a more critical style of pedagogy.

In Literature Against Itself Graff analyzes the premises, conclusions, and implications of various literary theories and contemporary schools of criticism in terms of their validity and effectiveness for pedagogy and criticism. And in Professing Literature Graff shows how the various teaching methods and choices of texts in departments of literature from the nineteenth though the early twentieth century suggest that new methods and new canons of study-worthy texts will continue to appear. In the more recent Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992), Graff foregrounds the conclusions and pedagogical injunctions proffered in his earlier books. In the decade following the publication of Beyond the Culture Wars, Graff himself decided to put the pedogogical injunctions based on his conclusions into practice, coediting, with James Phelan, two “critical controversy” textbooks: Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Tempest. Both of these textbooks are in their second editions. In his most recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), Graff continues to explore the pedagogical implications of what he discovered in researching and writing his earlier books on theory and the institutional history of literature departments.

Teaching the controversies or conflicts has ironically even been taken up by a group which eschews rational argument — a sine qua non of Graff’s critical pedagogy: religious fundamentalists. I would agree to a certain extent with anyone who thinks it unfortunate that some religious fundamentalists — in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses — have co-opted Graff’s phrase “teaching the controversies.” But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, however ironic or unintended, part of Graff’s legacy is to have afforded educators the pedagogic means to obviate the conditions in which thoughts of intellectual, political, or outright physical violence might flourish. So, by all means, let the fundamentalists, in good faith (interesting word!) teach the controversies — but in their religious schools not in public classrooms. Let the conflicts continue to be taught and discussed by everyone — rational free-thinkers and fundamentalists alike.

Let the controversies and the conversations they engender continue.

What makes something funny? Some years ago I picked up an anthology of pieces (they weren’t quite formal essays), by humorist S. J. Perelman. In the introduction the editor begins to answer the question but leaves off writing to attend to a laughing fit so severe he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wet cloth on his forehead.

Then there is the question of taste and political correctness. I’ll just pose the question: Why are so many jokes that many or most of us would laugh at in poor taste or politically incorrect? One person’s joke is another’s person’s “teachable moment.”

Some humorous writing or telling is good for the moment, while some pieces, episodes, images, scenes have something that triggers the humor center in generation after generation — certain lines and scenes in Shakespeare, for example, or Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels come to mind. I’m sure you can think of your own.

Here is a list of philosophical humor links selected from an even more comprehensive list at http://consc.net/phil-humor.html Some of them are sure to get you laughing or thinking about laughing (can you think and laugh at the same time?).

• Philosophical kisses
• Non-philosopher’s guide to philosophical terms
• Philosophical warning labels
• Philosophy light-bulb jokes
• A Descartes joke
• Understanding philosophy through jokes
• Brain in a vat at the wheel of a runaway trolley
• The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
• Husserl parody
• The Postmodernism Generator
• Realists Anonymous
• Tractatus Fuselagico-Umbilicus
• Witteringswine’s Philosophical Tribulations
• A fragment of a lost Platonic dialogue
• Tech support, Nietzsche style
• History of Greek philosophy
• Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding
• A rant about Kant
• Philosophy Comics
• Principia Comica
• Philosophy Cartoons
• Lump of Clay
• Berkeley on Locke on the material world
• Kant attack ad
• Kierkegaard
• History of Western Philosophy in 90 seconds
• Monty Python’s International Philosophy sketch
• Analytic philosophy as reflected in the works of Monty Python
• I also dated Zarathustra
• Self-referential story
• Everything is equally interesting
• Socrates’ Argument Clinic
• New logical particles
• Tractatus Logico-Randomus
• Zombies on the web
• Introductory philosophy quiz
• How to be a philosopher
• Nanophilosophy
• Philosophy Action Figures
• The Metaphysics Lecture
• Philosopher Jokes
• Chomskybot
• Mathematical Jokes
• Mathematical Humor
• Physics Humor
• Psychology Humor Page
• Science Humor
• Self-Reference Jokes
• Twinkies Project

I found this at http://vimeo.com/3261363

Definitely worth watching.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

I sat many hours in Northwestern University’s Harris lecture hall 107 during my years as an undergraduate and graduate student from 1968 to 1982.

As an undergraduate I listened to Alfred Appel lecture on James Joyce, Nathaniel West, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and the modernist significance of the great jazz artists of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker. How many college lectures have a soundtrack?

Appel’s lectures on Nabokov and the pop culture motifs that form much of the substance of Lolita informed and entertained us. Much of the content of Appel’s lectures on Nabokov and Lolita can be found, mutatis mutandis, in Appel’s still authoritative Annotated Lolita. Students listened in attentive silence to his lectures on Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and how Nick Adams found healing and relief for his battle-scarred psyche through fly fishing. This silence was atypical: more often than not, many of Appel’s lectures were punctuated with frequent laughter.

Appel made a lot of people laugh. I’ll never forget sitting in a Romantic poetry class on the second floor of University Hall when, just as Professor Gerald Prince was reciting these lines from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, “Away! away! for I will fly to thee, / Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,” Appel walks by the door opening to the hallway, flapping his arms like a bird. The class roared with laughter; Professor Prince, his back to the door, was dumbfounded.

In the early 70’s I also remember two other lecturers who held forth in Harris 107: anthropology professor Stuart Struever and guru to the hippies, Stephen Gaskin.

Hearing anthropology professor Stuart Struever explain how the Vietnam War was essentially “maladaptive” encouraged students to continue or begin their protests of the war. I was so impressed and moved by the perspectives that an anthropological approach to understanding opened up that I changed my major to anthropology. During the 1970’s Struever was host to 100’s of student assistants who helped in excavating the 10,000 year old Hopewell burial mounds in Greene County, Illinois, about 270 miles south of Chicago. Struever was a colorful character who wore denim jeans and khaki short sleeved shirts as often as a tie and jacket, who interjected into his lectures stories of the years he spent buying and selling artifacts for import and trade in Africa. Think Indiana Jones.

One warm spring evening in 1970 I listened to Stephen Gaskin — eventual founder of The Farm coop that settled in Tennessee — give a talk from a seated zazen half lotus pose, a talk about Buddha, weed, psilocybin, LSD,  Jesus, and enlightenment — not necessarily in that order. That lecture was eventually anthologized in Monday Night Class, still in print forty years later. I will also never forget wandering outside after Stephen’s talk to the parking lot along Lake Michigan and being invited into one of the caravan school buses that followed Stephen’s lecture tour from the left to right coast and back again. I hung out for an few hours with a several guys and girls who were sharing a converted school bus. To this day the smell of patchouli oil brings back with hallucinatory vividness that evening and that after-lecture party in a converted school bus.

As a graduate student teaching assistant some 10 years later in the early 80’s, I remember Martin Mueller’s lucid background lectures on Shakespeare, especially his talks about The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. The last lectures I attended in Harris 107  were given by Henry Binder in a course comparing literary and cinematic treatments of the “American West” with evening screenings of Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and The Wild Bunch.

These memories of hearing  experts of various kinds holding forth on their chosen fields of  literature, philosophy, religion, politics, history — memories now thirty and more years old — are a source of exquisite nostalgia. But nostalgia cloys, does not really satisfy, but that is part of its poignant, seductive charm, isn’t it? the fact that it does not satisfy.

Recently I discovered Bound to Please, an anthology of a quarter century’s worth of book reviews by Washington Post Book World editor, Michael Dirda. Dirda has spent his professional life reveling in the writings, thoughts, and works of  various authors, translators, biographers, artists, and historians who have each individually in turn dedicated their individual lives to exploring the works, thoughts, or times of their chosen subjects and fields of research.

Reading these reviews is like sitting once again as a bearded young man listening to an inspiring, knowledge-laden professor holding forth in Harris 107.

Postscript: By chance I happened to read recently that Harris Hall is being renovated. New generations of students and scholars — and perhaps a next-gen hippie-guru or two — await.

Get ready to laugh.

Ready? OK. Here goes.

A number of years ago the philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed a question in an essay titled eponymously with the question itself — What is it like to be a bat? In this essay Nagel analyzes certain reductionist theories of mind while exploring the various ways in which it can be said that we can in some sense “know” what it is like to be someone or something other than ourselves.

This question—What is it like to be a bat?—and the eponymous essay in which it was first proposed have been touchstones ever since for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, the mind/body problem, and the meaning, reality, or nature of consciousness and subjectivity.

The entire, fascinating subject can be handled less philosophically, more personally, colloquial-like. Imagine we are sharing a leisurely Sunday morning brunch at your favorite restaurant. I bring up Nagel’s essay in a light-hearted way and note the following:

• Changing just one letter, I ask: What is it like to be a Bob?
• Changing two words, I ask: What is it like be you?
• Changing even more words: What is it like to be something that can ask such questions?
• And so on.

The form of the question is simple; its contents, infinite.

If we ever meet, and you happen to ask me what it was like to laugh out loud (really hard and long) after writing the above, I would begin my answer by recounting an episode in the editor’s introduction to an anthology of  essays by the humorist S. J. Perelman. The editor excuses himself mid-introduction, just after rhetorically posing the question: What is humor? Upon returning to finish writing the introduction, the editor informs us that beginning to think of an answer sent him into a laughing fit so severe that he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wash cloth draping his forehead.

The editor never does answer the question, instead he cleverly suggests that the Perelman essays to follow will present an answer to the question of what humor is — what makes something funny — much better than any answer he might attempt in the expository prose of his introduction.

One final question. If you ask: What is it like to be us? I would answer laughter (don’t laugh now, wait a sec, keep reading), I would answer that laughter defines us right now, at this very moment.  But only if you laugh, right now.

LOL