I Was a Brain in a Vat
https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...ain-in-a-vat/17FB89E0A1DE424BB65259AAE5EC28A1
ABSTRACT: Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is. In his 1981 book,
Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat’’, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world. The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat... (
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Why philosophy of physics?
https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-philosophy-of-physics-when-you-can-do-physics-itself
INTRO: When I’m making small talk at parties and suchlike, revealing to others that I’m a philosopher of physics is a little bit like rolling the dice. What reaction am I going to get? The range is pretty broad, from ‘What does philosophy have to do with physics?’ to ‘Oh, that’s way above my pay grade!’ to (on happier occasions) ‘That sounds amazing, tell me more!’ to (on less happy occasions) ‘What a waste of taxpayer’s money! You should be doing engineering instead!’
Only the last of these responses is downright stupid, but otherwise the range of reactions is perfectly reasonable and understandable: philosophers of physics are, of course, not ten-a-penny, and what we’re up to is hardly obvious from the job description. So what I want to do here is sketch what the philosophy of physics really amounts to, the current state of play in the field, and how this state of play came about... (
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‘The Revolution to Come’ Review: Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes (book review)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/bo...b?st=LwgisY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
EXCERPTS: In his book “
The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea From Thucydides to Lenin,” Dan Edelstein argues that the 18th of Brumaire did not end the French Revolution but consummated it.
“Authoritarianism,” he writes, “is one of the most striking features” of revolutions. Napoleon was an archetype, followed by a grim parade of successors: “Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot … Khomeini.” These dictators are not counterrevolutionary figures in his account but pre-eminent revolutionaries. They resolve what Mr. Edelstein calls a “structural problem with modern revolutions”: namely, disagreement over precisely what sort of historical progress any given revolution is destined to attain.
[...] For the ancient Greeks, and for millennia thereafter, political turmoil was “revolutionary” in that it was a perennial pathology of cyclical history, bringing only pointless suffering... (
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The Political Journey of Thomas Mann
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-political-journey-of-thomas-mann
EXCERPT: There is no real inconsistency here, of course. Conservatism is itself a venerable ideological commitment within liberalism, and there were any number of anti-Nazi conservatives who suffered as much for their resistance as those on the left did. What’s significant about
Mann’s anti-Nazi conservatism is that even as he bravely denounced Hitler, he remained the author of
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man.
That is, unlike many Marxists, he could never reduce all aspects of human experience to
material conditions and
class conflict. He understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical. True to his conservative inclinations, Mann was drawn to metaphors of disease and infection—cholera in
Death in Venice, tuberculosis in
The Magic Mountain, even tooth decay in
Buddenbrooks.
When he wrote
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he named democracy a disease, but he came to see that the opposite was true. For Mann, the method of analysis remained unchanged, but he would put it to different ends. Thinking like a man of the right, he would work for left-of-center ends—and do so even more effectively precisely because of his fundamentally conservative disposition... (
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What happened to Shulamith Firestone?
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/hazards-of-reality/
EXCERPTS: Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia,
Firestone spent the next decade in and out of the psych ward at Beth Israel, sometimes stable, sometimes paranoid and screaming, sometimes lucid, sometimes terrified of poisoned food and government agents hiding behind the faces of friends, sometimes simply catatonic. When she suddenly re-emerged in 1997, not only evidently working again but having already completed an entire manuscript...
[...] Her second book would also be her last. Although Firestone lived another fourteen years, she never published again, much less returned to public politics. She’d only been able to write
Airless Spaces with the support of a psychiatrist and network of friends who had assumed responsibility for her care...
[...] In
Harper’s, meanwhile, Audrey Wollen presents a more sophisticated reading of
Airless Spaces, finding her way to unity between the two Firestones by reading her earlier work as a failed “prophecy.”
The Dialectic of Sex, she writes, was a “wildly flawed, and wildly far-flung” work that “verges on the silvered edge of science fiction.” But the feminist future Firestone predicted came to pass in precisely the wrong way. The
second wave fell apart. The utopian technologist revolution Firestone envisioned instead produced the technology for patriarchal revanchism: where Firestone saw the technological future liberating women from the vagaries of childbearing and heterosexual subjugation, it instead delivered the secret children of Elon Musk. Firestone’s prophesy was “off by a mile, a mile as narrow as a hair’s breadth,” Wollen writes.
[...] At the turn of the century, the critic Catherine Prendergast found schizophrenic writers trapped between two kinds of readers: the dismissive and the fawning. “Historically, the severely mentally ill have been granted either no insight or insight of an enhanced and often creative or spiritual nature,” she wrote. They are either “mad poets” or “mental patients” producing “music” or “word salad.” “I sense from reading
Foucault that the position of the mad poet is to be regarded as preferable to the position of the mental patient,” Prendergast went on, but barely... (
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