How Women Are Harassed Out of Science

'O problema é que as mudanças significativas requerem um nível de acção e cooperação colectivas para além do que são capazes as academias e universidades, agora lamentavelmente ocupadas em competiir umas com as outras em tudo e mais alguma coisa.'

Tim Crane in, The peer review industry: implausible and outrageous

(acerca do nihilismo das sociedades contemporâneas, a partir do mural encomendado pela Goldman Sachs a Julie Mehretu, da ausência de narrativas coerentes e dos actos que se esgotam em si mesmos, serem comuns às elites e a todos os outros que as criticam)

Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre gave a lecture to Notre Dame’s Center of Ethics and Culture in 2000 about the compartmentalization of our ethical lives. He argued that in modern Western culture these different areas are governed by different ethical norms and standards. The example he gives is how a waiter at a restaurant acts differently in the kitchen than in front of the customer. In the kitchen it is normal to yell, curse, and touch the food with his bare hands; none of this would be appropriate in front of the customer. And when the waiter goes home, his personal life is dictated by a further third set of norms. Or consider how the ethics of lying are treated differently during a job interview versus at home or at a law office. Like the painting in the Goldman Sachs lobby, our ethical lives seem to be made of different layers that don’t connect. Our culture no longer shares a single ethical narrative, and so our choices are not weighed against a standard that’s consistent. Rather, people ask that their choices be accepted simply because they were made.

James McElroy, Goldman Sachs Lobby Art Explains Everything That’s Wrong With Our Elites (What this $5 million mural says about art and finance stewing in the same nihilistic culture pot.)

Numa época em que os ingleses começavam a fazer turismo dentro do país e os nobres deixavam que se visitasse the grounds os que tinham espírito mais empreendedor procuravam ter pontos de interesse que atraíssem os visitantes. Hence, um eremita no jardim :)

If you were a grand gentlemen of the Georgian era, having a huge country house with lavishly landscaped grounds wasn’t enough to impress your visitors. No, you needed a little something extra. You needed an ornamental hermit.

How to Tell If You’re a Jerk

If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.

Jerks are people who culpably fail to appreciate the perspectives of the people around them, treating others as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with, rather than as moral and epistemic peers. To be a jerk is to be ignorant in a certain way—ignorant of the value of others, ignorant of the merit of their ideas and plans, dismissive of their desires and beliefs, unforgiving of their perceived inferiority. The nugget of folk wisdom in calling certain people jerks is to highlight this particular species of deficiency.

Jerks see the world through goggles that dim others’ humanity. The server at the restaurant is not a potentially interesting person with a distinctive personality, life story, and set of goals to which you might possibly relate. Instead, he is merely a tool by which to secure a meal or a fool on which you can vent your anger. The people ahead of you at Starbucks are faceless and of no account. Those beneath you in the social hierarchy lack your talents and deserve to get the scut work.

The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein

O THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, começou uma série de artigos a que chamou, Footnotes To Plato, a célebre frase de Whitehead acerca da Filosofia. São artigos acerca do pensamento e legado de grandes filósofos e pensadores. Muito interessante para se ter uma ideia geral acerca deles e do seu pensamento.

But most of them, according to Brennan, treat politics like a spectator sport or, even worse, a brutal contact sport. The completely ignorant are what he calls “hobbits”; by contrast, those who root for one team and hate the other are “hooligans.” For hooligans, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: They understand enough to be deeply convinced that their team is on the side of the angels and that the other side are devils (witness how 40 percent of Trump supporters in Florida thought that Hillary Clinton had literally emerged from hell). But they are incapable of rationally weighing policy options or even comprehending their own basic interests. For the hooligans, it’s all about identity.

(Blaming the People, Is democracy really the problem?)

Maurizio Bettini : «La pureté supposée d’une culture n’existe pas, n’a jamais existé et n’existera jamais»

How ‘white people’ were invented by a playwright in 1613

The Case Against Reality

... what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality.

(...)

On one side you’ll find researchers scratching their chins raw trying to understand how a three-pound lump of gray matter obeying nothing more than the ordinary laws of physics can give rise to first-person conscious experience.

(...)

On the other side are quantum physicists, marveling at the strange fact that quantum systems don’t seem to be definite objects localized in space until we come along to observe them.

'In Everything I Do, I Aim to Strengthen Democracy'

SPIEGEL: Ms. Merkel, in the U.S., the president shows disdain for the judiciary and for the media - and, more broadly, for democratic values. Is democracy losing momentum around the world?

Merkel: I hope not. For my part, in everything I do, I aim to strengthen democracy in Germany and beyond. The United States is also a strong democracy. As we are seeing in Poland, for example, and also in Hungary, it is important that we have counterweights in democratic systems, and I believe they are still strong in America. [???]

Esta entrevista é fascinante. Infelizmente o meu conhecimento de linguística e etimologia é completamente irrelevante (e da língua alemã praticmente nulo) e, por isso, não consigo ajuizar da realidade/irrealidade das especulações do indivíduo sobre as diferenças entre as línguas mas, sabendo alguma coisa de Filosofia e, partindo do princípio que uma língua é uma relação muito específica e marcante de apropriação/contrução da realidade, se o que o indivíduo diz tem algum fundamento, mesmo tendo em conta algum exagero, a entrevista é cheia de ideias interessantes e inspiradoras. 

– Toutes les langues du nord ne mettent pas le verbe à la fin…

– Disons que l’allemand est la langue qui a poussé à l’extrême son propre principe de cohérence. Prenez l’horizon métaphorique du mot «appartenance»: en français, il évoque un appartement. En allemand Zugehörichkeit contient le verbe hören, entendre: on appartient à un groupe si l’on est capable d’entendre son appel. Le rapport au réel passe par l’ouïe. C’est pourquoi la musique constitue l’une des contributions principales des germanophones à la culture universelle. Avec la philosophie spéculative, qui est son corollaire. La «logique» hégélienne peut en effet être lue comme l’équivalent d’une phrase allemande ininterrompue alignant tous les éléments possibles du verbe «être». On retrouve le même souci d’exhaustivité dans le traitement du thème musical (Durchführung) de la sonate clas­sique.

– Vous êtes contre toute idée de langue unique?

– Oui. La nostalgie d’un paradis pré-babélique est très régressive. Le principe de vie, c’est la différenciation: vive la prolifération des langues!

* Heinz Wismann, philosophe allemand à Paris, auteur de «Penser entre les langues». (Le Temps.ch)