Coloring the Plane: Ramsey’s Theorem Revisited and the Moser Spindle

by Jonathan Kujawa

A few months ago I wrote about one of my favorite results in math: Ramsey's Theorem. It tells us that when we look at things at a large enough scale complete chaos is impossible. That is, if we look hard enough we inevitably find patterns. Call it the Conspiracy Theory Theorem.

Ramsey's theorem launched an entire field of mathematics which answers questions of the form “In such-and-such a setting, what kind of structure do we find if we look on a large enough scale?”. Or you might instead ask: “In such-and-such a setting, if I want to avoid a certain structure on large scales, what do I have to do?”. Of course, it's usually easier to ask the question than to find the answer [1].

A famous recent example is the Green-Tao Theorem. In 2004 Ben Green and Terence Tao proved that within the prime numbers you can find arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. The prime numbers are the ones which can only be evenly divided by one and themselves (and so have to do with multiplication/division). They are rather randomly distributed amongst all the numbers, but the Green-Tao theorem says that if you look for the right kind of structure (sequences of numbers given by addition) and at a large enough scale, then you can't avoid finding it. It is a striking result which was among the reasons Dr. Tao earned the Fields medal in 2006 and has put Dr. Green in the running for a Fields medal this year [2].

When reading up on Ramsey's Theorem I discovered a delightful book edited by Alexander Soifer entitled “Ramsey Theory: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow“. It mixes the history and mathematics of Ramsey theory and covers everything from pre-Ramsey Ramsey theory up to the current state of the art.

From this book I learned of an irresistible 60+ year old question called the Hadwiger-Nelson problem. It's easy to state:

If you want to color the points of the Euclidean plane in such a way as to guarantee that there are never two points of the same color which are exactly one unit apart, how many colors do you need?

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Sam Hamill Interviewed

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

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Photo by Ian Boyden

When you listen as keenly for humanity’s pulse as Sam Hamill does, you “fall into the place where everything is music”— in Rumi’s words. This is the music where all cultures meet, where the spirit finds its truest articulation: a place impossible even to imagine in our present global reality defined by the fractures of an ever-deepening mistrust between people. Through his poetry, translation, teaching, editing and publishing, Sam confronts the weaponry of power-hungry systems. He describes his practice as “serving in the temple of poetry”— the only place, perhaps, where all human languages have an equal chance to grow and blossom because they all have an equal claim on poetry and on ennobling humanity. I recently spoke with Sam Hamill via email:

Shadab: On the eleventh anniversary of “poets against war,” arguably the most impressive anti-war movement since Vietnam, what are your thoughts as the founder and the leading voice of the movement?

Sam: Little has changed. We have fewer civil rights, and we’ve spread the death machine ever more widely, and this has clearly become war-without-end. The US government is the largest and most successful terrorist organization in the world, threatening all peoples everywhere. My on-line anthology, Poets Against the War, collected 30,000 poems by 26,000 poets protesting the attack on Iraq. That is the largest single-theme anthology in all of history. Did it stop the invasion? No. Of course not. But it became a part of the history of that criminal war and its extension into other countries.

Shadab: What drew you to translation? Being among the best known and prolific literary translators, what do you find most rewarding about the process and the product?

Sam: I grew up reading Greek and Roman myths and tales and then reading Rexroth and others on Zen, reading the Spanish poets, the Harvard Classics, etc, it was natural that I’d want to know more. My Zen practice drew me into the world of Asian classics.

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Monday Poem

Birds on a wire


Birds on a wire are made a melod
y

Synchronous

the universe is synchronous
its beauties overlap
tunes are made of birds on wires
Leonard Cohen taught us that
and now another gives this song to us

nature plays its songs for us
its riffs are made of days
its melodies are made of suns and moons,
of particles and waves
that are each, but synchronous

all her songs belong to us
each is ours to keep
the ruthless ones of hearts on fire
the ones sublime and deep
the ones both right and wrong for us
.

Jim Culleny
4/27/14

Birds on a wire by Leonard Cohen
.

Does Literary Fiction Challenge Racial Stereotypes?

by Jalees Rehman

A book is a mirror: if a fool looks in, do not expect an apostle to look out.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

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Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of the recent research has centered on the question of whether literary fiction can increase empathy. In 2013, Bal and Veltkamp published a paper in the journal PLOS One showing that subjects who read excerpts from literary texts scored higher on an empathy scale than those who had read a nonfiction text. This increase in empathy was predominantly found in the participants who felt “transported” (emotionally and cognitively involved) into the literary narrative. Another 2013 study published in the journal Science by Kidd and Castano suggested that reading literary fiction texts increased the ability to understand and relate to the thoughts and emotions of other humans when compared to reading either non-fiction or popular fiction texts.

Scientific assessments of how fiction affects empathy are fraught with difficulties and critics raise many legitimate questions. Do “empathy scales” used in psychology studies truly capture the psychological phenomenon of “empathy”? How long does the effect of reading literary fiction last and does it translate into meaningful shifts in behavior? How does one select appropriate literary fiction texts and control texts, and conduct such studies in a heterogeneous group of participants who probably have very diverse literary tastes? Kidd and Castano, for example, used an excerpt of The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht as a literary fiction text because the book was a finalist for the National Book Award, whereas an excerpt of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn was used as a ‘popular fiction' text even though it was long-listed for the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction.

The recent study “Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction” led by the psychology researcher Dan Johnson from Washington and Lee University took a somewhat different approach. Instead of assessing global changes in empathy, Johnson and colleagues focused on a more specific question. Could the reading of a fictional narrative change the perception of racial stereotypes?

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Attacking the Value of Art is Not a Good Strategy for Altruists

by Dwight Furrow

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Destruction of the Buddhas 2001 Creative Commons License

The pages of Aeon contained one of the most dispiriting articles I have ever read. The author, a budding screenwriter, falls in with advocates of the Effective Altruism movement. They proceed to half-persuade him to give up his artistic pursuit because it is not as useful to society as finding a “real job” and donating his salary to charity. He then poses the question which for him is existential:

Is your self-expression more important than human lives and suffering? Would you rather contribute to the culture of rich societies than work to reduce the suffering of the poor, or of future generations? Is it not arbitrary to fill the world with your own personal spin on things, simply because it's yours?

In the end, he is not sure if the arts are where he wants to be:

“For now, that will have to be my justification. I'm not ready to give up writing. I'm not ready to take up some high-paid job that I'd hate in order to reduce the world's suffering. Maybe that will change. For now, call me Net-Positive Man. “

Has the world lost another Shakespeare?

Effective Altruism is a movement devoted to the utilitarian notion that we are morally required to maximize the good we do in the world. According to this view, in our choice of careers and activities we should use empirical evidence and cost-effectiveness calculations to determine what will do the most good by reducing suffering. Thus, for someone with artistic talent they are obligated to sell their talents to the highest bidder and then contribute the bulk of their earnings to the most effective charities. Only in rare cases where a work of art directly contributes to reducing suffering (or perhaps to producing propaganda for Effective Altruism) would it be justified to devote time and energy to artistic production. It is not enough for a person to do more good than harm; you must make yourself irreplaceable by producing more good than someone else could have produced in your place.

I find this dispiriting because the vision of human life embodied in the Effective Altruism movement is profoundly ugly and dehumanizing.

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Don’t Call a Gypsy a gypsy

by Tamuira Reid

Bucharest, Romania, 2009. Madonna gyrates her way across a brightly lit stage in front of 60,000 screaming fans. Suddenly she stops, looks sternly out into the crowd. “It has been brought to my attention … that there is a lot of discrimination against Romanies and gypsies in general in Eastern Europe,” she says. “It made me feel very sad. We don't believe in discrimination [where I come from] … we believe in freedom and equal rights for everyone.”

And then it happens. Nearly all of the 60,000 adoring fans turn into a huge jeering mass. They boo her.

But this doesn’t faze Madonna. She dusts off her thigh highs, clicks her heels and goes on with her show, resuming the usual bumping and grinding that has made her so famous. She did what she set out to do – to give a “shout out” to her gypsy peeps, seeing as she has recently become an admirer of several Gypsy dancers, even going as far as to invite them on her tour. Maybe the pop icon will inspire others to jump on the “Gypsies are cool” bandwagon (no pun intended).

First things first, Madonna: never call a Gypsy a gypsy.

_____

There are somewhere between 8-10 million Roma or Romani (derogatively referred to as “gypsy”, the lowercase “g” insinuating that it’s not a proper noun) currently living in Eastern Europe. It’s impossible to get an accurate count because of the number of Roma who are undocumented by governments that still refuse to claim them or to acknowledge their existence as anything other than outsider.

With the resurgence of hate crimes against the Roma throughout Eastern Europe, the Western World is starting to ask, “Who are these people exactly?” Even though the Roma have been persecuted and murdered in droves since well before WWII, it has taken the general global public decades to become interested.

Roma did not have proper representation in the EU until fairy recently and no one has been held accountable for them — they’ve been left to fend for themselves — and this lack of belonging only heightens their status as outsiders.

They have been forced from their homes, whether burned out, bombed out or physically dragged out, and have had no choice but to live in a parallel universe, existing on the periphery of a society that does not and will not claim them. They are travelers not driven by wanderlust, but driven out by hatred.

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Love in the Time of Colometa

by Madhu Kaza

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After I heard the recent news that Gabriel García Márquez had died, and after I'd read the obituaries and tributes, and reminisced about my own early encounters with his fiction, I knew it was time to read another great 20th century writer: and so this week I finally read Mercè Rodoreda's novel La plaça del Diamant. Rodoreda had become one of my favorite writers on the basis of a few short stories I'd read a couple of years ago in the collection My Christina. But I hadn't delved more deeply into her work. I knew that García Márquez had been a champion of her writing, and that a month after her own death in April, 1983 he wrote a moving tribute to her in the pages of the Spanish daily, El Pais.

In the piece titled, “Do you know who Mercè Rodoreda was?” García Márquez wrote of his grief at hearing the news of her death, not only because of his great admiration for her work, but also because outside of Spain her death had not been widely noted, and she hadn't received what he felt were her due honors. Rodoreda was born in Barcelona in 1908 and began publishing at a young age. After the Spanish Civil War, when the Catalan language was banned in public and the culture harshly supressed, Rodoreda went into exile. For nearly twenty years, until 1957 she published nothing. In 1962 she published La plaça del Diamant (translated as The Time of the Doves by David Rosenthal in 1981), widely regarded as her masterpiece and a masterpiece of Catalan literature. García Márquez wrote of her as an “invisible woman who wrote tough, beautiful novels in splendid Catalan.” Reading Rodoreda's work for the first time was as dazzling for him as his first encounter with the work of Juan Rulfo. Of The Time of the Doves, he remarked, “In my view, it is the most beautiful novel that's been published in Spain after the Civil War.”

The Time of the Doves narrates the experiences of Natalia, a young shop assistant in Barcelona in the bleak years before, during and just after the Civil War. Natalia is neither ambitious, nor assertive. At the beginning of the novel she goes to a dance only because, as she says, “It was hard for me to say no if someone asks me to do something.” It almost seems that Natalia marries the carpenter Quimet for the same reason; at the dance he announces that by the end of the year she will be his wife, and shortly thereafter, with little resistance, Natalia breaks off her previous engagement and marries him.

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Where are the limes, and What is to be Done?

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

DownloadThe Great North American Lime Shortage of 2014 has people panicked. As the heat of the summer looms, the national media is running frenzied articles, families are being ripped apart, bartenders are at each other's throats and lime hoarding is rampant. The causes of this terrible situation read like a list of contemporary American anxieties. Consumption (of limes) has risen dramatically since the 70s, and people have been living beyond their means, delaying the inevitable reckoning with citrus-fueled bacchanalias. Globalization and the destruction of lime farming in the U.S. now means that most limes here come from Mexico. And this production has been severely damaged by a combination of bad weather (probably caused by global warming), bacterial infection (no doubt drug resistant) and, of course, drug cartels[1], who are supposed to be hijacking supply.

When asked excessively metaphysical questions (“Is the world finite?”), the Buddha would not answer and instead told the story of a man shot with a poisoned arrow, who refused to have a doctor attend to him until he knew who his assailant was, why he had been shot, what kind of bow was used and which animal's feathers were used to make the arrow. Taking a similar pragmatic stance, we will not inquire further into the ultimate causes of the lime shortage and simply discuss coping mechanisms (or, if you prefer, routes to salvation). And to fortify ourselves we will remember that possibility emerges within constraints and it is hard to create anything interesting without them.

To replace the lime we must first know the lime and understand its particular role. At least to a first approximation, this rests on its utility as a source both of acidity and of fragrant citrus oils[2], and so these are the dimensions we will seek to replace.

Much of what makes citrus fruits distinctive (as opposed to just generically sour-sweet) comes from particular aromatic oils and the oil glands in the peel are especially rich sources of these. The classical citrus aromas result from compounds like limonene which, unsurprisingly, smells like lemons and is extracted for use in both fragrances and cleaning products. But the peels also contain piney and herbaceous oils, in line with the general observation that almost nothing has a simple aroma. A nice way to introduce yourself to these aromatic oils (if you haven't already) is to use a vegetable peeler to cut a swath of lemon rind and twist it, which breaks the glands and releases the oil. This is a deservedly popular garnish for cocktails. Note that by “peel” I just mean the superficial yellow part; the white pith that lies underneath is bitter and should be avoided (though as in marmalade, small amounts of this bitterness can nicely complement added sugar).

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The Fundamental Trouble with Narendra Modi

by Kathleen Goodwin

Narendra-modiIn the spring of 2012, I spent four weeks in Delhi conducting interviews for my senior thesis, an analysis of the systematic massacre of 3,000 members of the Delhi Sikh community in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's assassination by two Sikh members of her own security detail in 1984. While I had vaguely contemplated comparing the events of '84 to the pogroms in Gujarat in 2002, which entailed organized killing of over 1,000 Muslims, I found that every single interviewee was unable to discuss Delhi in '84 without an immediate comparison to Gujarat in '02. What is striking, as I comb through the transcripts of my interviews today, is the shared view of my interviewees that it was unlikely that Narendra Modi would manage to become Prime Minister of India. This list includes venerable political commentators including Madhu Kishwar, Hartosh Singh Bal, and Ashis Nandy, among others. And now as I click through the home pages of India's English language newspapers and weekly publications, there is an excess of articles already analyzing the effects of Modi's assuming the Prime Minister's office. The predictions of those in Western periodicals was most succinctly captured in Modi's inclusion on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2014 that was published this week. Fareed Zakaria writes, “Narendra Modi, who — if the opinion polls are accurate — is poised to become India's next Prime Minister, and thus the world leader chosen by the largest electorate on the planet.”

Of course, Modi has not won yet, and stranger things have happened in politics than a last minute upset, but nearly all signs point to the May 16 announcement that the next Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy is a man who was unequivocally complicit, if not directly responsible, for mass murder of a minority group. This outcome was unfathomable to many acutely politically attuned (albeit left leaning) Indians just two years ago. What precisely has changed to allow the rise of Narendra Modi, whose taint from 2002 was thought to be crippling? The answer is that both circumstance and individual cunning have allowed Modi to exploit a deeply frustrated Indian populace. As Zakaria admits, Modi, “has a reputation for autocratic rule and a dark Hindu-nationalist streak. But those concerns are waning in a country desperate for change.”

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A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind

Jennifer Oullette in Quanta:

Sand-brain-1_james_o_brienIn 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed “self-organized criticality.”

As much as scientists in other fields adore outspoken, know-it-all physicists, Bak’s audacious idea — that the brain’s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from the disordered electrical activity of neurons — did not meet with immediate acceptance.

But over time, in fits and starts, Bak’s radical argument has grown into a legitimate scientific discipline. Now, about 150 scientists worldwide investigate so-called “critical” phenomena in the brain, the topic of at least three focused workshops in 2013 alone. Add the ongoing efforts to found a journal devoted to such studies, and you have all the hallmarks of a field moving from the fringes of disciplinary boundaries to the mainstream.

More here.

The Possibility of Self-Sacrifice

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Oded Na’aman in Boston Review:

Normally, death is present in our lives as an ending-yet-to-arrive. For most of us, Simone Weil writes, “Death appears as a limit set in advance on the future.” We make plans, pursue goals, navigate relationships—all under the condition of death. We lead our lives under the condition of death; our actions are shaped by it as a surface is shaped by its boundaries.

However, as we approach this boundary, when our end is present, we are nothing but terror. All pursuits disintegrate, and our self-understanding collapses. At once we are expelled from the sphere of meaning. We are nothing more than this body. This body and its last breath. It is not simply that we cannot survive our own death; we cannot bear the sight of it. We do not want to die. Not now.

And yet the possibility of self-sacrifice suggests that this terror can be overcome, that death can be meaningful. One recent example is that of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in December 2010 and whose death put in motion the massive uprising known as the Arab Spring. But there are many less noted acts of self-sacrifice. In different places and moments in time, in different languages and cultures, soldiers, activists, lovers, friends, and parents exhibit a willingness to die that demands our attention.

Such acts, so difficult to comprehend, may seem at first sight unworthy of serious consideration. But rushing to this conclusion would be a mistake. It is not only that by dismissing acts of self-sacrifice as unintelligible we disavow a prevalent and influential human phenomenon. Understanding these acts may also shed light on the way we value things more generally. Indeed, we will see that even if most of us will never actually take such extreme measures, the possibility of self-sacrifice is part of living a meaningful life.

More here.

Ants Swarm Like Brains Think

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Carrie Arnold in Nautilus:

Each of the brain’s 86 billion neurons can be connected to many thousands of others. When a neuron fires, it sends a signal to nearby neurons that changes the probability that they will also fire. Some neurons are excitatory, and increase the chances that other neurons will fire. Others are inhibitory, and reduce this chance. A combination of inputs from a given neuron’s neighbors will determine if it fires. If two neurons make each other fire often, the synapse between them (a small gap across which chemical or electrical signals are passed) will strengthen, so that they can more readily provide feedback to each other.

“This is where you get the saying that ‘Neurons that fire together, wire together,’ ” says Dmitri Chklovskii, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. But what is often not appreciated about this adage is that wiring also requires the second neuron to send a message to the first that it, too, has fired.

“The only way the upstream neuron knows that the second neuron fired is that it produces a feedback spike. This helps the synapse make the decision to get stronger,” Chklovskii says. Feedback is where the similarity with ants begins. “Feedback loops are everywhere on every level. They allow the system to realize that what it used to be doing isn’t working any more, and to try something new.”

Both ants and brains actually rely on two types of feedback, held in a delicate balance: negative (or inhibitory) feedback, and positive (or excitatory) feedback. “Negative feedback tends to cause stability. Positive feedback tends to cause runaway behavior,” said Tomer Czaczkes, an ant biologist at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “These two simple rules make something very powerful.”

The foraging response to food is an example of a positive feedback loop, and familiar to anyone who has had a picnic ruined by a line of ants marching in single file toward their meal. But knowing when not to leave the nest and risk predation and dehydration may be just as important as knowing when to take advantage of a windfall of seeds. At low levels of an input (a small amount of food, for example) positive feedback dominates. At high levels of input, negative feedback dominates, helping to prevent runaway processes.

More here.

India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade

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Wendy Doniger in the NYRB (photo: Kuni Takahashi/The New York Times/Redux):

In February of this year, after a long career of relative obscurity in the ivory tower, I suddenly became notorious. In 2010, Penguin India had published a book of mine,The Hindus: An Alternative History, which won two awards in India: in 2012, the Ramnath Goenka Award, and in 2013, the Colonel James Tod Award. But within months of its publication in India, a then-eighty-one-year-old retired headmaster named Dina Nath Batra, a proud member of the far-right organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had brought the first of a series of civil and criminal actions against the book, arguing that it violated Article 295a of the Indian Penal Code, which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class” of citizens.

After fighting the case for four years, Penguin India, which had recently merged with Bertelsmann, abandoned the lawsuit, agreeing to cease publishing the book. (It also agreed to pulp all remaining copies, but—as it turned out—not a single book was destroyed; all extant copies were quickly bought up from the bookstores.) When Penguin told me it was all over, I thought it was all over, and was grateful for the long run we’d had.

There wasn’t anything special about my book; Batra had been attacking other books for some time. But what was special, and unexpected, was the volume and intensity and duration of the outcry in reaction to Penguin’s action: other authors withdrew their books from Penguin, defying it to pulp them, too; people accused the publishers of cowardice for giving up without even taking the case to court, in contrast with their former courage in successfully (and at very great expense) defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960. One Bangalore law firm issued a legal notice suggesting that the Penguin logo be changed from a penguin to a chicken.

More here.

Davidson and Derrida

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Richard Marshall interviews Sam Wheeler III in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: So firstly, what are the similarities between Davidson and Derrida you find interesting? And how is Wittgenstein part of this ‘deconstruction’ mix you develop? You say it’s taken you longer to work out how Davidson and Derrida differ? Have you got it sorted now? What are the differences?

SW: The correspondences are between notions like indeterminacy of interpretation and Derrida’s “free play” and their shared denial that there is a given. Absent a language (the logoi, the language of thought, Fregean senses) whose words, by their very nature, refer to their referents, interpreting one system of signs in terms of another allows choices. That is, without a common thing that expressions from two systems express, there is nothing to go on but what people say when. So, there is slack.

Without a given domain of objects, another kind of fixity of meaning, “referring to the same object” is unavailable. Derrida in relation to Heidegger is somewhat akin to Davidson in relation to Quine, in dropping the remaining bit of realistic metaphysics.

Derrida and Davidson go in different directions. Davidson’s applications of his semantics and ontological views is largely on topics central to analytic philosophy, with some exceptions. Derrida, of course, primarily writes about topics in continental philosophy. He is interested in interpretations that go beyond the logical/truth-conditional. He takes the denial of logoi to mean that rhetorical features of a discourse can be just as important as what we would regard as “logical.” So, many of Derrida’s interpretations of, say Plato, rest on what we could regard as accidental features, for instance that “pharmakon” is both drug and poison.

The one figure I know they both thought about is J.L. Austin. Davidson spent several classes on Austin’s How to Do Things with Words in his 1967 class on philosophy of language. Derrida wrote Signature, Event, Context on the same text. They raise some of the same issues. Both Davidson and Derrida are suspicious of theories which ignore “marginal” cases. Davidson was particularly interested in arguing that what you can do with a sentence is not a good starting-point for semantics. Derrida and Davidson both point out that there is no way to fix a particular speech act to a sentence. Davidson’s notes that no sign can label something an assertion. Derrida makes a similar point about signatures.

Derrida may have read Davidson, since he did read my essay relating his views to indeterminacy of interpretation. I’m pretty sure Davidson never read Derrida. But Derrida would have very much admired Davidson’s essay on James Joyce, I think. Davidson would, if patient, have admired Derrida’s “White Mythology.”

More here.

Toward Cultural Citizenship

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

HumBhabha, the Rothenberg professor of the humanities, who is teaching “The Art of Reading” this spring with Marquand professor of English Peter Sacks, asserts that the humanities are “the preeminent sciences of interpretation.” Whether assessing linguistic, aural, or visual evidence, “the humanities through literature, the classics, modern languages, [or]…philosophy” use interpretation to create a “whole world of associations, contexts, significations, and values.” Interpretation, he stresses, is therefore an activity that through the exercise of judgment about important works (of art, literature, music, sculpture, architecture, etc.) “creates social and cultural values. And therefore, the humanities help us to become…not just political citizens, not social citizens, not citizens in a legal sense, but cultural citizens. That is the real force of the humanities.”

Humanistic interpretation also plays an important role in coping with the outpouring of information from the digital world, Bhabha says. “As we teach our students how to interpret, that allows the flood of facts and information to be turned into knowledge. Interpretation is the mediating force that winnows through all the information” to produce and categorize knowledge.

More here.