by Joseph Shieber

Completely by chance, I happened to come across a discussion of Tyron Goldschmidt’s paper, “A Proof of Exodus: Judah HaLevy and Jonathan Edwards Walk into a Bar”, in Cole Aronson’s review of the 2019 book Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age. I was intrigued by Aronson’s celebration of Goldschmidt’s “characteristic verve”, so — with the help of my college’s outstanding Interlibrary Loan — I got hold of the paper.

Just as a matter of literary quality, Aronson undersells Goldschmidt’s paper. Goldschmidt is a delightfully engaging writer. If you’ve dipped into some contemporary academic philosophy and come away with the impression that it’s all turgid and dry, check out Goldschmidt’s essay. It’s a treat.

Now, of course, I’ve got to go ahead and ruin your impression of the delightfulness of academic philosophy by attempting to point out flaws in Goldschmidt’s argument. I can’t help it; it’s in my nature.

Goldschmidt begins by noting that testimony is central to our knowledge. Much of what we know is based on our having learned it from others. If anything, Goldschmidt underappreciates our dependence — the example he uses is historical (our knowledge that Napoleon existed), but he could have easily included countless examples. It’s only because of testimony that I know that Raphael Warnock is a newly-elected U.S. Senator from Georgia, that the top five warmest years on record have been since 2015, or even what my own name is!

Goldschmidt suggests that, by appreciating the centrality of testimony we can appreciate an underrecognized argument for the truth of biblically recorded miracles — in particular, the miracles associated with the Jewish tradition surrounding the Exodus from Egypt. Read more »

Buddha Mind

Buddha mind’s a still but never motionless field
Buddha mind holds all, each wave and ripple subsumed
along with every tiny dot, a broken wholeness

no metaphor can speak its more-and-less
no single thought can split its late-and-soon

its splash and depth of shade, golden color,
its sanguine stippled clouds, its calm bronze face serene,
both shut and absent eye welcoming, then with lids raised 
seeing soon-and-later-less-and-more revealed

Jim Culleny 1/9/2021
Watercolor, The Present Moment 
by Mary Walsh Martel

Other watercolors by Mary Walsh Martel
(Click image for expanded view)

by Emrys Westacott

The German language is famous for its often long compound words that combine ideas to neatly express in a single word complex notions. Torschlusspanik, (gate-shut-panic), for instance, referred in medieval times to the fear that one was not going to make it back into the city before the gates closed for the night, and now signifies the worry, common among middle aged people, that the opportunities for accomplishing one’s dreams are disappearing for good. Backpfeifengesicht, sometimes translated as “face in need of a fist”, means a face that you feel needs slapping.

One could certainly find a use for these particular words this past week while watching Donald Trump’s Republican enablers suddenly starting to pose as staunch defenders of democratic principles. But we could also do with our own compound expressions to capture the particular forms of perfidiousness on display. For instance, it would be really useful to have a word that means “culpably late enlightenment.”

Every single Republican politician has known perfectly well for the past two months that the 2020 US presidential election was not fraudulent, or rigged, or stolen. (If there are any who really believe otherwise, they are either utter fools or as mentally deranged as Trump himself.) So please, let’s not start giving out medals for honourable conduct when someone like Kelly Loeffler, the (recently defeated) senator from Georgia, decides, after Wednesday’s riotous invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters, to no longer object to the certification process that was underway at the time. Actually, her change of heart doesn’t make much sense. If she really believed that her objections to certification were justified, why drop them? The antics of Trump’s mob don’t affect the probability that there were serious voting irregularities in certain states. Read more »

Tigran Tsitoghdzyan. Black Mirror, 2018.

Work on paper; mixed media.

More here.

by Jackson Arn

When Harold Haber was released from prison, he found out why nobody had visited him in two years. His brother, sister, mother, father, grandmother, uncle, and cousins had died. He and his grandfather were the last two Habers left in the country, maybe the world. His grandfather was 89 years old and slept all day. The house was cracked paint, emptied windows, dust, and gashes in walls. In Harold’s head, a sense of duty thickened. The family had to be rebuilt. The family name had to be spoken everywhere. He married Sarah and had five children. One survived long enough to have his own. As Harold choked he thought, I did my part.

*

Two of David Haber’s children outlived their childhoods. David Haber did not outlive his twenties. As he found his way home on a Tuesday night, belly sloshing, something tore in him. We found him the next morning with a mark, maroon and claw-shaped, on his abdomen’s right.

*

Esther had her first child at fifteen, but he could not be acknowledged. Two years later, as her husband raised her dress for the first time, she thought of her grandmother and resolved to name her next child Sarah. Her husband, taken aback by her silence in the crucial second, decided not to trust her and named the child after his grandmother, who’d died defending our glorious land. Esther secretly thought of their child as Sarah until she gave birth to her third, who she named Harold.

*

Harry Haber felt the full weight of his name twice in his life, the first time aged seven. His father was instructing him with a belt. Between the strokes he heard a hiss: “If your grandfather were alive to see you …” Then there was a pause and then a sniff. He did not dare turn to look. After a few minutes he realized his father had left the room, leaving him bent over, half-naked. The second time, Harry was dying in his trench. He thought of his three children and his father and his father’s father. Time oozed like a wound. He thought of the glory he and the rest of us had fought for, and the second glory to which his name belonged. He resolved, delirious, to pass on the name to his next child, and then he died. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

It is almost midnight here in New York City, and I’ve been sitting at my dining room table for the past eight hours with my finger on the “send” button. Each time, I freeze, regroup, take another sip of coffee, sneak a cigarette out on the fire escape where my son won’t see me. Because I know I have to scrap the essay I wrote for this week. The one I wrote before Thursday. The one that I can’t stand to look at now. “Dating During Covid”.

Every single thing I do feels like a betrayal. A privilege. Everything I do feels white.

Writing about anything other than the Capitol feels wrong. Writing about the Capitol as the events process and take shape in my white mind feels wrong. Writing is a kind of performance, here, in this intellectualized virtual space. What gives me access to this stage? What the hell do I know? What makes my voice so special?

I cannot write my way out of this.

There are voices that need to be heard right now, listened to, learned from. I am not one of them. Not now. Not yet. I have not done the work. I know I am full of feelings; big ones, shameful ones, stupid ones. Feelings that have ignited after a long, slow burn. But feelings, my feelings, are not relevant here. I am a white woman holding space for no one but myself.

I don’t want to hear my voice. I don’t want to hear any white voices. Just for five minutes, an hour, a day, a week. I want us to stop filling the pages that do not belong to us and give them back to their rightful owners. To stop acting like dutiful interpreters of a language we aren’t fluent in. To shut-up and bear witness. To take responsibility. To realize that being a nice white liberal with black and brown friends does not make you an anti-racist. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Robyn Repko Waller

Wednesday’s riots at the Capitol shook many Americans and, indeed, individuals around the globe. Screens worldwide glared with shocking and impactful images of some Trump supporters breaching Capitol police barricades and scaling the Capitol walls to loot and overrun the halls and private chambers in an attempt at undermining the ceremonial certification of President Elect Joe Biden’s win. Confederate flags were flown. Lives were lost in the chaos.

The response from many onlookers, both in person and from afar: outrage. Outrage at the harmful undermining of democracy. Outrage at the intent to harm and plunder. Outrage at those who have sown the seeds of false information and stirred the boiling frustration of pockets of MAGA nation. Outrage at the hands-off treatment of those rioting — in striking comparison to the reception of BLM protesters in DC. Sustained and exhausted outrage at an outgoing President who has actively stoked the fires of insurrection and chaos, even while the riots unfolded. 

Plenty has been said in the aftermath of this event about who is to blame — not just legally, but morally speaking — for the physical and symbolic destruction of our democracy. I won’t spend much time on that here. I’ll also leave aside too the imperative discussion of false information as a driving source of polarized political groups, radicalization of American citizens, and, ultimately, the ensuing riots. There’s no doubt that false and misleading information contributed to the actions of the swarm of rioters at the Capitol that day. And, of course, misinformation withstanding, the voluntarily taken actions of those rioters were wrong. They are, in the eyes of onlookers, to be held accountable, morally and legally. So too, should those implicated who are in power, many are demanding. 

The question that interests me here, rather, has to do with those who cast moral blame. Those who are outraged. Assuming these rioters and instigators have done something egregiously wrong and are blameworthy for their actions, who gets to blame them? That is, who has standing to blame (as it’s termed in the philosophical literature)? Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

Dear Dr. Cardona:

The violent, insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 was due, in part, to the success of the Nation’s system of public education, not its failure. Since Ronald Reagan announced in 1981 that “government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem,” federal authorities have worked to dismantle and erase any vestiges of democratic education from our system of public education. Free-market values replaced democratic ones. Public education slowly but consistently was transformed by neoliberal ideologues on both sides of the aisle into an institution both in crisis and the cause of the Nation’s perceived economic slip on the global stage. Following Reagan’s lead, all federally sponsored school reform efforts hollowed out public education’s essential role in a democracy and focused instead on its role within a free-market economy. In terms of both a fix and focus, neoliberalism was and remains the ideological engine that drives the evolution of public education in the United States. These reform efforts have been incredibly successful in reducing public education to a general system of job training, higher education prep, and ideological indoctrination (i.e., American Exceptionalism). As a consequence of this success, many of the Nation’s citizens have little to no knowledge or skills relating to the essential demands of democratic life. The culmination of the neoliberal assault on democratic education over the last forty-years helped create the conditions that led to the rise of Trump, the development of Trumpism, and the murderous, failed attempt at a coup d’etat in Washington, DC. From what I have read, I am not confident that your plans for public education will address these issues.

As Secretary of Education, according to President Biden, you will “strive to eliminate long-standing inequities and close racial and socioeconomic opportunity gaps…to improve student success and grow a stronger, more prosperous, and more inclusive middle class.” Consistent with the President’s call for making public education a lever of economic prosperity, you have said, “The passion I have for public education stems from my belief that it is the best lever for economic success and prosperity…and the belief that public education is still the great equalizer. It was for me.”

On the surface, these goals are admirable and for most Americans uncontroversial. Yet, I am concerned that you are unintentionally setting up public education for immanent failure. This is not because you and President Biden are insincere in your support for public education or because there is anything wrong with the students, teachers, administrators and/or communities that serve or are served by public education. Quite simply, you will fail to meet these goals because it is not, nor has it ever been the responsibility of public education to make social and economic policy. Read more »

My wife and her sister walking in the Altfasstal region of the South Tyrol over the weekend.

by Eric Miller

Tickets

How apt that the person responsible for handling tickets to a Museum of Anthropology should herself sit in a vitrine! You cannot get in for free to an exhibition, how else could the museum sustain itself? It is an enterprise. Compensation is fair. History being what it is, we do not have paper tickets, we have electronic ones. But, behind her laminations of glass and transpicuous plastic, the ticket woman has trouble scanning with her hand-held device our shyly displayed, ephemeral glyph. Only the diligent device can verify it, this woman herself could not puzzle it out any more than we can. Shaped to please the palm that enfolds it, the mechanical keeper of the threshold emits an intelligent-looking, candy-coloured beam. How photodynamic the act of entry has become! I have noticed, however, and on more than one occasion, the speed of light is hard to match in daily life. True, that standard (or rather that hope) is a shade unrealistic. At present, a brilliant little ray, unbending, as thin as a wire, concentrating hard, is only supposed to okay an insignia flashed upon our opposing screen.

Exasperated with the impasse and with the beam—which, to be fair, looks credibly intense—, the ticket woman sighs, sighs, snaps at us and glares. Her eyes are more lancing than a laser. Her glance stings like splashed vinegar. No, we cannot possibly really possess the tickets we say we have. Then a beep like a nuthatch’s, a synthetic syllable blurted by her scanner, deems us, none too soon, to be admissible after all. Passing thus is always a relief, I began to mistrust us myself. Who knows what we were up to! Did you ever work a fair? I was still a kid when I worked, not very hard at all, at a Maytime fair. Read more »

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the most reliable writer of all in the history of 3QD: Akim Reinhardt. Starting at the end of 2010, Akim has written his excellent column at 3QD every fourth week for just over ten years now. He has never, ever missed a single deadline in this whole time. Not once. You can check the archives yourself if you wish. During this time he also wrote a serial book at 3QD which you can read here if you like. This is no easy feat and no other writer at 3QD comes even close to this record of incredibly durable consistency.

For his brilliance, his wit, his originality, his humor, his erudition, his superhuman dependability, and most of all his friendship, I am extremely grateful to Akim.

Thank you, Akim!

Akim begins his second decade writing for 3QD today with his 146th (!) essay “All Democrats are Happy Trump Lost, But Some Don’t Want to See Him Leave“. While the world has changed much in the past year, it is good to know that some things will stay the same as we enter 2021. Speaking of things staying the same, if you would like to help keep 3QD going, please become a supporter by clicking here now.

Please also join me in giving Akim a round of applause and, from all of us at 3QD, best wishes for a happy and healthy new year to everyone!

Yours, Abbas

by Akim Reinhardt

Every Democrat, and many independent voters, breathed an enormous sigh of relief when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the November election. Now they are all nervously counting down the days (16) until the last of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits is dismissed, his minions’ stones bounce of the machinery of our electoral system, and Trump is finally evicted from the White House. Only then can we set about repairing the very significant damage that Trump and Trumpism have wrought upon our republican (small r) and democratic (small d) institutions.

Yet at the same time, many savvy Democrats do not want Trump to actually go away. Remain out of office, whether president or dog catcher? Absolutely. But quietly fade into the woodwork as former presidents generally do, and no longer be a presence in American politics? Well, not exactly.

Why? Because here in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, Republicans face a potential crisis. Like a piece of hot iron on an anvil, the party is being bent in two different directions, hammered by a simple question: What comes next?

The answer is no simple matter because Trumpism was not politics as usual for America, and especially for Republicans.

Unlike Republican presidential nominees before him, Donald Trump did not ascended to the top of the GOP by building alliances with party power brokers. Instead of playing nice with them, he actually alienated them. They opposed him, and won despite them by pulling an end around and appealing directly to primary voters. He built up his cult of personality by channeling an excitable brand of right wing populism that partly eschewed Republican orthodoxy.

Trump was perhaps uniquely positioned to do this successfully. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

Three times have we started doing philosophy, and three times has the enterprise come to a somewhat embarrassing end, being supplanted by other activities while failing anyway to deliver whatever goods it had promised. Each of those three times corresponds to a part of Stephen Gaukroger’s recent book The Failures of Philosophy, which I will be discussing here. In each of these three times, philosophy’s program was different: in Antiquity, it tied itself to the pursuit of the good life; after its revival in the European middle ages it obtained a status as the guardian of a fundamental science in the form of metaphysics; and when this metaphysical project disintegrated, it reinvented itself as the author of a meta-scientific theory of everything, eventually latching on to science in a last attempt at relevance.

Indeed, this means that the last serious attempt to revive philosophy faded out many decades ago. Unlike David Hume, who figures in this book as one of only a few thinkers in the Western canon who saw and confronted directly the problems inherent in the ambitions of philosophy, Gaukroger does not regard himself as writing in a “philosophic age”. Nobody now looks at philosophers as having something interesting to contribute, the way we look at scientists (although Gaukroger has a thing or two to say about them, too). For all intents and purposes, we live in a post-philosophical era, though ending his book on a Picardy third, Gaukroger does not completely reject the idea that there are things to be salvaged.

Gaukroger defines philosophy as second-order enquiry. This unites its three separate incarnations, which otherwise have much less in common than is usually believed. This definition elegantly serves both to demarcate philosophical from non-philosophical thought, and to find a common cause for its decay: in each case, its demise was not accidental, but related to the very limits of second-order inquiry. The notion of second-order activity, of course, relies on some idea of first-order enquiry: philosophy is abstracting from something, and the object of its second-order interest is different in each case. Read more »

Uroboros

new year, a day of ends and beginnings,
two extremes of a rope, sunup-sundown,
the moment we split our sign for infinity
(that lazy 8 napping on its side as life goes on),
the day we take a short breath
in belief that its undulant line
can really be cut and resumed
without upsetting the will of a universe
to be one, unsplittable in the extent of its being
as if a year arbitrarily set to solar cycles
marks anything but a hope to confer human order
on a thing as ineffable as a snake biting its tail,
yet it can be done   and is   in love   by love

Jim Culleny
1/2/2021

Reading: JIm Culleny – Uroboros 2 – Clyp

by Usha Alexander

[This is the seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobil, to shareholders in 2015

***

For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness.

But I’ve discovered that walking away from this matter is no longer something I can just choose to do. For I now experience the world in a different way than I once did, as this grey mass clouds my vision and leaves its residue on everything I touch. I’ve come to see the changing Earth as the greatest single force shaping human affairs into the future, the backdrop against which the human story will play out and respond. 

Just as the temperate stability of the Holocene once enabled the shift from nomadism to settled farming and all of civilization, so the ongoing mass extinction of species and the rapidly warming climate will erode our present modes of life and maps of political order to make way for something new. Not just new, but very likely burdened by unprecedented collective hardship that stresses and tests our political systems, economies, infrastructures, and provisioning networks as never before. Some of these systems will fail. Without knowing how extremely or how quickly the planetary changes will occur, but knowing with some predictive capacity—unlike our Paleolithic ancestors—that an essential and irreversible change is underway, makes it difficult not to feel frightened and aggrieved for our future, even if I may not live to see the most startling changes. But then, what I’ve already witnessed has been startling enough. Read more »

Lorna Simpson. Unanswerable (detail) 2018.

Found photograph, and collage on paper.

More here, here, and here.