From today's reading:
1) What Generation Z will be like at work. Penelope Trunks explains. "...if you think Gen Y is obnoxious about being better at processing information than the older people, think how Gen Y will feel when the next generation tells them their IQ is much higher. And they’re right. Gen Y will be getting on the Adderall bandwagon to stay competitive the way Baby Boomers today get on Facebook."
2) God and university majors. "Being a humanities or a social science major has a statistically significant negative effect on religiosity -- measured by either religious attendance and how important students consider the importance of religion in their lives. The impact appears to be strongest in the social sciences."
3) Pastrami meets patty in Salt Lake City.
4) David Brooks on posterity. Brooks starts the piece by referring to one of my favorite bloggers, economist Tyler Cowan. A bit says: "But, of course, we don’t lead individualistic lives. Material conditions do not drive history. People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives."
Read more here.
5) Fellow Graduates, Before We Greet The Future, a Word From My Sponsor.
6) For those of you going to Lollapalooza in August here is the schedule.
Showing posts with label Humanities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humanities. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
Stanley Fish Talks Burris and St. Augustine?
Leave it to Stanley Fish to make my Monday morning an especially interesting one. Well, that and the fact that it's pleasantly quiet and I had a particularly gripping Sunday. But I digress.
Fish, a Humanities expert extraordinaire is doing a 'reading' of the Burris text and what it might represent. To make his point, he evokes the Middle Ages, the Donatis, Thomas Hobbes, and an array of contemporary political names and notions.
The paragraph that jumped out to me was the following. I would concur with it on principle:
"Virtue is a fine thing and it would be better if those who govern us instantiated it. But virtue is, for most human beings, an occasional achievement – sometimes you are, sometimes you aren’t – and, moreover, there is no public test, no test everyone would agree to, for determining its presence."
Read more here.
Fish, a Humanities expert extraordinaire is doing a 'reading' of the Burris text and what it might represent. To make his point, he evokes the Middle Ages, the Donatis, Thomas Hobbes, and an array of contemporary political names and notions.
The paragraph that jumped out to me was the following. I would concur with it on principle:
"Virtue is a fine thing and it would be better if those who govern us instantiated it. But virtue is, for most human beings, an occasional achievement – sometimes you are, sometimes you aren’t – and, moreover, there is no public test, no test everyone would agree to, for determining its presence."
Read more here.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Dimitri's Discussion of the Humanities, Part Zwei
Upon repeated requests from some Heteronormativity and Performativity readers, my good friend and collaborator, Dimitri, is contributing another post on the Humanities.
Thank you, Dimitri for contributing to a most relevant and important topic of discussion.
To access Dimitri's blog, click here.
Consilience
Boundaries between sciences and humanitarian disciplines exist only in part thanks to objective qualitative differences between the phenomena that they study and methods employed by their practitioners. No reason should convince us to respect these boundaries. New disciplines and approaches prove most useful when they breach these mostly artifactual boundaries. In many ways the language we speak defines our vision and prevents communication with someone studying the same subject using a different language.
Let me give you an example. In the middle of the 19th century few disciplines seemed as disparate as psychiatry and anatomy. Theodor Meynert, an Austrian anatomist, spent the early part of his career dissecting the brains of deceased patients at the Vienna Asylum. Through this experience, he came to appreciate the significance of anatomy in diagnosing mental disease and argued that psychiatry should become a branch of neuropathology, a controversial position at the time. He became the founder of the brain psychiatry movement. His 1874 treatise Psychiatry: Diseases of the Forebrain became a textbook in both neuroanatomy and clinical psychiatry. Neurobiology today owes much to Meynert's anatomic methods. Using Meynert's techniques and observations, his student Carl Wernicke formulated the disconnection theory of aphasia and modern theories of regional and hemispheric specialization of the brain.
Meynert's most acclaimed student, Sigmund Freud, was fully immersed in his teacher's mindset and recognized the organic origin of the mind. Daunted perhaps by the complexity of the physiological approach to the mind, Freud shied away from physiology and developed his psychoanalysis -- an abstract dead-end discipline that has never passed the muster of empirical proof or brought about any effective treatment.
Meynert coined the term Ego denoting the totality of structural connectivity patterns in the brain formed and honed by the experiences specific to the individual. This conception of the psychological personality remains coherent with modern neuroscience research, over a century later. Freud's redefined ego, super-ego, and id remain abstract 19th-century ideas.
What lesson do we learn from this? Insistence on the unity of knowledge, or consilience, and disregard for constructed barriers will always push our understanding forward. Another lesson: doing so may not make you more famous than someone who will help you blame your problems on your mother.
What boundaries will we disregard tomorrow? How about the boundaries between arts, literature, engineering, science, ethics, and philosophy. Let's recognize and understand the tools that each employ and apply them in every unlikeliest permutation.
Thank you, Dimitri for contributing to a most relevant and important topic of discussion.
To access Dimitri's blog, click here.
Consilience
Boundaries between sciences and humanitarian disciplines exist only in part thanks to objective qualitative differences between the phenomena that they study and methods employed by their practitioners. No reason should convince us to respect these boundaries. New disciplines and approaches prove most useful when they breach these mostly artifactual boundaries. In many ways the language we speak defines our vision and prevents communication with someone studying the same subject using a different language.
Let me give you an example. In the middle of the 19th century few disciplines seemed as disparate as psychiatry and anatomy. Theodor Meynert, an Austrian anatomist, spent the early part of his career dissecting the brains of deceased patients at the Vienna Asylum. Through this experience, he came to appreciate the significance of anatomy in diagnosing mental disease and argued that psychiatry should become a branch of neuropathology, a controversial position at the time. He became the founder of the brain psychiatry movement. His 1874 treatise Psychiatry: Diseases of the Forebrain became a textbook in both neuroanatomy and clinical psychiatry. Neurobiology today owes much to Meynert's anatomic methods. Using Meynert's techniques and observations, his student Carl Wernicke formulated the disconnection theory of aphasia and modern theories of regional and hemispheric specialization of the brain.
Meynert's most acclaimed student, Sigmund Freud, was fully immersed in his teacher's mindset and recognized the organic origin of the mind. Daunted perhaps by the complexity of the physiological approach to the mind, Freud shied away from physiology and developed his psychoanalysis -- an abstract dead-end discipline that has never passed the muster of empirical proof or brought about any effective treatment.
Meynert coined the term Ego denoting the totality of structural connectivity patterns in the brain formed and honed by the experiences specific to the individual. This conception of the psychological personality remains coherent with modern neuroscience research, over a century later. Freud's redefined ego, super-ego, and id remain abstract 19th-century ideas.
What lesson do we learn from this? Insistence on the unity of knowledge, or consilience, and disregard for constructed barriers will always push our understanding forward. Another lesson: doing so may not make you more famous than someone who will help you blame your problems on your mother.
What boundaries will we disregard tomorrow? How about the boundaries between arts, literature, engineering, science, ethics, and philosophy. Let's recognize and understand the tools that each employ and apply them in every unlikeliest permutation.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
"Humanities are Not For Something, But Everything Else Is For Them"
As I mentioned in December, this month I am happy to be featuring contributions from some of my favorite bloggers, as well as some folks in the sciences and the arts who have been asking themselves the kinds of questions I have as of late.
The first piece comes to us from my good friend, Dimitri, with whom I have had many a conversation abut the Humanities over the years. Dimitri first contributed this piece today per comment regarding the Stanley Fish post I featured yesterday. Dimitri is a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and his most current neuroscience research is at the level of a single synapse or small local circuits of neurons. He hopes to move in the direction of computational neuroscience of larger circuits of neurons such as the ones responsible for decision making or object recognition and affective response. Dimitri is also a closeted literary person.
Here are his thoughts on the Humanities:
I wonder how many of those who question the 'use' of the humanities have followed through with questioning the 'use' of other endeavors, including science. Although I value the pursuit of knowledge using rigorous methods and scientific humility (tentativeness of truth), I find artistic expression, emotive rhetoric, collective effervescence, and cultural fads to be a major source of intellectual stimulation and of research ideas. My question "what do you set out to do when you write?" was not one of ridicule but of genuine inquiry.
To divide disciplines into 'hard' and 'soft' is to miss the main premise of science: all knowledge is uncertain. As long as you can make an experimentally falsifiable explanatory hypothesis, it's science. Economics can be good science. John Nash and Jon von Neumann used economics to start new branches of mathematics. Neuroscience leaves little in humanities outside the reach of its inquiry. Humanities are us, our brains, they are cingulate cortex talking to cingulate cortex.
The boundary between humanities and 'hard' disciplines is an illusion (unless you are a robot following written procedures). This boundary is the product of dualistic thinking (soul vs. flesh, reason vs. emotion, good vs. evil) -- damn Zoroaster, damn Descartes and Hegel -- it's hard to shake them off, but we'll have to eventually.
I have observed that there is a strong correlation in individuals between scientific achievement and deep engagement in questions of the human condition, philosophy, motivation and emotion, society, and free artistic expression.
I disagree with Steven Pinker's belief that art, music, literature are artifacts of sexual selection, the proverbial 'peacock's tail' whose only function is to get chicks (okay, hens). Pinker comes from 'inhumane' computational sciences. Thinkers who are closely related to 'wet' empirical neuroscience are beginning to understand how emotion and conscious reasoning are inseparable (e.g. see Antonio Damasio's work). Art, emotion, and verse are but expressions of mutual limbic regulation and serves as communication device of vast subconscious processes of the limbic system. Love and relationships are stable regulatory networks that establish themselves with little consultation from your conscious self.
Perhaps the answer is that the use of sciences and other vocations is simply to create a context and a disciplined bloodline for the humanities -- free exploration of possibilities? Humanities are not for something, but everything else is for them. Perhaps it's just that the technical types feel left out burdened by the illusion of perpetual intellectual discipline? :-)
The first piece comes to us from my good friend, Dimitri, with whom I have had many a conversation abut the Humanities over the years. Dimitri first contributed this piece today per comment regarding the Stanley Fish post I featured yesterday. Dimitri is a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and his most current neuroscience research is at the level of a single synapse or small local circuits of neurons. He hopes to move in the direction of computational neuroscience of larger circuits of neurons such as the ones responsible for decision making or object recognition and affective response. Dimitri is also a closeted literary person.
Here are his thoughts on the Humanities:
I wonder how many of those who question the 'use' of the humanities have followed through with questioning the 'use' of other endeavors, including science. Although I value the pursuit of knowledge using rigorous methods and scientific humility (tentativeness of truth), I find artistic expression, emotive rhetoric, collective effervescence, and cultural fads to be a major source of intellectual stimulation and of research ideas. My question "what do you set out to do when you write?" was not one of ridicule but of genuine inquiry.
To divide disciplines into 'hard' and 'soft' is to miss the main premise of science: all knowledge is uncertain. As long as you can make an experimentally falsifiable explanatory hypothesis, it's science. Economics can be good science. John Nash and Jon von Neumann used economics to start new branches of mathematics. Neuroscience leaves little in humanities outside the reach of its inquiry. Humanities are us, our brains, they are cingulate cortex talking to cingulate cortex.
The boundary between humanities and 'hard' disciplines is an illusion (unless you are a robot following written procedures). This boundary is the product of dualistic thinking (soul vs. flesh, reason vs. emotion, good vs. evil) -- damn Zoroaster, damn Descartes and Hegel -- it's hard to shake them off, but we'll have to eventually.
I have observed that there is a strong correlation in individuals between scientific achievement and deep engagement in questions of the human condition, philosophy, motivation and emotion, society, and free artistic expression.
I disagree with Steven Pinker's belief that art, music, literature are artifacts of sexual selection, the proverbial 'peacock's tail' whose only function is to get chicks (okay, hens). Pinker comes from 'inhumane' computational sciences. Thinkers who are closely related to 'wet' empirical neuroscience are beginning to understand how emotion and conscious reasoning are inseparable (e.g. see Antonio Damasio's work). Art, emotion, and verse are but expressions of mutual limbic regulation and serves as communication device of vast subconscious processes of the limbic system. Love and relationships are stable regulatory networks that establish themselves with little consultation from your conscious self.
Perhaps the answer is that the use of sciences and other vocations is simply to create a context and a disciplined bloodline for the humanities -- free exploration of possibilities? Humanities are not for something, but everything else is for them. Perhaps it's just that the technical types feel left out burdened by the illusion of perpetual intellectual discipline? :-)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Stanley Fish Tackles the Humanities: Will They Save Us?
Stanley Fish contributed a thought-provoking piece on the 'use' of the Humanities.
I have often heard questions like, 'so, Humanities, eh? What do they DO, exactly?' My good friend, Dimitri, himself an engineer, tends to ask me questions of this kind. Almost unequivocally I answer with a question first, 'what do you mean DO? Contextualize 'do' first.' And as I do so, I have a 'je ne comprend pas' look stamped on my face. Since when is an entire field up for questioning?!
I understand that in our times things tend to be viewed as reified commodities and that most people have a need to quantify the actual 'value' of something. But then one treads on strange interpretation territories, i.e., how one defines 'value' might not correspond with others' takes.
I was happy to read Stanley Fish's bit on the Humanities and how he explores its 'use' rhetorically. Here are two chosen paragraphs from the post:
'Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then do they do? They don’t do anything, if by “do” is meant bring about effects in the world. And if they don’t bring about effects in the world they cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give to those who enjoy them.
To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.'
Indeed, this is not an answer problem, but rather a question problem. And, as noted, 'justification...confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance.
What do you think?
Read the full blog by Fish here.
graph per ny times
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