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What are libraries?
[Currently reading: The Meaning of the Library, Princeton University Press, 2015.] When I went to college, I had a part-time job reshelving books in the library. I really liked it: I was on my own, rolling a little wooden cart through a quiet place, placing things where they belong. It felt serene and meditative. I… Continue reading
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Brainwashing, the Red Scare, and the Turing Test
I just came across this brilliant lecture, “Imitation Games: Conspiratorial Sciences and Intelligent Machines,” given recently by Simon Schaffer. I’ve noted Schaffer’s work before on early automata. Here he extends his interest in our fascination with automata to post-WWII paranoia. Schaffer illustrates the intelligence backdrop to Turing’s work, and particularly the paranoia among communists and… Continue reading
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Star Wars awakens
(No spoilers) Star Wars came out in 1977, and I was 12 years old, which means it hit me the way a T-16 can bull’s-eye womp rats (at least with the right pilot). I remember Nixon resigning, and I remember when I first heard about 9/11, and I remember when that Imperial Cruiser came rolling… Continue reading
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What they needed
Then – without warning, without prelude, without even a minute to try to wrap a terrestrial head around the idea – Earth found itself in the middle of a galactic war. It was like neanderthals finding themselves on the beach at Normandy. Alien ships were suddenly surrounding the planet – resistance would have been not just futile, but hilarious – and… Continue reading
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Hypatia of Alexandria: or, a primer on platonic love
Plato, as we know, told tales of an abstract realm beyond the senses, a realm beyond the dim and dark cave we call “the world.” It was a realm of forms, first glimpsed through the discipline of mathematics, and more thoroughly known through philosophical cross-examination, or dialectic. It’s not clear just how much religion there… Continue reading
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Does philosophy belong in the humanities?
In the old model of the liberal arts, the trivium was the ground floor of the “core curriculum” for students. It consisted in logic, rhetoric, and grammar, or the basic tools for scholarly reading, understanding, and writing. One then studied the quadrivium, or the four fundamental tools for researching nature’s design: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and… Continue reading
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On lecturing
I am happy to see this essay in the NYT by Molly Worthen recalling us to the value of lectures. In circles of higher ed, “student-centered learning” and “engaged teaching” have been endlessly recommended, emphasized, extolled, and quite nearly made mandatory across the curriculum – and very often to very good effect, as it’s not… Continue reading
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Witches and inoculations
Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) may have been the first popularizer of modern science. Educated at Oxford, and one of the earliest fellows of the Royal Society, Glanvill published works that railed against rigid dogmatism and promoted open-minded scientific inquiry. He believed that the patient application of reason and experience, expressed in clear and unambiguous prose, would… Continue reading
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“A Stranger to One’s Own Country”
Descartes was not a bookish man. There’s a well-known anecdote that reveals what he thought of libraries: One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them he did most frequently consult. ‘I shall show you’, he replied,… Continue reading
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On Kuhn and the scientific revolution
I had the welcome opportunity recently to read an essay by Dan Garber on why the scientific revolution wasn’t a scientific revolution. It’s bound for a collection of essays on the legacy of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution, and reading it gave me a chance to reflect a little on Kuhn. It seems to… Continue reading
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Scattered Remarks
For fun, I put together a collection of 15 of my favorite Huenemanniac posts and published them as Scattered Remarks with Amazon (link in the right column). Not that any reader of this blog should be interested – there’s nothing in the book that isn’t freely available somewhere on this blog, except for the heartfelt… Continue reading
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My take on Newton
As a scholar of the early modern period, I cannot not have something to say about the great Isaac Newton. But I confess that I am intimidated both by his work and the thick forests of works that have been written about him, and I know I’m not up to the task of being a… Continue reading
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The Magical Dimensions of the Globe
There’s a particularly good episode of Doctor Who (“The Shakespeare Code”) wherein the Doctor and Martha visit Shakespeare and save the world from a conspiracy of witches. The witches’ plan is to take possession of Shakespeare and force him to write magical incantations into the (now lost) play Love’s Labours Won. (It’s not really magic, of… Continue reading
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Learning from Hume; or, Hume and Particle Physics
Philosophy students are typically taught the wrong lesson from the great Scottish skeptic David Hume. The standard story goes something like this. British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley wanted to connect everything we know to what we experience through the senses. The welcome consequence of this strategy is that all the stuff we see and… Continue reading
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Multitasking and multipurposing
The other day was entirely typical, but I paused to consider the wonder of it all. I was trading moves back and forth with a friend playing Civilization. I was the American civilization under Roosevelt, and because of some luck with natural resources, advantages in constructing Wonders, and some devilishly clever economic planning, I was… Continue reading
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Early modern revolution
In the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants invaded Catholic territories both geographic and ideological. Armed with sharp invectives and printing presses, anti-Catholic firebrands overturned centuries-old accounts of God and the natural world, flooding markets with new bibles, new confessional literatures, and new treatises of astronomy, astrology, medicine, alchemy, and magic. The Catholics reacted with ultimately… Continue reading
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On appreciating systems
How wonderful it would be to be a systematic thinker! One marvels at the Aristotles, the Aquinases, the Descarteses, the Kants, and the Hegels and the Marxes (well, the Karl Marxes anyway), the Freuds – those who know how to approach anything, how to incorporate any material into a systematic empire, those who can see… Continue reading
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Central Asia’s Golden Age
[S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age, Princeton, 2013] I can’t even say what my hazy mental picture of medieval central Asia was before I read S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment. That’s how poorly represented it was in my mental geography – there was not even a little sign on a stick saying,… Continue reading
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