Reviews and News:
English utilitarians were the most progressive of any of the modern reforming groups. They were also “repulsive,” Helen Andrews argues, “in manners, in conduct, in personality.”
In Comment, Yuval Levin writes about the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and friendship: “Toleration did not amount to peaceful mutual disdain…It could be much more than that precisely because of friendship. Indeed, the idea of friendship was central to Mendelssohn’s response to the pressures he confronted. Friendship could help avoid turning disagreement into hostility. In making this argument, he flaunted his friendship with Lessing, publishing a kind of essay on friendship (formulated as a letter to Lessing) that offers an intense, idealized treatment of the possibilities of friendship as a source of both intellectual camaraderie and human meaning.”
The first reviews of The Last Jedi are in, and they are mixed. Kyle Smith over at National Review? He don’t like it: “If your movie depends on Mark Hamill trying to be Walter Matthau, you’ve got trouble.” Ryan Gilbey likes it a little better, but not by much: “Poe, DJ, Rose and Finn, who sound like a new generation of Teletubbies, are given the task of secreting themselves on board an Imperial battleship and disabling its capacity for monitoring Rebel forces. I appreciate that not every Star Wars movie can revolve around the destruction of a Death Star, and nor would anyone wish it to, but this must be said to be at the low end of compelling.” At The Gray Lady, on the other hand, Manohla Dargis praises its “transporting entertainment” and “visual wit and a human touch.”
On Monday, a handful of former Gawker employees launched a Kickstarter campaign to buy and re-start the gossip website. It was shut down in 2016 following the Hulk Hogan law suit. Good luck with that…
“Judith Butler worries that UC Berkeley risks dire consequences if it fails to put more limits on the sorts of speech and free expression that it allows on campus.” She’s wrong.
Gene Epstein wonders what happened to Nat Turner: “A literary anniversary passed unobserved in 2017: the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Styron’s enthralling historical novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which tells the story of the slave who led a bloody rebellion in Virginia. While Vintage International’s 25th anniversary edition remains in print, the publisher hasn’t offered an edition honoring the book’s 50th year, and to my knowledge, no commemorative articles have appeared.”
Essay of the Day:
The late philosopher Jerry Fodor was a sceptic—of neo-Darwinian theories of the mind, that is, and the sort of writer, Stephen Metcalf argues in The New Yorker, “who could lift your spirits while derogating your world view”:
“The philosopher Jerry Fodor was important for the same reason you’ve probably never heard of him: he was unimpressed, to put it politely, by the intellectual trends of the day. His focus was the philosophy of the mind, and he regarded much of what went on in brain labs as make-work. ‘If the mind happens in space at all, it happens somewhere north of the neck,’ he wrote in The London Review of Books, in 1999. ‘What exactly turns on knowing how far north?’ Fodor was indifferent to recent developments in European thought—everything since Kant, more or less. But he was that rare thing, a man who could lift your spirits while derogating your world view. When he died, last month, philosophy Twitter filled with variations of the same sentiment: I loved Jerry, even though he was wrong about everything.
“Fodor first made his name at M.I.T., in the sixties and seventies, by pioneering a theory of the mind. He offered an updated version of what is sometimes called, in philosophy survey courses, rationalism. He didn’t think it was possible that we started our lives as blank slates and acquired, through experience alone, our mental repertoires; combining aspects of Chomsky’s theory of linguistic innateness with Turing’s insights into mathematical computation, he argued that there had to be a prior, unacquired ‘language of thought’—the title of his career-making book—out of which everyday cognition emerges. In offering a naturalistic account of mental representations, he staked out a middle ground where nobody thought one was possible: between our ordinary (or ‘folk’) notions about our own psychology—the fact that people “account for their voluntary behavior by citing beliefs and desires they entertain”—and the neurophysiology of the brain.
“As his career progressed, Fodor became a skeptic—but that doesn’t quite capture it. What do you get when you cross a unicorn with a gadfly? He became skeptical of his own earlier, more strictly modular thesis of the brain. Our reasoning is too holistic in its inferences for it to proceed solely from mechanical rule-following, he decided. ‘The moon looks bigger when it’s on the horizon; but I know perfectly well it’s not. My visual perception module gets fooled, but I don’t. The question is: who is this I?’ (There is, as of yet, no A.I. for this I.) But nothing inspired his skepticism more than the current vogue for Charles Darwin—specifically, the fusion of evolutionary biology, Mendelian genetics, and cognitive neuroscience known as neo-Darwinism.
“‘Neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,’ he wrote in What Darwin Got Wrong, co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist, and published in 2010. ‘It goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.’ Fodor thought that the neo-Darwinists had confused the loyalty oath of modernity—nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos—with blind adherence to the fallacy known as ‘natural selection.’ That species are a product of evolutionary descent was uncontroversial to Fodor, an avowed atheist; that the mechanism guiding the process was adaptation via a competition for survival—this, Fodor believed, had to be wrong.”
Photo: Lake Erie
Poem: Geoffrey Grigson, “Ruskin’s View, Kirby Lonsdale”
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