Monthly Archives: May 2013

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

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As usual, DeLillo’s language is often beautiful and its meaning is often obscure. This is a very short novel. It begins and ends with an unnamed man watching a slow-motion presentation of Psycho at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Between these two chapters, an aspiring filmmaker tries to get an intellectual older man to be the subject of a documentary film. The older man is to speak about his work with the Defense Department in support of the younger Bush’s Iraq war, or anything else he wants to talk about. These central chapters are set in the California desert and also feature a visit from the intellectual’s disengaged daughter.

I’ve read most of DeLillo’s novels and have never found it easy to say what their theme is. Maybe I’m wrong about the theme of this novel, but DeLillo draws an obvious contrast between the casual manner in which the defense intellectual participates in a war that costs thousands of lives and his intense reaction to the apparent loss of someone he cares about.  

Interwoven with the novel’s narrative are thoughts on film-making and film-watching, and the passage of time in natural and artificial settings. DeLillo again left me with the feeling that I had experienced something important about modern life, but not sure exactly what that was.  (5/9/11)

The Sources of Normativity by Christine M. Korsgaard

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Professor Korsgaard argues that ethical normativity or value results from autonomous agents like ourselves reflecting on what we ought to do and then endorsing a rational course of action, i.e., a course of action based on reasons we can truthfully endorse. This is “reflective endorsement”. Actions and the reasons for those actions are good if they are well-considered and promote our “practical identity”, the conception of ourselves as valuable beings with lives worth living. And since we value our own humanity, we should value the humanity of others as well. 

Korsgaard says that obligations only exist in the first-person perspective: “in one sense, the obligatory is like the visible: it depends on how much of the light of reflection is on”. She also believes that we are subject to moral laws that we ourselves create (until we as individuals change those laws).  

She admits, however, that her argument will fail to convince someone who is completely skeptical about morality. She does not provide a non-moral foundation for morality (who could?). What Korsgaad does provide is an explanation of the role morality plays in our lives and how trying to be moral contributes to our self-image as proper human beings. 

Included in the book are responses from four well-known philosophers. I thought that their criticisms were more sensible and understandable than Korsgaard’s replies.  (5/2/11)

What We’re Up Against, Part 2

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It’s good to be skeptical about the results of public opinion polls, especially if it’s only a single poll reporting a result.

On the other hand, if this is true, it explains a lot. Personally, I can’t believe that 18% of Democrats believe this. Maybe they’re worried about the Tea Party taking over?

From a Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind poll released today:

“Supporters and opponents of gun control have very different fundamental beliefs about the role of guns in American society. Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years, with another five percent unsure. However, these beliefs are conditional on party. Just 18 percent of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary, as opposed to 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.”

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2013/guncontrol/

The Jamestown Project by Karen Ordahl Kupperman

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I thought this was a book about Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in America. It is actually about much more than that. 

Kupperman describes the history of European exploration, trade and colonization with the Muslim world, Africa and North and South America. She puts Jamestown in its historical, cultural and political context. She quotes an amazing number of primary sources (with their original, often surprising spelling) to show what the English thought of the American Indians, what the American Indians thought of the English, what the Virginia Company wanted the Jamestown settlers to accomplish, what the Jamestown settlers wanted (and rarely got) from the Virginia Company. She explains that Jamestown was only one of many attempts to start a colony in America, that the Indians were quite familiar with Europeans before the Jamestown settlers arrived, and that Captain John Smith had a very interesting life before he met Pocahontas.

Most of the colonists died from disease and starvation. Some were killed by the Indians and some preferred living with the Indians. Kupperman argues that Jamestown eventually proved to be a success because it showed that colonies would only prosper if the colonists had personal incentives to succeed, for example, the prospect of owning their own land. The powerful people who put money into the colonies wanted to find a quick route to China, or gold and silver, or to convert the Indians to Christianity. The people who made the colonies succeed had simpler goals.  (4/29/11)

Logicomix: an Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

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This is an entertaining, fast-moving graphic novel (a very thick comic book) that tells the story of Bertrand Russell’s attempt to provide logical foundations for mathematics and also find a path to absolute certainty about the world. It is presented in the form of a public lecture given by Russell, in which Russell talks about his life and the recent history of mathematics and logic.  

The authors admit that this is a work of fiction, since some of the history has been changed for dramatic purposes or ease of exposition. But the work of great mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, including Cantor, Frege, Poincare, Hilbert, Wittgenstein, Godel and Turing, is accurately summarized. One theme in the novel is the apparent association between logical and mathematical skill and insanity. 

There are also interludes that feature the authors and artists working on the book — an act of self-reference that fits very nicely with the main theme of the novel — and attending performances of Greek tragedy in Athens.  

In general, the writing is better than the artwork, in particular because the characters’ facial expressions lack subtlety.  

There is also a helpful addendum that describes some of the main characters and concepts (one of the authors is a professor of computer science at Berkeley). This is how Godel’s proof of the Incompleteness Theorem is summarized: “Godel proved his Incompleteness Theorem by creating … a statement that … essentially says, in the language of arithmetic, ‘this statement is unprovable’. Any consistent axiomatic theory in which one can formulate such a statement must be necessarily incomplete: for either this statement is false, in which case it is both false and provable, contradicting the consistency of the axiomatic system, or true, in which case it is both true and unprovable, establishing its incompleteness“.  (4/15/11)