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Here is a review of a recent book describing a 1929 philosophy conference where Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger had a famous exchange, and both Levinas and Carnap were in the audience. The confrontation was fascinating; according to the review —

Gordon begins his book with a broad characterization of Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s philosophical positions. At the core of their debate at Davos (and, it turns out, at the core of their entire philosophical thought) lay, as Gordon puts it, “a fundamental contest between two normative images of humanity,” (p. 6) a contest “between thrownness and spontaneity” (p. 7). Where neo-Kantian Cassirer saw human beings as gifted with a capacity for “spontaneous self-expression” and thus endowed with “a complete freedom” to create worlds of meaning, Heidegger envisaged them to be determined by their “finitude” and thus as living in the midst of conditions they have not created and cannot hope to control.

Here is a book review of James Gleick’s recent book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by the great scientist Freeman Dyson. The book sounds like an interesting history of our grappling with both information and meaning. Dyson’s review is well worth reading. Here’s how it ends:

Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information. Gleick ends his book with Borges’s image of the human condition:

We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

… with a hint of a Norse saga in the middle:

The new one is here. Note that there’s an article featured by Edward Feser, who commented here recently on one of Kleiner’s posts. Feser’s article asks why (some) physicists are so bad at philosophy. I myself often wonder how a physicist (like Hawking, in his latest book) could have the confidence to stab away at philosophy without doing any real reading up on the subject first … can you imagine anyone doing the same thing with physics? And then I wonder why some editor somewhere wouldn’t say, “Hang on a moment; is there a chance this author doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about?” I guess there’s a popular philosophical skepticism which holds that, since no philosopher really has any knowledge, everyone is welcome to join in with any thought that crosses a mind.

Anyway, lots of other interesting posts at the Carnival as well. Check them out.

Erica Holberg, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, will present a lecture entitled “Pleasure, Action, and Ethical Theory” on this coming Tuesday, February 22nd, 4:30-5:30, in Main 207. All are welcome to attend. Also, as Ms. Holberg is a candidate for our position in ethics, feel free to drop in during these times that have been set aside for discussion: Tuesday, 11-12, and Wednesday, 11-11:30, in the department’s large conference room, found through Main 204.