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NEWS FROM THE ACADEMY Join Now!: Please consider a membership in the organization that Dr. Adler and Max Weismann co-founded in 1990 - go to The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas for information and benefits. (I know it's a great organization because I have been a member for many years and am a Senior Fellow of the Center. I highly recommend taking out a membership.) Did you know you can purchase lecture, discussion, and interview tapes and discs featuring Dr. Adler? Well, if not, you do now. These audio-visual materials are offered for sale by The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas at very reasonable prices. For a list of items, costs, and how to order, CLICK HERE. A Treasure Found, Restored, and Now Available: Three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren did a series of thirteen 14-minute videos about the very essence of the book. The videos were produced and published by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For unknown reasons sometime after their original publication, these videos have been lost all these years. The DVD includes all thirteen 14-minute programs for a total of three hours of video. Each section includes Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren in a lively, candid discussion of the art of reading and why it is so important and demonstrating its use in their own reading. For more information about this DVD or to make it part of your personal video library, go to http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm. Now For A Little Joke, Of Course (and thanks to Ava):
FYI: Remember you can always get updates on what's going on with us by going to Academy Updates. Also, should you find a problem with our website or broken links, etc., or want to suggest a link to some other website, or just make a comment in general, please use our Feedback Form. We may not reply to your message, but rest assured we read them all. Please continue to support The Radical Academy by shopping in our Academy Showcase, Bookstore, NewsStand, Emporium, and by patronizing our banner advertisers. We appreciate your support!
Punishment: The word "punishment" is used in the criminal law to stand for whatever treatment the state recommends for convicted offenders. That treatment may be either utilitarian or retributive, but it cannot be both. The treatment is retributive when the punishment fits the crime, not the criminal. Retributive punishment may or may not have a salutary effect upon the criminal, but the severity of the punishment must be measured by the seriousness of the crime. What was once called the "lex talionis" required a just proportion between the injury done to the victim of the crime and the injury to be suffered by the criminal -- en eye for an eye, a life for a life. Punishment is utilitarian or pragmatic when its aim is not to do strict justice, but rather to deter or reform criminals. Here the treatment accorded offenders judged guilty of committing the same offense may not be the same. The treatment may vary with the age and the character of the offender. It is in this context that the question of capital punishment must be considered by those who think the aim of punishment should be to prevent crime, and particularly recidivism, which is the recurrent criminality of offenders who are paroled. Some states have now abolished capital punishment on the grounds that it is unjust, a violation of the right to life. While the offender is alive, errors that may have occurred in his or her trial can be rectified. The right to life is not violated by the incarceration of the offender for life with no parole allowed. Nor is the right to liberty violated, for the offender incarcerated for life without parole still retains his right to liberty, even though his exercise of liberty is severely curtailed. The offender's right to liberty would be violated only if the warden treated the incarcerated offender as his personal slave. That would be unjust because it would be a violation of the offender's right to be treated as a free human being rather than as a slave. Current recommendations that criminals found guilty of three offenses should be incarcerated for life with no parole allowed is not a violation of human rights. They do not deprive the repeated offender's life of liberty, but they may be pragmatically sound measures aimed at reducing recidivism and thus preventing crime. Source: Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon. Have you a copy of this book in your personal library? If not, consider getting one. Read Max Weismann's review of this book by Clicking Here.
THE PHILOSOPHERS SPEAK Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) Ancient Greek philosopher "Aristotle's influence on the Western intellect is second to no other philosopher, both when has been correctly interpreted and when he has not been. He is remembered principally (1) for his invention and elaboration of the rules of logic (induction and deduction); (2) for his interpretation of heavenly phenomena; (3) for his scientific approach to biology, from which he derived the belief in entelecheia; (4) for his tripartite analysis of the human psyche; (5) for his ethics of eudaimonia; (6) for his theory of good government; (7) for his concept of poetry as mimêsis and katharsis; (8) for his metaphysical analysis of the four aitia, "causes"; (9) for his theory of motion and the Unmoved Mover." (Source: Volume 1 of The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World, by James L. Christian. If you want an excellent and comprehensive history of philosophy, the two volumes in this set are among the best available.)
Read about Aristotle in The Radical Academy. Also see The Philosophy of Aristotle in the Classic Philosophers section and Books by and about Aristotle in The Radical Academy Bookstore.
FOR THE RECORD Congressman Challenges FBI Director on Marijuana, by James W. Harris Have you noticed that Drug War reform is suddenly in the air? In recent months we've seen a startling rise in the number of politicians and citizens of all political stripes willing to challenge the Drug War statist quo. We've covered some examples in the past. Here's another. At a U.S. House of Representatives hearing in mid-May, FBI Director Robert Mueller was speaking to lawmakers about parents losing their lives to drugs. Suddenly Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) Steve Cohen TNspoke up. "Name me a couple of parents who have lost their lives to *marijuana*," Cohen challenged Mueller. "Can't," was Mueller's lame reply. "Exactly," said Rep. Cohen. "You can't, because that hasn't happened. Is there some time we're going to see that we ought to prioritize meth, crack, cocaine and heroin, and deal with the drugs that the American culture is really being affected by?" Source: Liberator Online James W. Harris is the editor of Liberator Online, a publication of Advocates for Self-Government. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, and he has been a Finalist for the Mencken Award, given by the Free Press Association for "Outstanding Journalism in Support of Liberty." Conformists May Kill Civilizations The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago. Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning -- imitating and emulating what the majority are doing -- may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic. Source: Nature News Psychiatrists See Bitterness as an Illness You know them. I know them. And, increasingly, psychiatrists know them. People who feel they have been wronged by someone and are so bitter they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances. This behavior is so common - and so deeply destructive - that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder. The behavior was discussed before an enthusiastic audience recently at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco. The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge. Source: Baltimore Sun U.S. Eugenics Legacy Paul Lombardo hadn't planned on a three-decade detour when he stopped at a greasy-spoon restaurant for breakfast in February, 1980. Lombardo, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up a newspaper to read as he ate his bacon and eggs. ... For almost 30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of the wrongs he read about that day. The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being "feeble-minded." The younger sister hadn't even known she'd had a tubal ligation. She didn't learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn't been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister -- Carrie Buck -- was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Source: USA Today Robot Babies Einstein the robot has enchanting eyes, the color of honey in sunlight. They are fringed with drugstore-variety false eyelashes and framed by matted gray brows made from real human hair. ... David Hanson, Einstein's creator, is visiting from Texas to help scientists here at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) prepare the robot for an upcoming conference. Hanson switches the robot on--really just a head and neck--and runs it through some of its dozens of expressions. Its lips purse. Its brow furrows. Its eyes widen as though in horror, then scrunch mirthfully as it flashes a grin. ... Still, the effect is so lifelike that even jaded graduate students have stopped by to stroke the robot's wrinkled cheek ... Source: Smithsonian Magazine Early "Human" Is Ape After All, Discoverer Decides Nearly 15 years ago Russell Ciochon shook our family tree when he announced that a fossil found in a Chinese cave was evidence of a new form of early human. But that was then. Today the anthropologist announced that the fossil, a partial jaw, is from an ape after all--a "mystery ape." And as controversial as the original theory was, Ciochon's reversal is also meeting with some criticism. The fossil was found in the 1980s in south-central China's Longgupo cave. According to Ciochon, "the jaw was very perplexing. It didn't fit in any category of hominin [early human ancestor] that we knew of in Asia, and it also didn't fit into any ape category." Source: National Geographic News New Glimpses of Life's Puzzling Origins Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun's outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon's face, heated Earth's surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist. Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory? Source: New York Times Human History Written in Stone and Blood Even by archaeological standards, Blombos Cave is a modestly sized shelter. Yet artifacts recovered from just 13 cubic meters of deposit inside transformed our understanding of when our species developed behavioral attributes we associate with "modern" humans. From this cramped hole in a sandstone cliff on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa, Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues unearthed evidence of symbolic expression, in the form of abstract designs (carved ochre bars) and personal ornaments (shell beads) at least 70,000 years old. That is more than 35,000 years before anything comparable emerged in Europe. ... Our modern anatomical features can be traced back almost 200,000 years, based on fossilized remains found in Ethiopia, but the making of the modern mind apparently lagged behind by more than 100,000 years. The remarkable finds at Blombos raised several intriguing questions. Source: American Scientist Blood and Treasure Two of the oddest things about people are morality and culture. Neither is unique to humans, but Homo sapiens has both in an abundance missing from other species. Indeed, that abundance -- of concern for the well-being of others, (even unrelated others), and of finely crafted material objects both useful and ornamental -- is seen by many as the mark of man, as what distinguishes humanity from mere beasts. How these human traits evolved is controversial. But two papers in last week's Science may throw light on the process. In one, Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico fleshes out his paradoxical theory that much of human virtue was forged in the crucible of war. Comrades in arms, he believes, become comrades in other things, too. Source: Economist Why Your Brain Just Can't Remember That Word Most of the time the brain works as it ought to: limbs move, memories are retrieved and experiences processed. But occasionally things go awry. In tip-of-the-tongue experiences, for instance, words suddenly and perplexingly go missing only to reappear seconds or minutes later. Another brain quirk -- déjà vu -- confirms the fallibility of memory. Now two new studies have shed light on both phenomena. Nearly everyone has tip-of-the-tongue moments, but bilinguals seem especially prone to these momentary lapses in vocabulary, says Jennie Pyers, a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Source: New Scientist You Know More than You Think There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members. ... Early authors found this surprising and attributed it to some mysterious group property. Eventually, however, it was recognized as a product of statistics: Using a large sample of imperfect estimates tends to cancel out extreme errors and converge on the truth. Subsequent research in forecasting demonstrated the power of averaging compared to more sophisticated statistical methods of combination. The power and simplicity of averaging was summed up in the title of James Surowiecki's 2004 best-selling book, The Wisdom of Crowds. Source: Scientific American Study of Ape Laughter Traces Roots of Our Human Ha-Has When scientists set out to trace the roots of human laughter, some chimps and gorillas were just tickled to help. Literally. That's how researchers made a variety of apes and some human babies laugh. After analyzing the sounds, they concluded that people and great apes inherited laughter from a shared ancestor that lived more than 10 million years ago. Experts praised the work. It gives very strong evidence that ape and human laughter are related through evolution, said Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. ... But ape laughter doesn't sound like the human version. It may be rapid panting, or slower noisy breathing or a short series of grunts. Source: Los Angeles Times Vatican's Celestial Eye, Seeking Not Angels but Data Fauré's "Requiem" is playing in the background, followed by the Kronos Quartet. Every so often the music is interrupted by an electromechanical arpeggio -- like a jazz riff on a clarinet -- as the motors guiding the telescope spin up and down. A night of galaxy gazing is about to begin at the Vatican's observatory on Mount Graham. "Got it. O.K., it's happy," says Christopher J. Corbally, the Jesuit priest who is vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group, as he sits in the control room making adjustments. The idea is not to watch for omens or angels but to do workmanlike astronomy that fights the perception that science and Catholicism necessarily conflict. Source: New York Times Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind. ... In the past few decades, however, studies of many other animals have shown that their two brain hemispheres also have distinctive roles. Despite those findings, prevailing wisdom continues to hold that people are different. Source: Scientific American Scientists Try to Find a Public Voice Like thousands of university researchers around the country, Allison K. Leidner believes that her findings in an obscure and hard-to-explain slice of the academic spectrum may hold importance to the lives of millions. Unlike many of those researchers, however, Ms. Leidner has realized the value of explaining her findings in a way that large numbers of people can understand. A small but growing number of colleges, helped by groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, are making a determined effort to teach their scientists ... to speak more often and more clearly to the public and to policy makers. ... Just a week after her AAAS "Communicating Science" workshop, Ms. Leidner was on Capitol Hill explaining her studies of the rare "crystal skipper" butterfly to North Carolina lawmakers as part of a lobbying day organized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences. ... More than 400 other scientists and engineers have participated in the AAAS program on college campuses and at professional-society meetings, she said. Still, that is only a small fraction of the nation's research scientists ... Source: Chronicle of Higher Education Best Visual Illusions of 2009 Every visual illusion - from the way that simple lines drawn on paper seem to form a cube, to the logic-defying labyrinths of M. C. Escher - works exactly the same way: they expose discrepancies between physical reality and our perception of that reality. That makes visual illusions appealing objects of study for neuroscientists: they offer clues to how our brains handle the information we receive about the outside world, in particular how we process visual images. "In most cases, we don't know how they work or why they work in neural terms," says Susana Martinez-Conde, a perceptual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. That's why a panel of scientists - of whom Martinez-Conde is one - organise the Visual Illusion of the Year Contest. Now in its fifth year, it features dozens of illusions created by scientists, artists, computer programmers and even the occasional magician. New illusions offer potentially new insights on the workings of the human mind: but they're fun, too. You can try out some of the winning entries for yourself. Source: New Scientist
COUNSELING CORNER: Things Got Ya Down? Well Then, Consider These . . . In a hospital's Intensive Care Unit, patients always died in the same bed, on Sunday morning, at about 11:00 AM, regardless of their medical condition. This puzzled the doctors and some even thought it had something to do with the super natural. No one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths occurred around 11:00 am Sunday, so a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents. The next Sunday morning, a few minutes before 11:00 AM all of the doctors and nurses nervously waited outside the ward to see for themselves what the terrible phenomenon was all about. Some were holding wooden crosses, prayer books, and other holy objects to ward off the evil spirits. Just when the clock struck 11:00. Pookie Johnson, the part-time Sunday sweeper, entered the ward and unplugged the life support system so he could use the vacuum cleaner. Still Having a Bad Day? The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez Oil spill in Alaska was $80,000.00. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were being released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, a killer whale ate them both. Still think you are having a Bad Day? A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen shaking frantically, almost in a dancing frenzy, with some kind of wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current, she whacked him with a handy plank of wood, breaking his arm in two places. Up to that moment, he had been happily listening to his Walkman. Are Ya OK Now? - No? Two animal rights defenders were protesting the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn, Germany. Suddenly, all two thousand pigs broke loose and escaped through a broken fence, stampeding madly. The two helpless protesters were trampled to death. What? STILL having a Bad Day? Iraqi terrorist Khay Rahnajet didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with 'Return to Sender' stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits. God is Good! There now, Feeling Better?
A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT A Little Wisdom: Every exit is an entry somewhere else. A Little Advice: Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive, anyway. A Little Quip: "The believer is happy. The doubter is wise." -- Hungarian proverb. A Little Proverb: If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. A Little Question: God made pot. Man made beer. Who do you trust? A Little Reflection: Your conscience never stops you from doing anything. It just stops you from enjoying it. A Little One-Liner: People are never too busy to tell you all that they have to do. A Little Admission: "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow (famous early twentieth-century defense lawyer). A Little Observation: Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. A Little Warning: Absence makes the heart go wander. A Little Quote: "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." -- Albert Einstein. A Little Put-Down: If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting? |
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