Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Turkey Pardon as Dark Parody

From the Stone series of the online edition of the New York Times, November 20, 2011.

In just a few days, we will once again endure the annual spectacle of the president of the United States  pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been fated for the Thanksgiving table. This event is typically covered in the media as a light-hearted bit of fluff — and fluff is what it might well be, if there were not actual humans on death row awaiting similar intervention. In the current American context, however, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners. There is in it an implicit acknowledgment that the killing of these prisoners is a practice that bears real, non-jocular comparison to the ritual slaughter of birds for feasts.

I am not saying that this slaughter of birds for food is wrong ― not here anyway ― but only that the parallel the presidential ritual invites us to notice is revealing...

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Being and Weather

[From the New York Times, August 29, 2011]

Two nights ago, Hurricane Irene was taking her sweet time, making her painfully slow path up the East Coast towards New York. And everyone, but everyone, was talking about the weather. New Yorkers, many of whom ordinarily exhibit a strong aversion to small talk, had given themselves carte blanche to do so until after the storm weakened and passed on to irrelevant Canada.

But what makes us so certain that talk of weather is small, anyway? What, after all, could be more fundamental to our existence as corporeal, terrestrial creatures than the fluctuations of the atmosphere through which we move? What is it, moreover, that we are neglecting to care about when we dismiss weather talk as the stuff of superficial exchange?

Etymology tells us that the banalization of weather is a recent development. In a number of languages the standard word for “weather” is exactly the same as the word for “time”: thus French le temps, Romanian timpul, Hungarian időjárás (literally “the walking of time”), to name a few.

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The Flight of Curiosity

From the 'Stone' series in the online edition of the New York Times. To read the entire article, click here.

Today’s natural scientist easily distinguishes his own work not only from his hobbies, but also from the activity of his pseudoscientific counterpart. When we look back in history, however, it becomes difficult to keep this distinction in view, for it has often happened that false beliefs have produced significant experimental results and have led to real discoveries. It is no less difficult  to separate the history either of science or of pseudoscience from what I will dare to call the “real” history of philosophy, for until very recently, what we now call science was not merely of interest to philosophers, but was in fact constitutive of philosophy. In fact, it was not called science at all, but rather natural philosophy.

Thus, tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as “Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire,” and “Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as “the magnetical philosophy,” and as late as 1808  John Dalton published “A New System of Chemical Philosophy.” A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his “Philosophie zoologique.” Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?