Author Archive for emily

From Eric Michael Johnson at Scientific American, The Primate Diaries…

Let’s face it, as a species we’re obsessed with ourselves. The vast majority of us spend our days at work or school where a considerable amount of time is taken up not discussing the important issues of the day, but rather the juicy details of one another’s personal lives. Then we go home only to sign on to social network services like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ and continue where we left off. In this respect we’re fairly typical primates. Most of our simian relatives, particularly our great ape cousins the chimpanzees and bonobos, like nothing better than keeping a watchful eye on what other members of their troop are up to. But our species has taken this preoccupation one step further.

Human beings are the most social of the primates and have the largest group sizes of any species in our order. For about 90% of our existence we lived in hunter-gatherer societies with populations that likely clustered around 150-200 individuals. By way of comparison, baboons come in a distant second with an average of about 50 group members. Now, thanks to modern industrial agriculture, our species has pushed that range well into the millions, a development that has resulted in considerable stress on our slightly above average primate brains. Of course, all organisms need to successfully predict and navigate their environments in order to relay their genes on to the next generation. It’s just that this becomes increasingly complicated when there are many individuals all interacting in the same environment simultaneously. Merely keeping track of these relationships requires a considerable amount of time and energy, not to mention brain power. More…

From the art of theory…

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, and is one of the most influential political theorists of our time. Jonathan Bruno and Jason Swadley sat down with him recently in Cambridge with 12 questions on the craft of political philosophy.

Art of Theory: What brought you to study political theory?

Michael Sandel: I began with an interest in politics. I was a political junkie as a kid, and still am. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I became interested in political philosophy as such. That’s where I first read Kant, and Kant I found terribly challenging and intriguing. I began graduate school in 1975. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice had come out four years earlier, so I read that for the first time in graduate school.

In fact, the first winter vacation in graduate school at Oxford—they had these six-week breaks between terms—I went with some friends to the south of Spain and took along a bunch of books and sat and read them: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Somehow Spain, which was a little less cold and damp than Oxford, was more conducive to reading.

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