Lecture:

Thursday, May 2, 2013

"Why Humanist Scholarship in an Uncertain World: Reflections from the German Tradition" 

A lecture by John Smith, University of Waterloo / UC Irvine

Location: Gilman 138-D

5:00-7:00PM

John H. Smith is currently preparing a book on  

• The Infinitesimal Difference: Calculus and Philosophy in Modern German Thought

François Jacob, Geneticist Who Pointed to How Traits Are Inherited, Dies at 92
In The Possible and the Actual (Le Jeu des possibles, 1981), French Geneticist François Jacob draws connections between science and myth. Scientific enquiry, he says, begins with inventing a possible world. The same happens with the creation of Myth.

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

— François Jacob

The Possible and the Actual (1982), 9.

Four articles reflecting the constant exchange between science, art and ...being human

suggested by Brenda Rapp:

Noticing: How To Take A Walk In The Woods by ADAM FRANK

A few excerpts:

 As the poet Rilke once said, 

Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.

Questions raise our pulse and sharpen our delight. [...]

Refining our capacity to notice is an act of reverence that we can bring to everywhere and everywhen. It's an invitation, bringing the world's most basic presence into view, opening our horizons and restoring our spirits. And that is what science is really there for.

How To See The World In A Grain Of Sand

More than two centuries ago, the great poet William Blake offered the world the most extraordinary of possibilities:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

and eternity in an hour.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Unfortunately, most of us don't know how to hold eternity in the palm of our hands. In fact, most of us feel lucky if we can just hold it together until the end of the day. The problem, of course, is that mostly we've lost our minds. And I mean that literally. Our attention is endlessly lost in the endless blur of appointments, to-do lists, worry, concern and agitation that makes up modern life.[...]

Can we really see the whole world in a grain of sand?

Through the lens of science we can see how even the smallest thing can be a gateway to an experience of the extraordinary, if only we can practice noticing.

 Where Art And Science Meet, Exactly

There are deep connections between meaning-making and object-making. Those connections are exactly where the resonances between art and science find their potency. 

The Getty Conservation Institute's exhibit From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine's Gray Column details the creation of one twelve-foot high, eight-foot wide, 3,500 lb. work with the appearance of a gigantic burnished prism.

Taking in the "Gray Column" from all angles of the gallery, it's clear that Valentine's work is, essentially, a protracted experiment in the relationship between light and matter. As the artist once said, his goal was to "take a big saw and cut out a piece of sky."

Fundamentally, both art and science are about encounters with the real world — the one we live in and experience as colors, textures, shapes and sounds. Every artistic creation and every scientific study is a record of experimentation. At their best those experiments are rooted in two vital qualities: interest and attention.[...] 

Interest and attention allow us to live lives that are rich in meaning, lives that are passionate about noticing the everyday miracles right in front of us. No wonder, then, that both science and art have such power over us.

From A Tennessee Forest, Singing The Beauty Of Nature And Science by BARBARA J. KING

David Haskell conversed with me about his experiences in the forest. Here are some highlights from our exchange, starting with his observation that the most numerous woodland creatures were not the most obvious:

The forest is ruled by the inconspicuous small creatures. Birds and mammals are more eye-catching, but the vast majority of the animals present were tiny insects, snails, worms and other invertebrate animals. Getting down on my belly with a hand lens pressed to my eye was the best way to see this.

But it's not only the animal species that are inter-connected; Haskell, too, became part of the forest ecosystem.

A deer walked right up to me — I was sitting very still and it did not see me — then took alarm and snorted. The deer's call was picked up by chipmunks, then squirrels above me, then wood thrushes downslope, spreading like a wave from a rock thrown into a lake. It took more than an hour for the wave to settle, especially for the chipmunks. From then on, I could tell when hikers were approaching by the bow wave of alarm that preceded them

Mathematics: The music of reason.

Greetings all, and thank you, Kristin, for opening this forum.  I definitely have an interest in creating a more holistic learning environment here at Hopkins, and think that communities like this one may be a fruitful place to start.  Maybe my sole contribution to this forum will be to give mathematics a voice from the inside.  Works for me.

Perhaps my place to start is a quote I placed on my faculty webpage that seems to have caught Kristin's eye:  The quote is from A Mathematician's Lament:

Mathematics is the music of reason.  To do mathematics is to engage in an act of discovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion— not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors: your patient is already dead. 

 This sentiment speaks to me, and is part of a long and very strong essay penned by Paul Lockhart, a mathematician currently teaching at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York.  It was written in 2002 and only published by the Mathematical Association of America in 2008.  The whole essay is a complete analysis of why the mathematics we, as mathematicians, "see" is definitely not what is presented in school.  It also talks about what a huge failing this is, and what we may be able do about it.

It is a long 25 pages.  But the first page is a rather eye-catching analogy between how we approach the teaching of math at early ages, and how we approach the teaching of music.

Try it.  

Minutes from our meeting [please change your phrasings if they are not totally correct, or add what I did not take note of]

Meeting

Friday, April 12, 2013, 1-3 pm  Gilman 479

The Johns Hopkins University

TOPIC: how to bridge the sciences and the humanities at Hopkins?

Participants:

Mathematics: Richard Brown

Public Health Studies:  Lisa Folda. Mieka Smart (absent)

Cognitive Science: Brenda Rapp, Géraldine Legendre (Linguistics) (absent)

Geography and Environmental Engineering: Erica Schoenberger

Biology: Karen Beemon

Biomedical Engineering:  Harry Goldberg (absent), Joel Bader (absent)

GRLL: Bill Egginton (Spanish) (absent), Jacques Neefs (French), Derek Schilling (French), Elisabeth Strowick (German) Kristin Cook Gailloud (French)

Department of Otolaryngology/ Peabody: Monica Lopez-Gonzalez

Physics and Astronomy: Bruce Barnett, Rosemary Wyse, Brice Ménard

Department of Chemistry: Paul Dagdigian, Kit H. Bowen

Department of Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries, & Department of History: Earle Havens (absent)

Students with double majors/minors in GRLL and Science:  Richard Kumapaley   

Richard Brown: Points out the importance to teach students to learn how to formulate a written argument (many agree)

Jacques Neefs: what is the reciprocity of this undertaking – students from the sciences are interested in literature, but we cannot easily imagine the reverse. It is necessary to created bridges on both sides

Brenda Rapp: Stanford has made a strong commitment to the humanities

Addendum FYI: [http://shc.stanford.edu/about/history/  At Stanford, all incoming freshman are exposed to the humanities through the required Thinking Matters course. https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/thinking-matters]

http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/why

Richard Brown: our conversation can center on the topic of Beauty, for example: the beauty of electricity, of mathematics etc.

We could create a Seminar Series and consider the notion of “beauty”; Math is an art form

Jacques Neefs: There is a strong link between math and music in Ancient Greece

Richard Kumapaley (answering my question about whether the word beauty is relevant to young people): perhaps the word “creativity” is better; mentions that Erica Shoenberger’s class [Introduction to Engineering for Sustainable Development class?]  was appealing in that it presented problem solving and strongly encouraged creativity. Richard explains how he has learned from the variety of classes he has taken at Hopkins in order to construct his own thinking. [Richard won an award for an online teaching project in epidemiology]

Lisa Folda: praises Richard’s intelligence and  “anomalous” pattern

Monica Lopez-Gonzalez: Support is an issue: interested students are out there, but can we gain (financial and administrative) support?

Derek Schilling: brings up the fact that across the disciplines we engage in common forms of reasoning, but employ these to different ends with varying degrees of rigor. Humanists, and literary scholars in particular, are notorious for their reliance on inductive reasoning. They set forth conclusions that are not demonstrably true but merely "probable." What many would consider to be faulty logic (presence of confirmation bias & availability heuristic) is what allows literary scholars to connect texts poetically. One thing we could do to attune students to commonalities among our disciplines is to address, reflexively and through example, the forms of reasoning we most often put to use.

Kit H. Bowen: the world breaks into 2 parts, the physical on one side, mankind on the other. The latter part is small. Man is all about emotions (and not easy to grasp). That is why I am here

Richard Brown: how to sell this to the administration? We should show there is popular demand.

Water is an important issue one of the 5 university-wide “signature initiatives” (= individualized health, the science of learning, the institute for the American city,  global health, and water). We could integrate this into a Seminar Series.

Jacques Neefs: Elisabeth Strowick recently gave a talk on “Clouds in Goethe”  [A lecture on Goethe's attempt to 'understand' cloud formations and its implications for the literary discourse] at the Literature and Cosmology, hosted by the German program at the Johns Hopkins University.

[Entrepreneurship & Management Minor?]

Joel Bader: the topic could be ETHICS, an all-important in all fields today

Jacques Neefs: ethics is not the root of the problem, it does not encompass the whole field of inventing and creativity

Conclusion: we will continue this conversation on Friday May 3^rd at 1pm in Gilman 75 this time  (food wine and will accompany us)

From Lisa Folda: 

If the group is interested, this is the collaborative event that I mentioned last Friday – perhaps not exactly what we would imagine for a Science/Humanities collaboration, but a good example of a wide range of participants from multiple sectors across the University and the community.


The Second Annual Symposium on the Social Determinants of Health aims to raise awareness about the impact and importance of the social determinants of health and to identify actionable items that can be undertaken to reduce health inequalities.