Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations One day science will identify the neural correlates of joy. But, I do hope that the rainbow will not be unwoven so completely. Until then - or even after that - the delicious mystery of how we relate to music will never fade away. Salvador Dali, Dream of Venus (1939), Hiroshima Prefectural Art Gallery. Photo by Author ystery will remain in this world for the simple reason that our understanding of reality is limited - below are some reasons for it - and may forever remain so. And we will continue to be curious about this world around us because that is what made us human in the first place. The nature of reality : Angles in Science, Credit: IGIT (Own work)/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 Reality is much more than physical objects. We have abstract objects and structures that we cannot touch and feel directly. These include mathematics (which Colin McGinn felt formed a “third

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at  Aeon Conversations This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cultures and mythologies too. A n excessive preoccupation, in modern societies, with this “manufactured quantity” - along with an acute segmentation of time - can make us too obsessed with the moment. We begin to think in terms of drops and bucketsful of water rather than seeing the river itself.   A cardinal tenet of the mythology of the Australian aboriginals is “The Dreaming” also referred to as the Eternal Dream Time. This dreamtime is the sacred abode of the ancestors who taught humans the skills needed for life. Although the dreamtime has echoes of a past heroic age, it cannot be fixed in time. As anthropologist W.E.H. Skinner pointed out, “It was, and is, everywhen.” This mythology reflects an endless succession of events symbolised by the cycle of the seasons. This awareness of time as cyclical is evident in a number of other cu

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations Cicero looked upon philosophy as a way to prepare for death as it worked in two ways. Firstly, reason and contemplation distracted us from quotidian cares and drew our souls from our bodies in a semblance of death. Secondly, the purpose of gaining wisdom is to teach ourselves to not be afraid to die. Death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin noted, are the only two inevitable things in House of Excise Collector (built in 1841), Prague (Photo: Wikimedia/Public Domain) our lives. We can hope to influence taxes by changing our politicians every now and then or, in the case of despotism, get rid of our rulers by more violent means. But we have no choice but to accept death. Cicero looked upon philosophy as a way to prepare for death as it worked in two ways. Firstly, reason and contemplation distracted us from quotidian cares and drew our souls from our bodies in a semblance of death. Secondly, the purpose of

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the spread of our geographic space. But does all this automatically translate to the world becoming better place, us better people? F rench Historian Fernand Braudel divided time into three scales: geographic, social (or sociological) and individual. We could apply such a triune categorisation to space too. We refer to geographic space when we say New York is around 10,000 miles from Sydney. Social space could refer to any space (more metaphoric than physical) that separates groups of humans from each other, be they family units, clans, ethnic groups, nation states or other artificial collections. Individual space is (more or less) what we commonly call personal space (my car, my house, my money). Murrumbidgee Rice Farm (CSIRO, 1991, Creative Commons) The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the girth of our geographic space and has helped us overcome “the tyran

Below is my "Question of the Month" response which was published in Philosophy Now , Dec 2015/Jan 2016 ( see subscriber link) (I was awarded a random book for my response.) What’s More Important: Freedom, Justice, Happiness, Truth? The thought foremost in the minds of the Jews fleeing the Third Reich would have been freedom from Nazi clutches, not justice. For them justice must have seemed a distant mirage. What makes justice hard to get is that, as philosopher John Gray points out, it is “an artefact of custom.” So when customs change, justice changes. And happiness here? The term can be applied in the context of someone fleeing oppression only if we stretch the meaning of ‘happiness’ to cover emotions such as relief, comfort, or solace. It is doubtful though if Hitler’s victims would have experienced even pale happiness. ABA's Magna Carta Memorial, Runnymede, UK. (Photo: Andrew Bowden/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0) Some say that truth consists of beliefs

This was originally posted on   LinkedIn Pulse  on November 14, 2015. Is it time to reevaluate the value (or not) of some of the jargon we have gone used to and to recognise (and “retrench”, to use another euphemism) those dinosaurs who failed to evolve with the times?    “B ig data” has been dethroned as “real-time data” has taken the reins. “Troubleshooting” is on its way out: the preferred term now is either “problem-solving” or “diagnosing”. And, other buzzwords like “virtual team” and “subject matter expert” may also have fallen victim to this extinction event. These were the conclusions reached by a study of 500,000 tech job postings by Seattle firm Textio ( as Bloomberg Business reported recently).   Image credit: By Dellex (Own work) /CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons If a word or phrase is used frequently widely enough - especially if picked up by social media or the blogosphere - it can quickly become part of the industry vernacular. But these buzzwords tend

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse  on September 29, 2015.  While our technology companies have begun addressing the gap they appear to be flipping Snow’s question around In a July 2015 article,   Forbes magazine reported how a number of tech companies like Facebook and Uber have recently begun recruiting more non-technical graduates than tech ones. It appears that they think that “liberal arts thinking makes them stronger.” For instance, as Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack Technologies) noted, studying philosophy taught him how to write really clearly and also - even more significantly - to follow arguments all the way down “which is invaluable in running meetings.” Forbes cites observations also from how graduates from some universities in the last decade were tracked on LinkedIn. Only 30% of graduates from Northwestern University, for example, secured jobs in engineering or information technology. Most of the rest ended up with career paths in such fields as sa

(This is a collection of my letters to media over the years) The letter below to "Philosophy Now" was published in Issue 108 (June/July 2015) of the magazine. Dear Editor: A number of the articles in Issue 106, and also  Grant Bartley’s Editorial , tend to reinforce the premise that human beings are “reasoning animals.” It is also indisputable that our philosophical reasoning is based on logic. Moreover, as Bartley points out, logic “is concerned with what is thinkable through language.” But we do not all speak the same language. Language being a system of symbols, each language could possess different sets of symbols, or the meaning attributed to a symbol may differ from one language to another. Do these limitations of language and mathematics also restrict the efficacy of logic, thus constraining our understanding of the world? This thought echoes Kant’s caution that our inability to accommodate the illogical could limit our comprehending the world beyond our minds. Th

We use the brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to facilitate our actions. However, do the functions of the brain alone amply explain the whole of the human condition? W hen I throw a ball to someone else, I show the unfailing workings of a natural law. That however does not mean that I represent that law of physics, let alone become an embodiment of that law. Similarly, when a particular set of neurons in my brain gave rise to my intention to throw that ball, those neurons were merely involved in a physiological activity underlying that intention. That does not mean that this particular of set of neurons is the intention itself. My MP3 player tells me that exceeding a certain volume level may harm my hearing in the long term. By indicating that this man-made device is “telling me” something, I use here language that anthropomorphises an artefact. I could have said instead that a warning message is displayed on the music player's screen. But I use

The reality we cook up is quite distinct from what actually exists. By this we also seem to posit that with reality there could be more than one version of the truth: an objective unchanging reality – the Kantian thing-in-itself - ontologically akin to mathematics; and then there is the reality we actually perceive which is subject however to constraints borne of both nature and nurture. W hen I have a camera in my hand I am like one of those small pesky dogs: I snap , snap, snap all the time. But this profligate output rarely translates to good quality. There is always some blemish with my photos: either they are out of focus or the sun is behind the subject - so ill-composed that I cannot even pass it off as a silhouette - or part of the head has been guillotined or, more often than not, a mix of all of these in the same shot. I therefore recently bought myself a DSLR camera in the hope that it will help me with learning to take better pictures. As part of this exercise in self-impr