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Edge, The Edge Annual Question — 2008:

“When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?”

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New New Philosophy:

“Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment?

O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally?

I don’t know where you ended up, but in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment. There’s plenty to be said about these interestingly asymmetrical results. But perhaps the most striking thing is this: The study was conducted by a philosopher, as a philosopher, in order to produce a piece of . . . philosophy.”

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037) (Wikipedia)

Kalima Translation:

“Every year Kalima will select 100 candidate titles of classic, contemporary and modern writing from around the world to be translated into Arabic.”

The Guardian, Translation project to bring cream of foreign writers to Arabs:

“The first 100 are from 16 languages, including Greek, Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Latin and ancient Greek. Half the candidate titles are English.”

The Independent, Two cultures, one language: Arabic translation of great works aims to bridge divide:

“The greatest Yiddish-language writer of the 20th century features on a list of 100 books chosen to inaugurate a daring, long-term project to bring landmark foreign works to Arabic-speaking readers.

The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by an author who was raised in Poland but for decades dominated Yiddish writing in New York, will join titles ranging from Sophocles and Chaucer to Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami among the first selections of the Kalima translation programme.

The Kalima (meaning “word” in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers’ access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history.

“The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library,” said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi. “We shy away as far as possible from best-sellers.”"

De 100 titels zijn:
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Terry Eagleton in London Review of Books:

“For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?”

Ter introductie: Mikhail Bakhtin (wikipedia)

Filosofieblog: “De term kosmopolitisme is aan een sterke opmars bezig binnen de hedendaagse politieke filosofie. In tegenstelling tot wat velen denken heeft het concept al een eeuwenoude geschiedenis.” (via)

BBC documentaire Human all Too Human over Friedrich Nietzsche uit 1999. (via) - Extra van Project Gutenberg, de tekst van het gelijknamige boek uit 1878 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.