I MAY BE THE ONLY PERSON WHO DID NOT GRASP THIS, BUT ...

No doubt you are aware of the flap over vaccination triggered by an outbreak of Measles in California.  Apparently, lots of up-scale tree-hugging eco-friendly Whole Foods types have chosen not to have their children vaccinated.  [I pre-emptively apologize for the deliberately offensive language.]  It is thought that the outbreak started at DisneyLand.

Why shouldn't parents have the right to choose not to have their children vaccinated?  Because that choice puts at risk the children who have been vaccinated?  How on earth could it do that?  Because the vaccine is only about 97% effective.  Communicable diseases need an accessible pool of target organisms in order to spread.  Otherwise, even though the bacterium or virus is live, it fails to come in contact with an organism it can infect.  Even if it does find one, that one is unlikely to encounter another.  With 97% of potential targets ruled out, the odds are just too small for an epidemic.

Enter a bunch of kids whose parents have decided not to have them vaccinated.  Their presence significantly increases the probability that an unsuccessfully vaccinated child will be infected.  So parents who claim to be exercising a parental right are in fact willfully endangering the children of other parents, and that they have no right to do.

I freely confess that I did not fully understand this until I came across a story somewhere that made reference to it in passing.  This is hardly rocket science or brain surgery, but it is apparently beyond the grasp of politicians and television commentators.

CORRECTION

My former student visited the set of the movie and met Vera Farmiga herself, so that reduces by one the number of degrees separating me from George Clooney.  [She also several times picked up and held Farmiga's little baby.  Does that count for anything?]

BRINGING HOME THE BACON

Most of you are familiar with the notion of "degrees of separation," made popular by a play and then by a parlor game called "six degrees of Kevin Bacon."  The idea is to see how many links of personal acquaintance are required to connect two seemingly distant people.  For example, I am connected by no more than three degrees of separation to George Clooney, a fact of which I was reminded yesterday while watching a bit of the quirky movie Up In The Air.  Clooney's co-star in that movie is a young actress named Vera Farmiga, who starred in a film made from a memoir written by the mother of one of my all-time favorite students, Jennifer Jensen-Wallach.  Since Jennifer's mother visited the set and met Farmiga, that means that I am linked to Clooney by the series of connections Me-Jennifer-Jennifer's mother-Farmiga-Clooney, which is three degrees of separation.

I am also linked to Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and every other major world leader by one degree of separation, since I, like thousands of others, once shook Barack Obama's hand.  Indeed, since my son, Tobias, served as the Chair of Obama's LGBT Advisory Committee in the 2008 election campaign, I am linked by only two degrees of separation of personal acquaintance to all those big wigs.  I am also linked by one degree of separation to every important figure in South Africa's political life of the last thirty years, inasmuch as I once spent an hour one-on-one with Desmond Tutu [a fact of which I am inordinately proud] and Tutu of course has known every important person in South Africa and thousands upon thousands of others not considered to be important by the world, but considered important by him.

It is perhaps a good deal more surprising that I am linked by two degrees of separation to Jeremy Bentham!  I am not talking about philosophical influences or anything hokey like that, but real honest-to-God personal acquaintance.  How on earth is that possible, inasmuch as Bentham died in  1832?  Well, in 1954, I had tea with Bertrand Russell in his modest home outside London.  Russell's godfather was John Stuart Mill [who died when Bertie was one, so I am stretching it a little, but still], and Mill's godfather was none other than Jeremy Bentham [a fact that is not at all surprising, inasmuch as Bentham and James Mill were political allies.]  So:  Me -- Russell -- Mill -- Bentham.  I spent a little time this morning trying without success to find evidence that Bentham knew David Hume.  It would have been possible -- Bentham was twenty-eight when Hume died -- but E. C. Mossner's magisterial biography of Hume does not list Bentham in the index, and I take that as definitive.  Along the way, I did discover something that I either never knew or had forgotten, namely that my second-hand copy of the biography originally belonged to the famous English legal theorist H. L. A. Hart.

Has anyone out there ever met Angelina Jolie?

2016

With the entry and then exit of Mitt Romney [rather like one of those old stage farces in which a character pops out of a door and then turns around and disappears again], the 2016 presidential race is beginning to take shape.  Hillary Clinton is far and away the best prepared, most accomplished, most impressive Republican in the field.  Unfortunately, she is running for the nomination on the Democratic ticket.  [When I was young, she would have been called a Rockefeller Republican -- hawkish on foreign policy and completely in thrall to Wall Street.]    That leaves everyone to the left of the middle without a candidate.  I gave $100 to Bernie Sanders today, but that was just a quiet, personal protest.  I mean, if someone who calls himself a Socialist pokes his head up and sniffs the air, I have to do something, right?  But that is not going anywhere.

By the time another fifteen months have gone by, I will be so freaked out by the person who is winning the Republican nomination race, whomever that is, that I will be supporting Clinton.  Just the Supreme Court nominations are reason enough.  But it is hard, at my age, to contemplate going into my nineties with little or no hope of a serious leftward move in American politics.

SOME MOVIES ARE IMMORTAL

Switching around channels on the TV, Susie and I stumbled on and just watched Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, one of the all-time great movies.  It is modeled [very closely, actually] on the original Frankenstein movie with Boris Karloff as the monster.  In this version, Peter Boyle plays the monster, Gene Wilder plays the good Doctor, Marty Feldman is his manservant and Teri Garr is his assistant, and there are spectacular smaller performances by Cloris Leachman, Madeleine Kahn, Kenneth Marx, and even a vignette with Gene Hackman.

If you have somehow missed this movie, hunt it up and watch it.  It surpasses even Blazing Saddles, the greatest "Western" ever made.

There is simply no joke too low for Brooks to embrace.  In his hands, the Borscht Circuit becomes the Vienna of Mozart.

BUSY BUSY BUSY

I have been hard at work on next Wednesday's lecture since early this morning.  I have only worked this intensively on the preparation for a course twice before:  in 1960, when I worked up my course at Harvard on the Critique of Pure Reason for the first time, and in then 1975, when I first taught a course on The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy at UMass.  On Wednesday, I shall complete my analytical exposition of classical Political Economy, bringing the story up to the point at which Marx entered the picture with Volume One of Capital.  Then I shall stop doing mathematical economics for a bit and start doing literary criticism!

I realized this week that I am really teaching two courses, not one.  [I plan to say this to the students on Wednesday, so those who have followed Jon Tostoe to this blog are getting a preview.]   The manifest subject of the course is "Karl Marx's Critique of Capitalism." but the latent subject [to borrow a distinction from Robert Merton] is "How to do Philosophy."  I want the students to learn, through this course, the importance of taking the time and expending the energy to learn a great deal about all the disciplines that bear in one way or another on the philosophical questions they are interested in. 

If you are doing the Philosophy of Mind, in my view, then you really need to familiarize yourself more than casually with neurophysiology.  If you are doing the Philosophy of Science, then it should go without saying that you need to know a very great deal, in a serious way, about modern Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.  If you are doing Political Philosophy, then you need to know a great deal about Political Sociology [I leave to one side Political Science, which has never struck me as an authentic discipline.]  And if you are doing Moral Philosophy, then you simply must inform yourself about Psychiatry, among other things.

This is not the dominant view in Philosophy these days, so far as I can tell.  Philosophers who are very smart, in a narrow, clever way, seem to imagine that they can rely on their innate intelligence to guide them through the Realm of Ideas.  But I disagree.

My favorite counterexample comes from the great neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.  Many of you may have come across the notion of "contrast-dependent terms," which is to say terms that are defined by reference to one another and therefore, it is supposed, can only be understood as a pair -- right and left, for example, or, for that matter, right and wrong..  There are philosophers who, after a bit of reflection undisturbed by any substantive knowledge, will assert confidently that no one could grasp the notion of to the right who did not also grasp the notion to the left.  Oliver Sacks, in one of his books, describes one of his patients, a woman who had suffered a traumatic brain injury.  She had lost all understanding of the concept to the left, while retaining a quite satisfactory functional grasp of to the right.  If she was looking for something on a table in front of her, and was told it was on her left, she would turn herself all the way around to the right until the object came into view.  Now, of course, a philosopher could try to "save the appearances" [to co-opt a phrase from the Greeks] by saying that the woman did not really understand the concept "to the right."  But that seems to me a counsel of desperation.

Oh well, I am only an Adjunct Professor in the Department, so I suspect I shall not make too lasting an impression on the students.

SELF-JUSTIFYING POSTSCRIPT

In the Fall of 1951 [yes, really sixty-four years ago -- that is not a typo] I took Willard van Orman Quine's graduate Math 280 course at Harvard, "Mathematical Logic."  We used as a text his book by the same name.  One of the other undergraduates in the course was Ralph Krause, a very smart young man.  Ralph found an error in the book and called it to Quine's attention.  Quine was very grateful, and corrected it in the next edition with a footnote acknowledgement to Krause.

Now, when it comes to all things formal, I am not fit to carry Quine's briefcase, and that is not modesty or hyperbole, just the plain truth.  So I figure, if it can happen to Quine ...