No, I didn’t get hit by a car. Instead, I got hit by your typical crush of deadlines, traveling, and a bout of laryngitis. But tranquility is returning, and I’m firing up the blogotron again.
Discover, April 20, 2004
Dinner with a philosopher is never just dinner, even when it’s at an obscure Indian restaurant on a quiet side street in Princeton with a 30-year-old post-doctoral researcher. Joshua Greene is a man who spends his days thinking about right and wrong, and how we separate the two. He has a particular fondness for moral paradoxes, which he collects the way some people collect snow globes.
“Let’s say you’re walking by a pond and there’s a drowning baby,” Greene says, over chicken tikka masala. “If you said, ‘I’ve just paid $200 for these shoes and the water would ruin them, so I won’t save the baby,’ you’d be an awful, horrible person. But there are millions of children around the world in the same situation, where just a little money for medicine or food could save their life. And yet we don’t consider ourselves monsters for having this dinner rather than giving the money to Oxfam. Why is that?”
The New York Times, April 4, 2004
To imagine a time and place – say, the city of Oxford on a summer day in 1662 – you have to engage not only the mind’s eye and ear but also the mind’s nose. The warm odor of malt and corn flour rises from the boats landing at the wharves along the Thames. The stink of cured fish hanging in fishmongers’ stalls mixes with the soft smell of bread in the bakeries. The smell of manure is everywhere, in the open sewers, on the town common where cows graze, in the streets where horses haul wagons and coaches.
This week I am in England to give some talks about Soul Made Flesh, which has just been published here. In addition to talking on the BBC, I’ll be talking at Blackwell’s in Bristol on Tuesday, and at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University on Wednesday. I’ve posted details and links to even more details on the talks page of my web site.
I’m in Cambridge at the MIT/Harvard Brain Boot Camp this week, so blogging will be light for a few days.