The hatching of consciousness

Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa and Joseph LeDoux’s The Deep History of Ourselves present radically different big pictures regarding the nature, evolution and distribution of consciousness in animals. In this essay review, I discuss the motivations behind these big pictures and try to steer a course between them.

On the Role of Teacher Unions in Social Justice: An Essay Review of Michael Charney, Jesse Hagopian, and Bob Peterson (Eds.) Teacher Unions and Social Justice: Organizing for the Schools and Communities Our Students Deserve. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2021.446 pp. ISBN: 978-0-942961-09-6

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communities, and the larger society. The importance of such a commitment and what it actually looks like is evident in the book under discussion here. Teacher Unions and Social Justice is one of a deservedly well-respected and growing series of volumes published by Rethinking Schools. The entire series constitutes substantive contributions to some of the most significant and contentious issues facing deeply committed educators. Through books such as Teacher Unions and Social Justice and other important publications, Rethinking Schools provides us with ways of combining the professional, political, and personal aspects of our lives and of coming together to build thicker forms of critically democratic education to defend a more robust vision of the common good.

The Border and the Way We Live Now

In this essay-review, Paula Moya discusses three recent scholarly books by T. Jackie Cuevas, Marissa López, and Roberto Hernández that react to the negative racialization of Mexican origin people in the US by analyzing a variety of strategies employed by Chicanx writers and artists in literary and cultural artifacts produced from the 19th century to the present. Cuevas argues that Chicanx scholars need to better acknowledge the wide variety of types of Chicanx people living in the US, including those who are gender variant. López charts how some writers rebuff limiting ethnic stereotypes by engaging in a politics of performative, aggressive abjection as a way of refusing to perform institutionally recognized latinidad. And in his focus on two transnational sites along the US-Mexico border, Hernández seeks to analyze the historical causes and underlying logic of our modern/colonial world system by articulating the not always evident relationship of local eruptions of violence to the global flows of racial capitalism. Together, they unite in fighting the forces of dishistoricization by recovering the history of Chicanx people in the US and imagining for the community a decolonial future that can elude the violent constraints of racial subordination.

Essay Review: On the Borderland of Physics and Psychic Phenomena

In an address presented on August 20, 1891 at the Sixty-First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science the President of the Association’s Section of Mathematics and Physical Science discussed various scientific developments. The speaker started with brief mentions of Michael Faraday’s centenary, and the death of Wilhelm Weber, and then went on to detailed discussions of a binary system of stars, the discovery of ways to achieve color photography, and the importance of professional systematic physics research leaving behind amateur efforts. Then he changed directions and said he was going to discuss a “topic which is as yet beyond the pale of scientific orthodoxy” (p. 551). The topic, the study of psychic phenomena, was called by the speaker the “borderland of physics and psychology,” an area “bounded on the north by psychology, on the south by physics, on the east by physiology, and on the west by pathology and medicine” (p. 553). “I have spoken,” our speaker continued, “of the apparently direct action of mind on mind, and of a possible action of mind on matter. But the whole region is unexplored territory . . . I care not what the end may be. I do care that inquiry shall be conducted by us” (p. 555, my italics). The speaker was English physicist Oliver J. Lodge (1892; see Figure 1), who by that time was well known for his interest and work in psychical research.1 The “us” in the last quote above was a reference to the community of physicists. Such interest in the topic by some physicists, of which Lodge was a main player, is the subject of the book reviewed here.

“Stands for Itself Certainly”

J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of novels with Jesus in their titles, published between 2013 and 2019, has bewildered many reviewers. This essay review proposes that that bewilderment stems from a misconception of the novels’ allegorical dimension and of the possible meanings evoked by their titles. The trilogy is the consummation of Coetzee's meditations on analogy and linguistic skepticism; on the ontological status of fictions; on the eschatological impulsion of writing; and on memory's capacity for true recognitions that have no empirical basis. The trilogy presents us with a world that affirms a purely immanent life. Coetzee tests this world dialogically by subjecting its self-identical “here” to the nonidentical repetitions of analogical thought, through which an “elsewhere” impinges on the “here.” The trilogy's deepest questions turn on the metaphysical scope of this “elsewhere”: that is, on whether the vertiginous depths of analogy participate in an underlying substrate of meaning, recognizable as “the Word of God.”

Religion, Cultural Politics, and Public Knowledge: An Essay Review of Kathleen C. Oberlin. (2020). Creating the creation Museum: How fundamentalist beliefs come to life. New York: New York University Press. pp. 269. Paper. ISBN 978147905709

Almost all of the discussions surrounding educational policy focus their attention on particular places, especially various kinds of formal schooling. While this focus is of course crucial, it tends to ignore other educational sites where acts of teaching go on and where challenges to accepted understandings are waged. These include libraries and the topic of this essay, museums. Creating the Creation Museum clearly documents why such sites are worthy of our most serious attention. The book is a substantive contribution in a number of ways. It offers important critical insights about the Museum and its overt role in “advancing a long standing movement goal: advancing the cultural authority of creation science.” It also provides us with an expanded set of methodological tools for engaging in such work.

Evolutionary biology meets consciousness: essay review of Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subjective experience. Though it would be impossible to cover all its content in a short book review, here we provide a critical evaluation of their two key ideas—the role of Unlimited Associative Learning in the evolution of, and detection of, consciousness and a metaphysical claim about consciousness as a mode of being—in a manner that will hopefully overcome some of the initial resistance of potential readers to tackle a book of this length.