Existentialism and...Star Wars

Sartre in a nutshell here.

Even more on language

Some more on the research noted below in the Economist. There is also some discussion of rather more controversial research challenging the dominant Chomskyan innateness thesis - roughly the view that the human brain has hard-wired grammar modules. Interesting, but it's not yet time to give up Chomsky.

More on language. Recent research published by Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland suggests that modern languages may have a single point of origin in southern Africa.

Here is a report and brief discussion in the New York Times.

The thesis that modern language originated only once is an issue of considerable controversy among linguists. To put things very roughly the research uses methodology employed in biology to examine the diversity of sound types in different languages. As the distance from southern Africa grows, so the number of consonants, vowels and tones in a language decreases. Atkinson explain that this pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa.

On a rather different note, this is just...strange, remarkable, a future career option. Thanks to Daniel Hill who posted this on Facebook.

Those who study sociology will be familiar with Tony Sewell's thesis on the educationally underachievement of black students - in particular black boys from Caribbean backgrounds. In a nutshell, the working class culture in which they are embedded narrows their horizons and limits their aspirations. It's all about class, not race. While I think Sewell may underplay the structural aspects of working class culture and economic relations which limit the possibility of opportunities, he is (obviously) onto something.

Here's an article written following David Cameron's criticism of Oxford University for the low level of black undergraduate recruitment.

Here's an article on a language on the cusp of disappearing. If a language ceases to have any speakers, but has its vocabulary and grammar reliably recorded, then there is the possibility of it being revived by subsequent generations - or, at any rate, by a few enthusiasts. Are they speaking the same language? What are the identity conditions of a language?

Empathy

Here is an interesting article on empathy. In particular, it considers how an absence of the capacity to empathise can underpin what we judge to be morally problematic actions and attitudes. This is an ancient thought - think about the emphasis placed by Aristotle on the role of character and the emotions - and one that continues to be of interest to researchers in psychology, cognitive science and experimental philosophy. While the author, Simon Baron-Cohen, may be right to stress the importance of empathy as a being like 'universal solvent' in helping us deal with conflict, you might wonder whether the appeal to its absence is enough to explain much of what seems to be morally evil.