After rising to prominence for his stand-up act, he became a regular in movies and TV, most recently on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
The comedian Richard Lewis in 2014. He was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s.Credit…Michael Schwartz/WireImage
Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who first achieved fame in the 1970s and ’80s with his trademark acerbic, dark sense of humor, and who later parlayed that quality into an acting career that included movies like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and a recurring role as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.
Mr. Lewis was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s, marked by a world-weary, sarcastic wit that mapped well onto the urban malaise in which many of them plied their trade.
After finding success as a comedian in New York nightclubs, he became a regular on late-night talk shows, favored as much for his tight routine as for his casual, open affability as an interviewee. He appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman” 48 times.
And he was at the forefront of the boom in stand-up comedy that came with the expansion of cable television in the late 1980s.
ImageMr. Lewis performing as a standup in Las Vegas in 2005. He called himself “the Prince of Pain.” Credit…Ethan Miller/Getty Images
(i) Introduction (ii) Sokal’s Sex Life and Kripke’s Schooldays (iii) Robert P. Crease on the Envy, Rivalry and Anger of Scientists (iv) Paul Davies on Newton’s Religious Context of Discovery (v) Rupert Sheldrake Against the Context-of-Discovery Distinction (vi) Slavoj Žižek Against the Context-of-Discovery Distinction
Many readers will have noticed the numerous social-media memes which have Albert Einstein’s words embedded within them. Relevantly, most of these memes aren’t actually about his scientific theories and views, or even about science itself. Instead, most of them are posted to defend the view that Einstein was religious, or spiritual, or a socialist, or this, or that, or the other. Other memes concentrate on Einstein’s private life.
More particularly, the users of Facebook and social media generally might also have also noted how often spiritual idealists (see here) and New Agers quote a handful of passages from German and Austrian physicists which were mainly spoken (or written) in the first three decades of the 20th century. The relevant point is that these much-quoted scientists rarely made an effort to tie their non-scientific views to their actual physical (i.e., technical) theories. What’s more, these physicists hardy referred to “Eastern thought” and spiritual stuff in the first place. Hence, the very-few passages which spiritual commentators, New Agers, etc. quote and embed in their memes.
Erwin Schrödinger is a good example of all this.
He actually went out of his way to disconnect his interest in (loosely called) Eastern religion from his actual technical physics. [See note 1.]
New Agers, on the other hand, do the opposite of this.
Such people go out of their way to connect — specifically — quantum physics to their prior spiritual beliefs.
So are all these (as it’s put in philosophy) contexts of discovery important to the scientific theories of particular scientists?
Indeed, are they contexts of discovery at all?
Sokal’s Sex Life and Kripke’s Schooldays
Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal
In extreme terms, it doesn’t matter if the scientist discussed (or memed) was also, say, a serial killer, a Nazi, a neoliberal, a narcissist, etc. In Einstein’s particular case, it doesn’t matter that he was (according to Metro newspaper) a “misogynist” and “neanderthal”.
Yet, to take just one example, the French critic and writerPhilippe Sollers was very interested in contexts of discovery. Or at least he was interested in in the sex life and personal psychology of a mathematician and physicist.
Philippe Sollers’ words are to be found in this article.
So now take American mathematician and physicist Alan Sokalandthe physicist and philosopherJean Bricmont and their words (from the book Intellectual Impostures) on Philippe Sollers’ words (see image above) on… well, Sokal and Bricmont themselves:
“[] Philippe Sollers asserts [] that our private lives ‘merit investigation’: ‘What do they like? What paintings do they have on their walls? What are their wives like? How are those beautiful abstract statements translated in their daily and sexual lives?’
“Well! Let’s concede once and for all that we are arrogant, mediocre, sexually frustrated scientists, ignorant in philosophy and enslaved by a scientistic ideology (neoconservative or hard-line Marxist, take your pick).”
In any case, how did Alan Sokal react to Philippe Sollers’ words?
“But please tell us what this implies concerning the validity or invalidity of our arguments.”
All that said, popular-science writers often become very fixated on biographical detail. Perhaps they do so for two related — as well as obvious – reasons:
(1) To popularise science and scientists (2) To help sell their books.
Let’s now take a rather less sexy context of discovery.
Saul Kripke
The American philosopher and logician Saul Kripkewas once honest enough to admit (inthis video) that his initial interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein was solely down to who taught him at university when he was a student. (He mentions “three faculty members” particularly.) Of course, alongside the fact that his teachers had an interest in Wittgenstein (specifically the “late Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations) would have been the fact that Kripke actually developed an independent interest in what Wittgenstein wrote. Having said that, Kripke also confesses that he didn’t at first see the importance of Wittgenstein or his Philosophical Investigations. Indeed, he didn’t “develop [his] own take on what [Wittgenstein] was doing until 1962 and 1963”…
Then again, Kripke was still only 22 in 1962…
But who cares about all this biographical detail!
Well, a lot of people do.
Indeed, there’s nothing wrong with that.
The question is what relevance does it have to Kripke’s actual philosophical ideas in, say, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, etc?
The context of Kripke’s discovery of Wittgenstein, in this case, will have no interest at all to those strict philosophers who’re solely interested in the context of justifying Kripke’s analysis of Wittgenstein.
Thus, if biographyand context are really so important when it comes to Sokal’s arguments (or to the scientific theories of scientists), then take the following letter (see here) which Einstein wrote to his wife in 1919? —
“You will make sure: – that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; – that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; – that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
“You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego: – my sitting at home with you; – my going out or travelling with you.
“You will obey the following points in your relations with me: – you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way; – you will stop talking to me if I request it; – you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
“You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour.”
Have these words ever appeared in any social-media memes?
That said, Einstein’s letter to his wife (of the time) has indeed been tackled by journalists, and by some science writers too.
The point here is that if contexts of discovery can be used in positive ways, then they can be used in negative ways too.
More relevantly, if positive contexts of discovery can be tied to actual scientific theories and ideas, then so too can negative ones.
So can we pick and choose contexts of discovery according to taste?
Now let’s just pretend that Einstein was a serial killer, or a neanderthal, or a misogynist — or perhaps all three at once.
How would, say, the historian of science and philosopher Robert P. Crease deal with these possibilities?
Robert P. Crease on the Envy, Rivalry and Anger of Scientists
Robert Crease isn’t just interested in contexts of discovery: he actually ties the scientific theories of physicists to their (as it were) extra-curricular activities and beliefs…
Or at least he seems to!
Crease believes such that such scientific theories actually embody aspects of the (as it were) biographical detail of the scientists who created them.
“[I]n Einstein [] we can see glimpses of what lies beyond the standard model: an account of science in which character and personal feeling are not marginal to the scientific process, not a prelude to a person’s scientific labours, but what sustains them and carried them forward.”
Of course it can still be asked if Crease is actually arguing that all this “character and personal feeling” is somehow embodied in scientists’ scientific theories.
So if it is, then how is it so?
What’s more, what is Crease actually pitting himself against?
Crease is pitting himself against what he (ironically) calls “the standard model [of] [m]ost histories of science”. Crease writes:
“It emphasises the collective and impersonal dimension, and downplays the experiences of specific individuals. The principle structural ingredients are discoveries, instruments, measurements, and theories.”
Is this true?
Do historians really “downplay[] the experiences of specific individuals”?
Not in the cases I’ve read.
Indeed, if we move away from historians of science, popular-science writers certainly don’t!
So perhaps that’s the very distinction Crease is making: the distinction between historians of science and popular-science writers. (Crease has himself written such a popular-science book — the one these quotes come from.)
Moreover, even if what Crease says about historians of science is true, then what are we to make of all these experiences of specific individuals from a scientific point of view?
Of course, much — very much ! — has been made of them from all sorts of other points of view.
However, what relevance do the specific experiences of specific scientists have to their specific scientific theories and ideas?
“[e]nvy, rivalry, anger, disbelief, conviction, stress, hope, despair, dejection — all can be found in the documents”.
Has any historian of science argued that scientists don’t experience envy, rivalry, anger,disbelief, conviction, stress, hope, despair, rejection? Has any scientist himself ever argued this about his fellow scientists?
Like the physicist and popular-science writer Paul Davies (to be discussed in a moment), Robert Crease believes that all of this experience becomes embodied in the actual scientific theories of scientists…
Or at least I think that’s what he believes.
As already stated, it’s hard to see what Crease is getting at otherwise.
In any case, Paul Davies certainly does believe this.
Paul Davies on Newton’s Religious Contexts of Discovery
The popular-science writer and physicist Paul Davies goes much further too.
For example, Davies is keen to stress Isaac Newton’s religious beliefs, and how they influenced (or even determined) his actual physics. (See Davies’s‘Taking Science on Faith’for the New York Times.)
Thus, if this is true (in this case at least), then the context of discovery can’t be separated from from the context of justification at all. That’s because Davies is making a direct link between Newton’s scientific theories and his religious beliefs.
On the other hand, if that link between contexts of discovery and actual scientific theories isn’t there, then (at its crudest) it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to Newton’s scientific theories and ideas whether he too was a serial killer, or believed in pink goblins, or was a Christian fundamentalist, or that he stole all his ideas from Leibniz.
Of course, much has also been made of Newton’s (as it were) religious credentials by other people.
For example, spiritual-but-not-religious people and New-Agers have made much of Newton’s alchemy, Biblical prophesies, chronologies, fixation with numbers, interpretations of the Bible, and his takes on the philosopher’s stone and sacred geometry.
What’s more, their biographical and historical detail about Newton may well be largely correct!
Rupert Sheldrake Against the Distinction
Say that Einstein was a serial killer or a misogynist.
However, some critics of science (e.g., postmodernists, poststructuralists, religious and spiritual people, some Marxists, psychoanalysts, Jungians, etc.) have argued that this distinctionis a phoney. And it’s phoney largely because they see it as an idealisation and a simplification.
It can be assumed that Sheldrake will be aware of this context-of-discovery/context-of-justification distinction. However, it can also be assumed that he doesn’t really buy it — at least not unquestioningly. (I doubt that anyone accepts it unquestioningly. I don’t.)
“To this day, scientists pretend that they are rather like disembodied minds. Unlike other human activities, science is supposed to be uniquely objective. Scientific papers are conventionally written in an impersonal style, seemingly devoid of emotions. Conclusions are meant to follow from facts by a logical process of reasoning, such as that which might be followed by a computer, if machines with sufficient artificial intelligence could ever be constructed. Nobody is ever seen doing anything, methods are followed, phenomena observed, and measurements are made, preferably with instruments. Everything is reported in the passive voice. Even schoolchildren learn this style, and practise it in their laboratory notebooks: ‘a test tube was taken…’
“All research scientists know that this process is artificial; they are not disembodied minds, uninfluenced by emotion.”
So what if scientists did believe that they have “disembodied minds”? Where would that lead us? Would it impact on the attitude we have to their actual scientific theories, and to science generally?
Moreover, do any of Sheldrake’s psychological analyses of scientists (even if genuinely insightful) matter? (Readers may now ask: Matter to whom? Matter in which respects?)
In any case, isn’t this simply Sheldrake’s biased interpretation of what scientists believe? Indeed, even if (most? many? some?) scientists do believe that they have a monopoly on what people call “the objective facts”, then that still wouldn’t entail a commitment to believing that their minds need to be disembodied in order to access those objective facts.
The philosopher Zizek (who uses the words “objective truth-values”) is also against the distinction. However, he never actually uses the technical terms “context of discovery” and “context of justification”.
Slavoj Žižek Against the Distinction
Firstly, Žižek tells us that the “standard distinction” is between
“the social or psychological conditions of a scientific invention and its objective truth-value”.
Žižek has a problem with this division (or distinction).
“The least one can say about it is that the very distinction between the (empirical, contingent sociopsychological) genesis of a certain scientific formation and its objective truth-value, independent of the conditions of this genesis, already presupposes a set of distinctions (between genesis and truth-value, etc.) which are by no means self-evident.”
Let’s firstly comment on certain terms which Žižek uses, and which are questionable.
Take his words “objective truth-value”.
Surely one can make a distinction between the context of discovery (or Žižek’s “genesis”) and the context of justification, and still not have a strong (or even any) commitment to objective truth-values.
For one, what does “objective” even mean in this context?
The words “scientific invention” also (to use Žižek’s own words) “presuppose[] a set of distinctions” which Žižek himself is making. In this case, he appears to believe that scientific theories (or even experimental findings) are little (or even nothing) more than inventions.
Of course, “invention” is a loaded term. Nonetheless, Žižek is on fairly strong ground here because some quantum theorists (who’re also physicists) stress this.
Fuchs believes that “quantum states represent observers’ personal information, expectations and degrees of belief”. More relevantly, Fuchs believes that this
“allows one to see all quantum measurements events as little ‘moments of creation’, rather than as revealing anything pre-existent”.
Now what could be more (as it were) constructionist, and, more relevantly, biographical than stressing (scientific) “moments of creation”?
Note:
(1) See Walter Moore’s excellent biography: Schrödinger: Life and Thought. Moore goes into much detail on Schrödinger’s interest in Schopenhauer, Vedanta, etc.
This open access book connects Jane Jacobs’s celebrated urban analysis to her ideas on economics and social theory. While Jacobs is a legend in the field of urbanism and famous for challenging and profoundly influencing urban planning and design, her theoretical contributions – although central to her criticisms of and proposals for public policy – are frequently overlooked even by her most enthusiastic admirers. This book argues that Jacobs’s insight that “a city cannot be a work of art” underlies both her ideas on planning and her understanding of economic development and social cooperation. It shows how the theory of the market process and Jacobs’s theory of urban processes are useful complements – an example of what economists and urbanists can learn from each other. This Jacobs-cum-market-process perspective offers new theoretical, historical, and policy analyses of cities, more realistic and coherent than standard accounts by either economists or urbanists.
If you’ve ever loved and lost a pet, you may have dreamt of being able to bring it back to life. In China, where animal cloning is legal, this already possible. Several companies offer cloning services to pet owners, using the DNA of the dead animal to create a new pet that’s very much like the old one. The procedure can cost up to €45,000 depending on the size of the animal. Despite the ethical questions raised by cloning, business is booming. Our correspondents report.
Lucy Sante recounts the trials and joys of her gender transition in the memoir “I Heard Her Call My Name.”
Lucy Sante’s transition began after she made digital images of her male self as a woman. “When I saw her,” she writes, “I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.”Credit…Erik Tanner for The New York Times
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I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante
“I want to change my sex,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1948. “Is that possible?”
It is a longing that has existed as long as we have. Now comes Lucy Sante with a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” about transitioning in her late 60s from male to female. She can hear what some of you are thinking. She fears that, by coming out as transgender now, she will be thought to be “merely following a trend, maybe to stay relevant.” She worries her transition will be viewed as a timely shucking of male privilege, a suit of armor that has grown heavy and begun to rust, or as a final bohemian pose, or as something more literary to do in semiretirement than sucking on a Werther’s Original.
Sante worries too about her byline, her newly “dead” one, as if someone had shot it. It “was, in a sense, my shop sign,” she writes. “Would I be risking my public identity as a writer by changing it?” Her books include a classic work of urban history, “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York” (1991) — it always seems to be on a front table at the Strand bookstore, where she used to run the paperback department — and the well-regarded “Evidence” (1992) and “The Factory of Facts” (1998). At one point, she writes, she considered publishing a memoir that began: “This book is by Luc Sante, although it was written by Lucy Sante.” Yet here, happily, is Lucy entire. It is an ideal letter, her added “y,” to symbolize a fork in the road.
We are living in what appears to be, pun barely intended, a transitional moment. Without dismissing the punitive effects that anti-trans bills are having on lives in some states, including the right to publicly exist, it is possible to recognize that trans existence is slipping into the vital center. Take for example the forthcoming Will Ferrell documentary, “Will & Harper,” the toast of the Sundance Film Festival. It is about Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with his best friend of 30 years who is transitioning. Writing in The Washington Post, Jada Yuan called the documentary “so generous and gentle about explaining trans-ness to older generations that it feels like it should be shown in schools and toured around the country as a vital, lifesaving tool.”
“I Heard Her Call My Name” might function, for older readers, in a similar manner. Beware, though: Sante is not as cuddly as Ferrell. Like a shark, she has an extra row of teeth. “I’m urban, concrete, disabused,” she writes. She was a New Jersey kid, the only child of immigrants from Belgium. She attended Columbia and her sensibility was formed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, where she ran with a crowd that included pre-fame Nan Goldin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She worked as the editor Barbara Epstein’s assistant at The New York Review of Books, a launching-pad placement, before becoming a critic and a writer and teaching for many years at Bard College.
Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis she must undergo instead.
The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps.
I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.
Reading “I Heard Her Call My Name” sometimes put me in mind of a throwaway line from “Detransition, Baby,” Torrey Peters’s shrewd 2021 novel: “Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.” Sante’s wrestling with her vanity also brings out some of this book’s darkest moments. She is subject to intense moments of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. There is a bleakly funny moment when, on a friend’s Instagram, she sees a photo of “a wig atop an upright stick, and I felt an instant shock of recognition.”
Sante writes that, from nearly the beginning, she absorbed every cultural detail that had to do with “the matter of boys changing into girls.” She filed all this material away. “It was the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” Was it a sign that her first sexual experience, as young Luc, involved a trip to the emergency room because of a uniquely painful condition called phimosis, “a congenital narrowing of the opening of the foreskin so that it cannot be retracted”? (Talk of genitalia is otherwise mostly elided in this memoir.) She would go on to marry twice and to have a son.
The urge to transition became undeniable during Covid. In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.
The book presents a life in layered stages. We shift back and forth between present and past. The present has greater impact. We are with Sante as she tries on wigs, joins support groups, finds an endocrinologist and begins to take subcutaneous injections of estrogen. She practices sitting like a woman, to shake off what she thinks of as her lifelong imitation of masculinity. She was tired of, she writes, “trying at all times to mount a production titled ‘Luc,’ written and directed and produced by and starring me.” She gets into jewelry. She has a mani-pedi. On a deeper level, she senses herself becoming more open toward the world. She finds that she is becoming more social, less shut down.
One of the things that make this memoir convincing is that it is, on a certain level, unconvincing. Sante is a writer with a lot of peripheral vision. Below and beyond the press of her sentences, you sense her working as both her own private investigator and her defense attorney. Is femininity some kind of test that she still might not pass? The book is powerful because this has always been true: Ambivalence is more convincing than stone certainty. Masculinity had long been Sante’s oversold thesis, and here came the more honest and understated antithesis.
“I Heard Her Call My Name” will not be, I hope, the final memoir from Lucy Sante. It’s a story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring. Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal. She does not try to arrange herself in a consistent mellow light. As Sarah Moss wrote in “Summerwater,” her excellent 2020 novel, in a line that I will only paraphrase: Being “a little old lady” does not stop you from wanting to smack people.
I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition | By Lucy Sante | Penguin Press | 226 pp. | $27
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 2024, Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Dawn of Woman. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Mike Popovich – Freedom Ministries • If you’ve been encouraged by this message and Freedom Ministries, please consider sharing it with others or giving online at https://give.cornerstone.cc/Freedom+M… Official YouTube Channel of FREEDOM MINISTRIES Colorado Springs, CO Mike and Barb Popovich
MOVING = capable of movement; relating to a change of residence; stirring deeply in a way that evokes a strong emotional response
QUESTION: Is something moving you?
STORY: Cindy and I have been together for 31 years now. We are different people but we do share a common purpose. Life is constantly moving right? Well, in 2017 I retired from 18 years of teaching middle and high school students. In 2018 the college where Cindy was a nursing professor suddenly closed. In 2019 we decided to move from Vista, CA back to Wisconsin where we both grew up and where our sisters and brothers live. COVID kinda divided our family. Cindy and I are in our elder years and now in 2024 we are moving again. We are moving to Tennessee. Why? Well, our purpose for moving has always been simple: We want to share the valuable principles that we have learned in our life and we want to help people who are interested in waking up. Cindy is a nutritionist and an herbalist. She values bodily health and natural food. I am an Ontological artist. I focus on a problem and then I listen to my heart and soul (my Inner Beingness) and I use paint or pencils to draw out an expression of the TRUTH of the problem that is here now. We are teachers and our purpose is moving us.
QUOTES
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” ~ Dalai Lama
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” ~ Carl Jung
“True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” ~ Helen Keller
“The purpose of education is to make good human beings with skill and expertise… Enlightened human beings can be created by teachers.” ~ A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
EXERCISE
STOP.
Sit quietly. Assume an erect posture.
Sense the breath. Sit calmly and reflect upon your life purpose.
Feel the energy of life moving in your body.
Get your pen and paper and write a few words or draw lines expressing your unique purpose in life. Move forward into your day listening to your heart and soul calling you to express your purpose.
Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance, he saw a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and the beach. As the man approached, he could see there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.
The man was stuck by the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached, the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.
As he came up to the person, he said: “You must be crazy. There are many miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked up at the man, then stooped down to pick up another starfish to throw into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said: “It sure made a difference to that one”.
Author Unknown
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