Category Archives: philosophy

A figure from Raphael's "The School of Athens" variously identified as Francesco Maria della Rovere, Pico della Mirandola, or Hypatia of Alexandria.

On Knowledge

On Knowledge – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to address how we recognize knowledge in comparison to the various fields of inquiry through which we refine our understanding of things.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkaneArtRaphael, The School of Athens (1509–1511), Apostolic Palace, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. Public Domain.Sources“On Writing,” Wednesday Blog 6.27.Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, (University of California Press, 2025).Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492, (Harvard University Press, 2024), 307.Dead Poets Society, (1989) "What will your verse be?" Video on YouTube.
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This week, I want to address how we recognize knowledge in comparison to the various fields of inquiry through which we refine our understanding of things.

Lately my work has been dedicated to a thorough review of the historiography within which I’m grounding my dissertation. I wrote about this two weeks ago in an essay titled “On Writing.”[1] My research is historical, yet it touches on secondary literature which operates within various fields within the discipline of history. These include Renaissance history, and its larger sibling early modern history, the history of cartography, the history of animals, the history of botany, and more broadly the history of early modern science. Methodologically, I owe a great deal to two great twentieth-century Francophone anthropologists, Alfred Métraux (1902–1963) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009). While Métraux and Lévi-Strauss aren’t considered directly in the historiographic section of the new introduction that I’m writing for my dissertation, which is limited to sources published since the millennium, they nevertheless stand tall in the background of my history.

Today we often talk within academia about a desire for interdisciplinarity in our work and our research. We’ve found ourselves too narrowed by our ever shrinking fields and seek greener common pastures for grazing as our intellectual and pastoral ancestors alike once knew. In my case, this interdisciplinarity lies more in my efforts to incorporate historical zoology into my work, a methodology which seeks to use zoological methodology and theory to explain historical animals. I have friends who study many things. Among them is one whose passion for history, classics, and mathematics has come together to craft a dissertation which seeks to demonstrate the intersections between those three to better understand the great transitions in human inquiry. Another seeks to follow the medical connections across oceans between disparate regions in the Americas and Europe that nevertheless existed even if they seem remarkable today. Still more, I have a friend who applies basic economic need to explain a complex diplomatic situation that once existed between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire in the Adriatic Sea. All of these historians of whom I write are applying a degree of interdisciplinarity to their work that reflects their own disparate interests and curiosities. In early modern history we talk about curiosities as objects which were collected from disparate and exotic lands into cabinets to display the erudite collector’s prestige and wealth. I say our curiosity is something to be collected by those worthy archives, libraries, museums, or universities that will employ us in the near future and for us to feed with new ideas and avenues of investigation that we will never be bored with life.

In all of these things, there is an underlying genre of knowledge which I am addressing. I’ve written thus far about history alone, yet it is the same for the anthropologists, astronomers, planetary scientists, and physicists who I know. Likewise for the literature scholars and the linguists. Our fields of inquiry all grow on the same planet that comprises of our collected knowledge. In English, this word knowledge is somewhat nebulous. To me, it says that we know things broad or specific. In London, for instance, the Knowledge is the series of tests which new cabbies must complete in order to learn every street within a certain radius of Charing Cross. The Latin translation of this word, scientia, makes things even more complicated as that is the root of the English word science. Thus, when we refer to Renaissance science, there is always a caveat in the following sentence explaining that “this is not science as we know it but a sort of protoscience.” I was advised, similarly, after a particularly poorly received presentation at a workshop at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels in October 2023 that I shouldn’t refer to “sixteenth-century conservation” because no such concept existed at the time; instead, it would be better to discuss a “genealogy of conservation.” This sense that modern terms, in use since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, ought not to be pulled further back into the past I think loses some of the provenance of those terms and how the Enlightenment philosophes first came across them. 

I find it telling that the Ancient Greek translation of knowledge, γνῶσις (gnôsis), is a word with which I’m more familiar from theology and the concept of Gnosticism whereas scientia reminds me of philosophy and the other fields of inquiry which grew from that particular branch of the tree of human curiosity. One might even say that philosophy and theology are a pair, siblings perhaps? They seek to understand similar things: on the one hand an inquiry into thought, and ideally wisdom, and on the other a search for the nature of the Divine, which at least in my Catholicism we can know because we are made in the Image of God. The division here between the Ancient Greek term being affiliated with faith and the Latin one with reason I think speaks to the Latin roots of my own education in Catholic schools and at a Jesuit university, where I learned about Plato and Aristotle, yet I recognized Aristotle’s Historia animalium (History of Animals) by its Latin name by which it was generally known in Western Europe for centuries before the rise of vernacular scholarship rather than by its Greek original Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἰστοριῶν (Ton peri ta zoia historion). Note that the English translation of this title, History of Animals reflects better the Latin cognate of ἰστοριῶν rather than the better English translation of that Greek word, Inquiry.

Added onto these classical etymologies, in my first semester Historiography class at Binghamton University I was introduced to the German translation of scientia, γνῶσις, and knowledge. Wissenschaft struck me immediately because I saw the German cognate for the English word wizard in its prefix, and because I knew that the -schaft suffix tends to translate into English as -ship. Thus, my rough Anglicization of Wissenschaft renders Wizardship, which is rather nifty. Yet this word Wissenschaft instead was seen in the nineteenth century as a general word which could be translated into English as science. This is important for us historians trained in the United States because our own historiographic tradition, that is our national school of historians traces our roots back to German universities in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. I remember long sessions of my historiography class at UMKC discussing the works of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the father of research-based history. I felt a sense that this concept of Wissenschaft seemed relatable, and as it turned out that was because Irish has a similar concept. 

Whereas in English we tack on the suffix -ology onto any word to make it the study of that word, in Irish you add the suffix -ocht. So, geology is geolaíocht and biology is bitheolaíocht. Yet note with the second example that the suffix is not just -ocht but an entire word, eolaíocht. This is the Irish word for science, added onto the end of bitheolaíocht to demonstrate that this word refers to the study of bith- a prefix combining form of the word beatha, meaning life. So, biology then is the science of life itself. Powerful stuff. I appreciate that Irish linguists and scholars have sought overall to preserve our language’s own consistency with its scientific terminology. It means that these fields of study, these areas of knowledge, can exist purely within the purview of the Irish language without any extra need to recognize that their prefixes or suffixes come from Latin, Greek, or English. There are some exceptions of course: take zó-eolaíocht, the Irish word for zoology, which effectively adopts the Greek word ζῷον perhaps through the English zoo into Irish. Would it not have been just as easy for whoever devised this hyphenated word to instead write ainmhíeolaíocht, translated into English as the science of animals? Here though I see more influence from English because this language adopts as much as it can from other languages out of prestige and a desire for translingual communicability. As an English speaker, I find scholarly works often easier to read because we share common etymologies for our words relating to knowledge. English’s science, geology, biology, and zoology are French’s science, géologie,biologie, and zoologie. In English, we drop any pretense of Englishness to clothe ourselves in a common mantle familiar to colleagues from related cultures around the globe. In academia this is to our mutual benefit, after all so much of our work is international. I’m regularly on webinars and Zoom calls with colleagues in Europe for instance. I believe this is the lingering spirit of the old scholarly preference for Latin as a lingua franca which at least to me seems close enough in the past that it’s tangible yet realistically it’s surely been a very long time since any serious scholarly work beyond classics was published in Latin for the benefit of a broad translingual readership?

I for one admire the Irish word eolaíocht and its root eolas, which translates into English as knowledge, that is an awareness of things because eolaíocht represents a universal concept while retaining its own native nature. So often in my research I am discussing the early assimilation of indigenous cosmovisions, to borrow a Spanish word put to good use by Surekha Davies in her latest book, into the nascent global world centered on Europe.[2] I see how these cosmic conceptions faded until they were rendered in Gothic or Latin letters on the voluminous pages of encyclopedic Renaissance general and natural histories which remain among the most often cited primary sources for these indigenous cultures who Marcy Norton argued in her 2024 book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 had their own classical past made remote from their colonial present by European contact, conquest, and colonization.[3] Seeing these indigenous perspectives fade into their categorized and classified statuses within the cosmos defined by Europe’s natural philosophers I feel fortunate that my own diaspora (which was also colonized) has retained this element of our individual perspective. I first came across the -ocht suffix in the word poblacht, the Irish word for republic. A famous story from the birth of the Irish Free State during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921 tells of British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, a Welsh speaker, remarking to Michael Collins, an Irish speaker, that their choice of a republic was unusual because none of the Celtic languages naturally have a word for republic. That word evokes its Roman roots in the ancient Res publica Romana, the Roman Republic, whose northward expansion across the Alps led to the gradual death of the Continental Celtic languages, whose speakers’ descendants today are largely the Western Romance speakers of French, Romansh, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese, among others. Romance languages are noted for their common descent from Latin, whence they all derive variations on the Latin word scientia; English gets science through Old French. “How are you going to name your new government in the Irish language?” Lloyd-George asked. Collins replied something along the lines of “a kingdom is called a ríocht, so this government of the people (pobal) will be called a poblacht. Thus, the Republic of Ireland is named in Irish Poblacht na hÉireann. Naturally, this word pobal derives from the Latin populus, so the shadow of Rome hovers even over unconquered Hibernia. Yet that is another topic for a different essay.

Let me conclude with a comment on the difference between knowledge and wisdom, as I see it. The former is far more tangible. We can know things through learning embodied best in living and in reading. I know for instance to look both ways before crossing a street because plenty of people in the last 140 years have been hit by cars, buses, and trucks, and you can never be too careful. Likewise, I know everything I do about the things I study through reading what others have written about these topics. It’s my job then to say what I will. In Whitman’s words made immortal by our recitation, the answer to the eternal question, “that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” That’s history, people! Reading the powerful play of what others have written and summoning up the courage to take the podium and have your say. I first heard this particular poem, as did many in my generation, recited by Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. Knowledge is the recitation of these facts we’ve learned. Wisdom is understanding how these facts fit together and speak to our common humanity. What makes us human? I believe it’s as much what we know as what we remain ignorant of. Our ignorance isn’t always a curse, rather it’s another foggy field we’ve yet to inquire about, a place where someone’s curiosity will surely thrive someday. It is another evocation of eolas still to come in our long human story. How wonderous is that?

[1] “On Writing,” Wednesday Blog 6.27.

[2] Surekha Davies, Humans: A Monstrous History, (University of California Press, 2025).

[3] Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492, (Harvard University Press, 2024), 307.

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Three Ologies

Three Ologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding: epistemology, ontology, and teleology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

A major turning point in my life came at the end of 2014 when I decided to drop my philosophy major to a minor and not take the final class that I needed to complete that major. The class in question was Continental Philosophy, and it remains one of those decisions that I regret because it closed some doors for me in the long run even while it seemed like a reasonable decision in the short term. A year later, now working on my master’s degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, I was reminded daily that I really should’ve just taken that last class because so much of what we were studying was based in continental philosophy.

I initially pursued a triple major in History, Philosophy, and Theology and a double minor in French and Music at Rockhurst University. I was quite proud of the fact that up to that point in my seven completed semesters at Rockhurst that I’d been able to juggle those three majors and the two minors while still having an active and fulfilling social life on campus. I went into Rockhurst with several vague ideas of what I might want to do with these degrees when I was finished; notably I remember both considering doing a Ph.D., likely in History, and possibly going from Rockhurst either into the Jesuit novitiate or into a diocesan Catholic seminary to become a priest. The first four years of Catholic seminary is comprised of that philosophy bachelor’s degree, so it felt like a good idea to undertake that at Rockhurst and keep the door open.

Now ten years after I would’ve finished my undergraduate with that philosophy degree, I realize that even as I continued to consider holy orders that I may well have properly begun to close that door in my early twenties, not feeling that the priesthood was the right fit for me in spite of what many people have said. Even then, most of the other professions that I’ve considered have been shrinking in one way or another in my lifetime. It feels here as in so many other aspects of my life that I was born at a high point in our society’s capacity to consider the arts, humanities, and even the sciences and that as I’ve gotten older that capacity has diminished time and again. Even while I continue to be frustrated to remain in these wilderness years, I nevertheless continue to learn and to grow in my understanding of what is possible for me to do in my career.

In the last seven years I’ve reasserted myself as a historian first and foremost, settling into the Renaissance as my period of study in late 2017 and gradually shifting from considering the history of Englishwomen’s education to the history of translation to now the history of natural history. Yet all of these disciplines lie under the common umbrella of intellectual history. My manner of writing the history I craft tends to speak toward French notions of mentality and perception, while the economics I still occasionally encounter in my work speak to Max Weber’s notions of capitalism as a broader Cross-Channel enterprise including Brittany and Normandy alongside England, Picardy, Flanders, and the Dutch Republic. I’m beginning to try out a new method of writing history that draws on the natural sciences to better understand the animals and other natural things described by my Renaissance cosmographers and natural historians.

Amid all of this, three words continue to appear, three words which I have often had trouble remembering their meaning. These three are epistemology, ontology, and teleology. In spite of my training in Ancient Greek, I still have trouble keeping these three apart. They represent three central tenants of philosophy which help make sense of how we understand things. It may not sound like the strongest topic for a riveting podcast episode, but for those of you listening bear with me.

Descartes’s tomb, photo by the author.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It distinguishes things which are justified from mere opinions. This theory of knowledge considers propositions about facts, practices which form knowledge, and familiarity with an object thus allowing the subject to know it. This word episteme in Greek (ἐπιστήμη) translates into English as both knowledge and science. Science itself is a word which at its core refers to knowledge, for the root Latin verb sciō means “to know.” We know for instance that we exist because we can recognize our existence, in Descartes’s famous words “I think, therefore I am.” I made a point of visiting Descartes’s tomb in the Abbey Church of St. Germain-des-Prés when I was in Paris in October 2023 because so much of my own philosophy is Cartesian in its origins. I reject the principle that we could be living in a simulation on the grounds that based on what we can know and perceive we are not inclined to accept such a suggestion.

The second of these words is ontology, a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. This word derives from the present participle of the Greek to-be verb εἰμί. I stand by my assertion that the life we are living is real because we can recognize it in large part because the best explanation that I’ve found for the course our history has taken is reliant on us having the freedom to decide the courses of our own lives. This free will explains how a society can seem to take steps backward even while the chaos those retreats cause is to the society’s detriment. The method which I am developing in my research to understand the nature of historical animals using modern scientific research is ontological in character. I can test if this method will work by applying it to particular individual animals who appear in the historical record and determining their true character by a process of eliminating candidate species until the animal’s own species is determined. In this search for the nature of these animals I hope to prove that the historical past, before the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, is valuable to the natural sciences as a means of understanding the longer-term nature of other animals during the period in which human influence upon nature was growing toward the Anthropocene which we find ourselves in today.

I like to think of ontology in the linguistic context of how the copular to be verb appears in our literature. Think, for instance, of how God is identified in the Bible. In the story of the burning bush, the Divine is referred to as “I Am that I Am,” or rather the purest expression of existence. For this reason, when I was an undergraduate in my theology major, I began to refer to God as the Divine Essence owing to the root of essence in the Latin copular verb. English recognizes a far wider set of states of being than does Irish. Where in English I might say “I am sad,” in Irish I would say “sadness is upon me,” or “Tá brón orm.”

The third of these words is teleology. This is the explanation of phenomena in terms of their purpose rather than the manner of their invention. Τέλος (telos) is the Greek word for an end, an aim, or a goal. The purpose of something’s existence then is at focus here. I do question this idea that we have a specific purpose in life, perhaps because mine has not gone quite how I expected. In my Catholicism, the most teleological concept we retain is the idea of a vocation either to holy orders, marriage, or to the single life. The teleology at play here speaks to some sense of destiny which I feel stands in opposition to our free will. Perhaps there is some purpose to life, at its initial conception in the first moments that matter began to form in the void that became our Universe, yet I do not believe that I can perceive any intended influence beyond the flick of the first domino at the Big Bang. We may not even be sure that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, after all there had to be energy to build up to cause such a tremendous explosion in the first place. In a theological view I would point to the Incarnation of Jesus as an example of telos in our history, I am a Catholic after all. My lingering question is where should that theological teleology interact with the other ways of knowing?

I’ve written here before about my view that belief and knowledge are two distinct yet interrelated things. One must believe in one’s senses to know, yet there are things in which one can believe without knowing which one cannot know without believing. The prime example of this is God; “I believe in One God,” it’s something I say every week at Mass in the Creed, “Credo in unum Deum,” in the Latin original of our Roman Missal. Yet God alone is a tremendous challenge to know because God is both paradoxical and far greater than the extent of my knowledge. For this reason, we had the Incarnation, as we recite in the Creed:

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

The Only Begotten Son of God,

Born of the Father before all ages.”

For God to be knowable God needed to come down to our human level in the person of Jesus, God the Son. This was Jesus’s telos, to be known, to be heard, and as we believe restore faith in God and cleanse humanity of original sin. Here there is a collision of belief and knowledge, where something clearly happened about 2,000 years ago because a new profusion of faith occurred, beginning in Judaea and spreading around the Mediterranean World in the Roman Empire and beyond to become Christianity. That new religion adapted to fit the cultures it encountered, so as to be more acceptable to its new converts. Today that collision continues in the Eucharist, the most sacred of all seven sacraments, in which we Catholics alongside our Orthodox brothers and sisters believe that God becomes flesh again in the sacramental bread and wine. Can we know that it happens? Not by any scientific measure, yet something does happen. That something is perceptible through belief, and it is the Great Mystery of the Faith that has kept me in the Catholic Church in spite of the ecclesiastical politics and divisions of our time.

My Irish Gaelic ancestors understood Christianity in their own way, aspects of which survive into the present day. That collision of belief and knowledge looks to some lingering folk belief, or superstition if you will, that I’ve inherited of particular days in the calendar when the worlds of the living and the dead could collide. We see this most pronounced in the old Gaelic calendar on Samhain, which developed through Catholicism into Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and All Souls’ Day around the beginning of November. I see All Saints’ Day fitting into this as well, after all the Saints are our honored dead all the same. Likewise, Bealtaine, the celebration of the coming of Summer at the beginning of May is also the Catholic celebration of the Crowning of Mary, something I attended at Rockhurst on several occasions.

What in all of this can I actually know? I know the stories that have survived from before St. Patrick and the coming of Christianity to my ancestors 15 centuries ago, even if those stories are Christianized in some way or another. I know this just as much as I know that Jesus existed in the first century CE because there are effects of these stories in the lives and histories that are remembered down the generations. If these stories have any teleology, it’s to teach us lessons about life that our ancestors learned so that we might not have to face the same trouble all over again. The folly of humanity is that we are resistant to having a clear purpose or end to our aims. Through our free will we know that there are always many options to choose between.I don’t know if I made the right choice in dropping that philosophy major at the last moment. In many respects, it was a poor decision. I learned from that experience and many others in my early life to stick with things until their conclusion. This learning is something that has been tested to grow beyond mere opinion through belief into something that is verifiable. When I look at my prospects in my doctoral program, I always decide to stick with it because I don’t yet know what my prospects will be like once I’ve earned it, something that I do know having 2 master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree to my name. I have gained a great deal of epistemic experience through all these memories that have informed the nature of my character. Yet where they lead I cannot say, for the purpose of my life is something I continue to decide day by day.

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What’s the Difference between Beavers and Humans?

What's the Difference between Beavers and Humans? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude a month of chaos I interviewed environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane. Links Ben Goldfarb's Website: https://www.bengoldfarb.com NOAA Fisheries, "Oregon Beavers Engineer Better Fish Habitat, More Fish," 14 July 2016. Popular Science, "From the Archives: Do Beavers Rule on Mars?", 6 May 2022. Harvest Public Media, "The Midwest and Great Plains are gearing up for water fights fueled by climate change", 3 Sep 2024. Photo Credit: Beaver in the Pipestone Creek, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota. Photo: Gabe Yellowhawk. Public Domain. Learn more here.
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This week, to conclude a month of chaos I interviewed environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

STK: This is a really fascinating book, I have to say.

STK: I was reading something back in June that was talking about the idea of the Homo faber where we should identify ourselves by our ability to build and to imagine solutions to get out of our problems. I read that and said, “that’s what beavers do to, right?” So, the premise of this one is what is the difference between humans and beavers?

STK: When you talked in the book here about the restoration of beaver dams on Bridge Creek in Oregon; could this be a model for a clearer for how humanity could adapt to cohabitate with the rest of nature?

BG: Yeah, I think so. The situation in Bridge Creek and other places like that is that humans are building beaver dam analogues to help beavers flourish. When we wiped out several hundred million beavers over several centuries in North America, we made it harder for beavers to recolonize, so when you have a healthy beaver-rich stream they are pooling that water up and pushing it out onto the floodplain. When the beavers disappear there’s nothing to cool or check the water, streams then cut through the sediment on the bottom, and they turn into these miniature canyons or ravines. That’s a hard place for beavers to recolonize because the stream is trapped in its place and that’s where these human-built beaver dams come in because we can knock some big wooden posts into the stream bed and weave some willows in there and build some stability. It’s not as good as what the beavers do but it’s a starter dam that they can come in, build off of, and advance. So, these beaver dam analogues are like beaver kick starters, and they allow them to recolonize places where they otherwise couldn’t colonize. And to your point, I think we’ve spent hundreds of years in North America making life harder for beavers in many ways, mostly by killing them directly, and this is a way that we’re making life a little bit easier for them. You can apply this model onto many other wildlife restoration projects like wildlife crossings, or the planting of oyster reefs or salt marshes. These are things which work with ecosystems rather than against them.

A beaver dam on Bridge Creek in Oregon. Photo: NOAA Fisheries, Public Domain. Learn more here.

STK: Yeah, I know they talk here about the butterfly gardens that give them a place to land and such when they migrate.

We’re the species that created the grid system whereas beavers have their own idea of fluid stability. What would you say to that?

BG: We as a species are obsessed with linearity and if Homo faber is a construction species or an infrastructure species as some historians have put it. Linear features are what we construct: highways, railroads, power lines, fiberoptic cables, just look at our crop furrows. Beavers create what looks to us like chaos, there’s water ponding up everywhere with trees dying all over the place, and there’s sediment muckiness that smells a bit. This looks to us like fluid chaos, and I think we need to recognize that those kinds of beaver-modified or beaver-influenced systems are first the historical rule rather than the exception at the time of European arrival, but more important that those beaver systems are profoundly healthy as ecosystems compared to our infrastructure which are destructive to nature. We kill more than 1 million animals per day in the U.S. alone with our cars, whereas beavers create infrastructure that is highly beneficial to other animals from salmon and trout to waterfowl to moose and amphibians. It’s hard to name a species that doesn’t benefit from beavers at some point in its lifecycle.

STK: Beavers seem to have a human attitude to modifying the landscape. It reminds me of theories of terraforming other worlds. André Thevet described how on his way back to France from Brazil in 1556 most places hadn’t been colonized yet except how the island of Haiti was transformed by the Spanish into Hispaniola, “Little Spain,” in part by the influx of pigs they brought. So, this idea of terraforming in astrobiology seems pertinent here. You have a quote here, “We are a nation of floodplain dwellers and farmers, drawn to river valleys yet intolerant of riparian anarchy.” So, are we hostile to beavers because they challenge our sense of order?

BG: Right, the whole terraforming thing is funny because there was a story in, I believe Popular Science, in the 1930s that posited that beavers dug out the canals on Mars . So, that idea that beavers are world-makers have been applied to other planets as well. I think it’s instructive to think of the ways that beaver dams and human dams both impact the landscape, especially here in the West where I live. Every single river has a colossal mega dam on it, and those dams are immense, and they create enormous, consolidated reservoirs and they take a diverse and distributed approach to building ponds. Each of those ponds are only an acre or so, but they store more water in the landscape. You think about what the future of solar energy looks like, we’re on track to build giant industrial solar farms in the California desert when we could put a panel on every roof and opting for this more distributed and dispersed approach to power generation. That’s another interesting thing that beavers teach us: the value of the energy and strength of these distributed systems rather than the hyper-centralized systems that we tend to favor out of some misguided love of efficiency.

STK: Yeah, I just read this morning that our local NPR station was reporting that there’s a bill being proposed in the Missouri Assembly to ban water exportation from Missouri to the western states anticipating that Colorado, Utah, Arizona, et cetera are going to ask for our water eventually. It’s interesting to see that, we have the Missouri River here and the Mississippi River is on the eastern side of the state, and the Missouri floods at least once a year because they release the dams from the Dakotas that get all of the snowmelt and that floods down here typically. The Missouri is very heavily managed by the Army Corps of Engineers to the point that it’s faster than it used to be, but you know, it still floods.

Kansas City, Missouri’s Riverfront Walk along the Missouri River. Photo by the author.

BG: Look, the Missouri is one of the most hydrologically modified rivers in the U.S., and it’s certainly up there, and look at the catastrophic impacts it’s had most prominently on the Pallid sturgeon, and it speaks to the impact of human infrastructure being catastrophic for nature whereas beaver ponds are the world’s greatest fish production system. Trout and salmon grow exponentially faster in beaver ponds. The Missouri is like the Colorado River, one of those rivers that was incredibly full of sediment, “too thick to drink, too thin to plough,” so by damming the Missouri we changed water flows and sediment flows as well, and I think the beavers show us what a healthier and more beneficial relationship with sediment looks like. Beavers are capturing sediment as a resource which allows them to push more water onto the floodplain; they’re managing sediment better than we are in a lot of cases.

STK: Yeah, we actually saw one a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning crossing I-29 in Downtown Kansas City near the river, and it flopped itself over the barrier to get off the highway. I’m hoping there isn’t too much of a fall there, it’s all brush there. It was neat to see. We’re heavily redeveloping the riverfront now, so there’s going to be a lot more people up there were previously it was [among other things] an industrial waste dump by the railroads and such.

STK: I like what you said in the ninth chapter of this book when you were over in the U.K., and I’ve thought for a long time living here in Kansas City, my neighborhood was built here 100 years ago, and there weren’t trees here before they built this neighborhood, and all of the streets are named after colonial New Englanders. I’ve said then to people offhand that the developer tried to make this area a little New England, and as William Cronon wrote, New England was built out of the forests there as a new form of England. So, I wonder there, were you getting toward saying that we could look to Britain for the inspiration for American ecological policies, and secondly that the end goal of unlimited development would be how Britain is today?

BG: Yeah, to me one of the really striking things about visiting the U.K. for the book was how biologically improvised Britain and Ireland are today, and how fortunate we are to have the wildlife here in the U.S.: we have wolves, bison, and moose which were all species that once existed there that were annihilated there. And fortunately, here in the U.S. we were colonized recently enough, and we have enough rugged and inaccessible topography to allow these animals to be conserved, and we’ve done enough wildlife reintroductions here in a way that the U.K. is just beginning to get around to with beavers, and lynx someday. So, visiting made me feel extremely grateful for everything we’ve hung onto in the U.S., and beavers are one of those organisms of an animal in the Lower 48 that we pushed to the brink of extinction, but enough beavers survived up in Canada that we were able to use reintroduced beavers from Canada and some that hung on in Yellowstone National Park to reintroduce beavers on a wide-scale here in the U.S. Beavers today aren’t as ubiquitous as they were at their peak, not by a long shot so maybe we take them for granted a little bit and have beavers in the landscape.

When I went back to England a year later on my book tour, I got to go on a nature walk where we saw beavers doing their thing and people were in tears with joy at seeing these beavers who had been eliminated from the landscape in the 1600s. It’s sort of like seeing the Loch Ness Monster, they’re these giant rodents with their paddle tails and they cut down trees with their teeth to build walls. They’re objectively these cool, bizarre, magical critters, and it was cool to be reminded of that in the U.K. where people are seeing this part of their natural heritage return to the landscape, while meanwhile they hang out in Downtown Kansas City, or Downtown Seattle, or in the Bronx River. It was a good reminder to appreciate our wildlife in general and beavers specifically.

Note that webbing. Photo by the author.

STK: Yeah, I lived in London for a year doing my first Master’s, and you’d see some nature in the parks. I was fascinated looking at the webbing on some of the duck’s feet in St James’s Park where they’ve been protected because that’s been a part of the Palace for 300 years. But if you really wanted to see nature, you’d watch Naturewatch on BBC 1 on weekday mornings.

STK: So, has colonization forever changed beavers? Are they a different animal than they were 400 years ago?

BG: That’s a good question, and I think that ecologically and biologically they’re not. You could take a beaver from the 1300s and plop him down in modern North America and he’d do his thing and build dams and create ponds. They’ve survived so much over the last handful of centuries creating the kinds of landscapes you’d have seen before colonization. I went to Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota where these animals are protected from trapping and the landscape is conducive to beaver dam building, and there were dams that were 1000 ft long and 15 ft high, and I thought it was this great glimpse into pre-colonial America and what this would’ve looked like. These animals are the same but what’s changed is our relationship with beavers where before we perceived them as commodities that we extracted on an industrial scale to make hats. In the 20thcentury beavers began to be protected a little bit, and their populations began to increase, but all of a sudden, they were coming into conflict with humans and flooding our roads and cutting down our apple trees and flooding our irrigation ditches, and so we now see them less as commodities and more as pests. So, we still kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of beavers in the U.S. per year for causing conflict when we’re the nuisance species more than they are, they were here first. So, we need to transition out of the commodity phase and out of the pest phase and into the symbiotic phase where we harness all of the ecological benefits that these animals provide for us. Their ponds filter out water pollution and create oases against drought and prevent wildfires in some cases, especially in the West. They provide incredible fish & wildlife habitat and mitigate flooding in New England. Their value is immense beyond measure and we need to recognize that and treat them as ecological partners in conservation. Indigenous people in North America had that approach. The Blackfeet didn’t kill beavers but saw them as sacred because they created water holes to help other species. Respecting and honoring beavers isn’t new to western science, we just need to rediscover what native people knew for millennia.

STK: Are you working on any big projects now?

BG: I’m working on a book about fish, about fish as ecological engineers putting my beaver hat back on. Fish as drivers of human movement and culture over the course of our species’ own history and all the ways in which we lost fish from our lives and landscapes. I’ve always loved fish, both as quarry (I’m an angler) and as beautiful special specimens, like beavers they’re both concealed by the opacity of water.

BG: I look forward to coming back and joining you when that’s out in, I don’t know, 2056!

STK: Yeah, I’ve got a couple of books that I hope will come out before 2030 hopefully.

BG: Yeah, cool, I look forward to reading about three-toed sloths in human history.

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Beaver in the Pipestone Creek, Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota. Photo: Gabe Yellowhawk. Public Domain. Learn more here.

Asking the Computer

Asking the Computer – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I address news that the latest version of ChatGPT will help with your math problems. — Links: New York Times, 12 Sep. 2024, Cade Metz, "OpenAI Unveils New ChatGPT That Can Reason Through Math and Science." Eddie Burback, 1 Sep. 2024, "AI is here. What now?" YouTube.
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This week, I address news that the latest version of ChatGPT will help with your math problems.

I’ve used ChatGPT on occasion, mostly to test the system and see what it will do if I prompt it about very particular things. What does it know about André Thevet (1516–1590), or about the championship run of my beloved Chicago Cubs from the 80s, the 1880s that is. I even asked it questions in Irish once and was startled to see it reply with perfect Irish grammar, better than Google Translate does. I’ve occasionally pulled up my ChatGPT app to ask about the proper cooking temperatures of beef, pork, or chicken rather than typing those questions into Google, and in one instance I used it to help me confirm a theory I had based on the secondary literature it had in its database for a project I was writing. The one thing that I would’ve expected ChatGPT to be best at from the start are logical questions, especially in mathematics. 

There are clear rules for math, except that in America it’s singular in its informal name while in Britain it retains its inherent plurality. As much as I acted out a learned frustration and incomprehension when posed with mathematical questions in elementary, middle, and high school, I appreciate its regularity, the way in which it operates on a universal and expected level. Many of the greatest minds throughout human history have seen math as a universal language, one which they could use to explain the world in which we live and the heavens we see over our heads. The History of Science is as much a history of knowledge as it is the history of the development of the Scientific Method, a tool which has its own mathematical regularity. All our scales and theorems and representations of real and unreal numbers reflect our own interpretation of the Cosmos, and so it is logical that an advanced civilization like our own (if I may be so bold) would have developed their own language for these same concepts which are inherent in our universe. Carl Sagan took this idea to a fuller level in his novel and later film Contact, in which the alien signal coming from Vega is mathematical in nature. 

Often, the lower numbers are some of the easiest words in a language for learners to pick up on. The numbers retain their similarities in the Indo-European languages to the extent that they were used as early evidence that the Irish trí, the English three, and the Latin trēs are related to the Sanskrit trī (त्रि) and the Farsi se (سه.) The higher the numbers go the more complicated they get, of course. An older pattern in Irish which I still use is to count higher numbers as four and fifty or ceathair is caoga, which is similar to the pattern used in modern German, and something that appears far more King James Bible in English. I love the complexity of the French base-twenty counting system, where the year of my birth, 1992, is mille neuf cent quatre-vignts douze, or one thousand nine-hundred four-twenties and twelve. Will the Belgian and Swiss word nonante to refer to the same number as quatre-vignts-dix ultimately win out in the Francophonie? Peut-être.

I was surprised to read in the New York Times last Friday that the latest version of ChatGPT called OpenAI o1 was built specifically to fix prior bugs that kept the program from solving mathematical problems. Surely this would be the first sort of language that one would teach a computer. As it turns out, no. Even now, OpenAI o1’s mathematical capabilities are limited to questions posed to it in English. So, as long as you have learned the English dialect of the language of mathematics then you can use this computer program to help you solve questions in the most universal of languages.

It reminds me of the bafflement I felt upon first seeing TurnItIn’s grammar correction feature, the purple boxes on TurnItIn’s web interface. For the uninitiated, TurnItIn is the essay grading and plagiarism detection system that most academic institutions that I’ve studied and taught at in the last 15 years use as a submission portal. I was proud to program into my Binghamton TurnItIn account several hotkeys that would allow me to save time retyping the same comment on 50 student essays every time they had a deadline. Thousands of essays later I can squarely say these hotkeys saved my bacon time and time again. Like legal documents, especially the medieval and early modern kind that I’ve read and written about in my studies, they are formulaic and expectable in their character.

The same goes for math: even with the basic understanding that I have (I only made it as far as Algebra II) the logic when explained well is inherent in the subject. Earlier in my doctoral studies, beginning in 2020, my two-sided approach to developing my own character and intellect beyond my studies came in the form of first signing up for Irish classes again, and second picking up where I left off with my mathematical studies in college and trying my hand at a beginner physics course. I’m sad to say I really haven’t had the time to devote to this mathematical pursuit as much as I would like. Perhaps I will be able to work it in someday, alas I also have to eat and sleep, and I’ve learned my attention will only last for so long. I too, dear reader, am only human.

Yet this is something where Open AI o1 differs from the average bear, for it is decidedly not human. How would we try to successfully communicate with a non-human entity or being when we have no basis for conversation to start with? The good thing about o1 and other AI programs is these are non-human minds which we are creating in our own image, ever the aspirant we are wrestling with the greater Essence from beyond this tangible Cosmos we inhabit. We can form o1 and its kind in the best image of our aspirations, a computerized mind that can recognize both empathy and logic and reflect those back to us in its answers to our questions. In the long run, I see o1’s descendants as the minds of far more powerful computers that will help our descendants explore this solar system and perhaps even beyond. 

From the first time I saw it in work, I saw in ChatGPT a descendant of the fictional computers of Starfleet’s vessels whose purpose in being is to seek out new life and new civilizations and to boldly go where no one has gone before. Perhaps that future where humanity has built our utopia in this place, our planetary home, will be facilitated by AI. Perhaps, if we use it, build it, and train it right. 

That said, the YouTuber Eddie Burback made a video several weeks ago about how he has seen AI put to use in his daily life in Los Angeles. In it, from the food delivery robots to his trips in several self-driving Waymo cars (manufactured by Jaguar), to his viewing of several AI films, Burback concluded that AI at this moment in 2024 is a net negative on human creativity and could remove more of the human element from the arts. I have seen far more AI generated images appear on my Instagram and Pinterest in the last year. I like Eddie’s videos, they may be long, but they are thorough and full of emotion, heart, and wit. They do a great service to their viewer at taking a long look at the world as he perceives it. I see much of the same thing, yet as the good Irish Catholic Cub fan that I am, I hold out hope that what today seems impossible to some: AI used morally and for the future improvement of our species and our advancement out of this adolescence in our story may still happen. I believe this is possible because I believe in us, that once this Wild West phase of the new Information Age settles down, we will see better uses of our new technologies develop, even as they continue to advance faster, higher, and stronger with each passing day.

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Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. Photo credit: (c) Field Museum of Natural History - CC BY-NC 4.0.

Elephant Tails

Photo Credit: Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley. 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. © Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0.

Elephant Tails – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some animalistic thoughts. Photo credit: Fighting African Elephants in Stanley Field Hall. Taxidermy by Carl Akeley . 41411 is on the left with two tusks and its trunk is raised. 41410 is on the right, with one tusk. (c) Field Museum of Natural History – CC BY-NC 4.0 — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some animalistic thoughts.

I wonder if the reason why we take our children to zoos and natural history museums to see the animals is because there’s a deep sense where we recognize our own animality? I still go to these places today, to revel in the same sense of wonder I felt at spying the animals, living and dead, that grace the halls and paths of these scientific institutions. For me and many others these are places where we were first introduced to wild things when we too were wild in our own way.

On Tuesday morning I made one of my regular visits to the Kansas City Zoo, to enjoy a cool late summer morning, and yes to see the animals who live there. I’ve come to appreciate more elements of these zoo visits the older I’ve gotten, where before I might love to see the lions and imagine them in the hunt; today, I admire the power, strength, and grace of their forms, and their wisdom at sleeping for nearly 20 hours per day. On this visit the African elephants were out on a morning buffet run through their long enclosure, while families and zookeepers gazed on from the footpaths that line the west side of the elephant enclosure. We didn’t stay long at the elephants on this visit, instead watching them as we passed by. These animals are intelligent and powerful and reflect some of the noblest values we cherish in our fellow humans in their own way.

Perhaps that is why we seek after collecting other animals and housing them in zoos while living or in museums after they are dead. Jay Kirk’s biography of Carl Akeley (1864–1926), the father of American taxidermy, described how on 24 June 1910, while on a collecting expedition for the American Museum of Natural History in Kenya and Uganda, Akeley was taken by surprise by a great bull elephant.[1] Akeley had the distinct impression that he “was being hunted as well, and was now engaged in a mortal contest with this bull.”[2] In the furor of the moment the safety of his rifle caught, after which he threw it aside and grabbed hold of one of the elephant’s tusks “as it lanced past him with the force of a sharpened swinging log.” Akeley held on between the two tusks as the elephant “plowed him into the ground,” and gored off part of his face, breaking enough of his body to convince the Kikuyu porters who joined his expedition 14,000 feet up Mount Kenya that he was dead.[3] Thankfully, Akeley wasn’t dead, and by the end of the expedition had gathered enough mammals to begin building his African Hall of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York where many generations of visitors have learned about these species in the century since.

I see an educational purpose to zoos and museums; they allow us to view these animals up close where otherwise we would have to travel to their native habitats or watch nature documentaries of their lives. These are places where the city dweller can explore the natural world in a controlled and comfortable manner. We demarcate ourselves from the rest of nature by our inventions and our buildings and our tool-use, yet other animals have been seen to do all these things in their own way. What sets us apart perhaps is that we build worlds meant only for ourselves in which we expect other species to exist on our terms. My parents didn’t buy new rugs for their house until after our last two pets, Noel the shih-poo and Kitty the American shorthair cat both died of old age, knowing that those two and our other dogs, cats, horses, goats, ponies, and even a turtle were going to do what they needed to when and where they needed to.

The same goes for these animals living in zoos: today they have enclosures that seek to mimic their native habitats, and to keep them busy and engaged in the thrill of life even while in captivity. Where once they were kept in cages, now they are housed in enclosures. The good people of Kansas City therefore are able to see Sumatran tiger, Red pandas, and Orangutans all in the same general vicinity of each other in the Asian zone of the Kansas City Zoo with minimal risk to life or limb. I say minimal because for all the efforts to contain the natural ways of these animals, we still have the human factor to consider.

In the last week I’ve read a fair bit on chaos theory, first devised by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s to describe seeming anomalous elements in weather patterns. Lorenz defines chaos as having a “sensible dependence” which is inherently deterministic by its sensibility.[4] Chaos “appears to involve chance,” which can be statistically estimated, yet those results are mere estimates.[5] One might say that the size of the human species alone, all 8.2 billion of us, would be enough data points to fulfill the conditions for chaos. Yet even then, there is a finite number which can be calculated, so even the uncertainty of the human factor in building environments for safe encounters between the rest of nature and ourselves for the mutual benefit of all is not uncertain enough to fulfill the need for an infinitely large sample size required for chaos to exist.[6]

Perhaps then, the best way to try to quantify the roots of chaos in the human factor would be to attempt to quantify the countless thoughts of we 8.2 billion humans? I imagine it like filling Stanley Field Hall at the Field Museum in Chicago and the balcony galleries above it to just beyond the fire code maximum capacity and then trying to count the number of thoughts each individual there might have in a given moment. In order to safely move those people out of the building to avoid overcrowding you not only would need to coax each individual to move in such an unsafely large crowd, but you’d need to keep all of those individuals calm and compliant to avoid a panic and stampede. At the end of the day, we are all humans, and humanity is inherently animalistic. A chaotic system is one dependent less on external factors, the fire marshal on a bullhorn directing the crowd out the north and south doors, and more on interior changes in initial conditions.[7] External changes then are predictable, while the human consciousness remains a wonder and a liability in situations when too many of us are in the same place at the same time. It’s a real wonder that the 2016 Cubs World Series Parade, which saw 5 million of us humans gather along the route from Wrigley Field down to Grant Park, didn’t result in any casualties or fights. I’ve argued before that this event is a sign of the inherent benevolence of the human spirit, and that we evolved with good intentions first and foremost.

Here though we’re moving from my philosophical interpretation of a branch of mathematics into matters of theology; and that doesn’t feel like an appropriate direction to take this, so I am avoiding matters of faith this week. When done right our museums and zoos allow us to learn about the rest of nature at a distance, a safe distance for both ourselves and everyone else. With all I’ve read in the last few weeks about polar bears, I’d rather just view them at the zoo, or the standing bears frozen in taxidermic eternity behind glass at the Field Museum. They might appreciate meeting me in life during their summer fast, though that’s entirely irr-elephant.

[1] “Akeley Expedition to British East Africa (1909-1911),” American Museum of Natural History Archives, https://data.library.amnh.org/archives-authorities/id/amnhc_2000084.

[2] Jay Kirk, Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals, (New York: Picador, 2010), 220.

[3] Kirk, 221-222.

[4] Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 8.

[5] Lorenz, 9.

[6] Lorenz, 10-12.

[7] Lorenz, 24.

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