World philosophy, real simple
Recent highlights from the Ideas blog
Do you ever look inside your cluttered, disgusting fridge and think, What Would Immanuel Kant Do? If so, then an article in the September issue of Real Simple is for you. The piece includes CliffsNotes style summaries of the most famous arguments of a half-dozen philosophers - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel - as well as a hyperpractical takeaway lesson supposedly drawn from the writings of each great thinker.
Let’s cut right to the pragmatic advice:
Plato: “Plato was the original perfectionist, but he also understood that utter perfection is an unattainable goal. So when you’re cleaning the kitchen, you may strive to reach an operating-room level of cleanliness, but even Plato would have been able to live with a few stray crumbs.”
Aristotle: “When trying to balance demands of work and home, consider Aristotle’s golden mean: If you’re a slave to a PDA and a cellphone, your family life will suffer. But ignore the devices and you may be out of a job. Switching them off for a few well-chosen hours daily might keep everyone happy.”
Hume: “Hume believed that people become so influenced by events they experience in their lives that they readily jump to the conclusion that history will repeat itself. A girl who has been cheated on by her past three boyfriends will assume that her boyfriend is up to no good when she catches him texting her best friend. However, it’s possible he’s just planning a party for his sweetheart.”
Who says Americans don’t give philosophy its due?
Fittingly, Slavid’s book is organized not by architect or style but by the environmental challenge faced by the designers and builders: hot, cold, high, wet, and space. Projects profiled include a research station in Antarctica, a luxury lodge erected in a Peruvian rain forest, and a “doomsday” global seed vault, situated in northernmost Scandinavia.
The seed vault, a humanitarian venture undertaken by Norway and completed last year, exemplifies extremity in both its intent (or “program”) and siting. Envisioned as a repository in which samples of the world’s crops could survive global catastrophe, the vault was built on an island in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, in a spot that experiences near-total darkness for four months a year. A monolithic structure fitted with heavy steel doors, designed by the Norwegian artist Dyveke Sanne and the ad agency KORO, guards the opening of a 400-foot-long tunnel that engineers bored into Arctic permafrost.
The vault is cold and dry enough that most seed species are expected to be able to survive there, untended (and assuming loss of power) for thousands of years. The vault currently holds over a million seeds, borne from 100 nations.
Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com. 
