"It was a dark and stormy night . . ."
* See also other posts using this word.
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Waxing the Dean
The Harvard Crimson "an hour ago" —
Philosophy Professor Sean Kelly To Serve as
Next Arts and Humanities Dean
"Kelly, a philosopher, holds degrees in mathematics and computer science,
and in cognitive and linguistic sciences. Over the course of his career,
he has taught both philosophy and neuroscience.
This story will be updated. " (Log24 link to Kelly added).
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Ich, Du, etc., etc.
Recent posts involving the English pronoun IT referred to
classic tales of horror by Madeleine L'Engle and Stephen King.
Those posts suggest some further remarks by Martin Buber:
THE WORLD IS TWOFOLD for man
in accordance with his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold
in accordance with the two basic words he can speak.
The basic words are not single words but word pairs.
One basic word is the word pair I-You.
The other basic word is the word pair I-It;
but this basic word is not changed when
He or She takes the place of It.
Thus the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the basic word I-You is different from
that in the basic word I-It.
— Buber, Martin. I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann
(p. 53). Kindle Edition.
Four German pronouns from the above passage
by Martin Buber lead to six pronoun pairs:
ich-du, ich-es, ich-sie, du-es, du-sie, es-sie.
This is in accordance with some 1974 remarks by
Marie-Louise von Franz —
The following passage by Buber may confuse readers of
L'Engle and King with its use, in translation, of "it" instead of
the original German "sie" ("she," corresponding to "die Welt") —
Here, for comparison, are the original German and the translation.
As for "that you in which the lines of relation, though parallel,
intersect," and "intimations of eternity," see Log24 posts on
the concept "line at infinity" as well as "Lost Horizon."
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Saturday, December 30, 2017
A Dream
Say You, Say Me
Lionel Richie
. . . .
"I had a dream,
I had an awesome dream
People in the park
playing games in the dark
And what they played
was a masquerade
And from behind walls of doubt
a voice was crying out"
. . . .
"Something else was behind this . . .
because it makes no sense.”
— The author reviewed in today's previous post,
as quoted yesterday in The Boston Globe
Say you, say me, say IT . . .
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
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Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Raiders of the Lost Stone
Two Students of Structure
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Diana Senechal's 1999 doctoral thesis at Yale was titled
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol."
Her mother, Marjorie Senechal, has written extensively on symmetry
and served as editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer .
From a 2013 memoir by Marjorie Senechal —
|
"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . . |
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
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Monday, December 25, 2017
New Kids on a Block:
A Midnight Special for Charles Wallace
Old Kid on Peter Block —
See the remarks today of Harvard philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly
in The New York Times :
Alexander's "15 properties that create the wholeness and aliveness" —
This is the sort of bullshit that seems to go over well at Harvard.
See Christopher Alexander in this journal.
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