Log24

From Sean D. Kelly, chairman of Harvard's philosophy department, on Oct. 13, 2011—

"What I’m looking for at the moment is a good reference from Plato to make it clear how he understands the term. I remember that in the Thaeatetus there is discussion of knowledge as true belief with logos, and a natural account here might count logos as something like rational justification or explanation. And perhaps Glaukon’s request in the Republic for an explanation or account (logos) of the claim that Justice is a good in itself is a clue. But there must be other places where the term appears in Plato. Does anyone have them?"

See instances of logos  under "Pl." (Plato) and "Id." (Idem ) in Liddell and Scott's A Greek-English Lexicon —

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=lo/gos .

(See also Liddell and Scott's "General List of Abbreviations"—

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Asection%3D5 .)

Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—

"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."

It probably doesn't, but a certain academic  tourist trap does .

A trio of Harvard hicks—

1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—

"Football can literally bring meaning to life."

(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)

2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—

Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."

"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."

— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011

3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—

A comment recently made to Faust—

“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."

Her response—

"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"

—  University Diaries  today. See the excellent commentary there.

For the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi—

Deadline

The above scene  was suggested by Robert Langdon's
Harvard course on Symbology —

 

"…as Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stated in his Fall 2006 address to the Harvard freshman class, being able to tell if a man is 'talking rot' is the ultimate goal of a liberal arts education."

— Yelena S. Mironova ’12 in The Harvard Crimson  yesterday

Is Mironova talking rot? Apparently not, since Knowles did, it seems, use that phrase in such an address. (See an alleged transcript of his remarks by someone at Facebook identifying herself as Van Le, Harvard '10)

Was Knowles talking rot? Perhaps, since the alleged transcript of his remarks indicates he attributed the phrase to a 1914 lecture by one J. A. Smith, a philosopher at Oxford,  but did not give a source for his quotation.

A Google web search for more accurate information yields no exact source. There are two notable hearsay sources—

The weblog Fairing's Parish  on August 16, 2009, gives a version attributed to Smith in More Christmas Crackers  by John Julius Norwich. (The hardcover first edition of this book was published by Viking on Oct. 14, 1991, according to Amazon.co.uk.)

An earlier book in the Christmas Crackers  series was cited as a Smith source by Michael M. Thomas at Forbes.com on Oct. 24, 2008—

"I happened upon Professor Smith long years ago, in the 1980 edition of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker  [sic ]…."

The weblog Laudator Temporis Acti  of Michael Gilleland on August 29, 2004, says…

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29….

Some further bibliographic notes on the Jahanbegloo book—

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Isaiah Berlin en toutes libertés: entretiens avec Isaiah Berlin  (Paris, 1991: Éditions du Félin); repr. in its original English form as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London, 1992: Peter Halban; New York, 1992: Scribner’s; London, 1993: Phoenix; 2nd ed., London, 2007: Halban); excerpted in Jewish Quarterly  38 No 3 (Autumn 1991), 15–26, Jewish Chronicle,  7 February 1992, Literary Supplement, ii, Guardian,  7 March 1992, 23, and (as ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’) New York Review of Books,  28 May 1992, 46–54; trans. Chinese (both scripts), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish (complete and in part, by different translators)

— http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/index.html

A Google books  search yields some starting points for a paper chase that might, given library resources like Harvard's, finally nail down the rot quote.

Try smith oxford "talking rot".

The best citation I can find online is not very good. See The Oxford Book of Oxford  (first edition 1978, new edition 2002), edited by Jan (formerly James) Morris, who gives as her source "J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, opening a lecture course in 1914 (quoted by Harold Macmillan in The Times, 1965)." This does not indicate whether Macmillan was quoting Smith from memory or from a written or printed record. Only the latter would clear Macmillan (and all subsequent purveyors of the alleged Smith quote who did not attribute it to Macmillan) from the suspicion of talking rot.

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).

My Education . . .

Hat tip to Groucho.

From a Boston Globe obituary for Andrew Lewis, an Oscar-nominated
screenwriter who reportedly died at 92 on Feb. 28, 2018 —

"A service has been held for Mr. Lewis . . . ."

—  Bryan Marquard, Globe staff, April 5, 2018

From this  journal on the reported date of his death —

The Globe reports that Lewis's father was Clarence Irving Lewis,
a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.

Fact check:  See page 246 of C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist ,
by Murray G. Murphey (SUNY Press, 2005).

Figure (a) above is not unrelated to philosophy. See Plato 's Meno  dialogue.
See also a different diamond — a symbol devised by C. I. Lewis for use in
modal logic — in the post Wittgenstein's Diamond (July 10, 2011).

When Philosophy Mattered

A review of …

Continental Divide :  Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos
By Peter E. Gordon
(Harvard University Press, 426 pp., $39.95)

The reviewer: David Nirenberg in The New Republic .
The review, dated January 13, 2011, ran in the
February 3, 2011, issue of the magazine.