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.

A Log24 post yesterday was titled
"To an Old Philosopher in Cambridge."
This  post is about one such philosopher,
the current president of Harvard University.

From May 2015 —

" 'When I publicly engage on an issue, it elevates it,' 
Faust said in an interview this month. 'So I want to
be very careful of how I use my voice ….'

In 2007, Faust put her philosophy more succinctly.
Referencing Harvard Business School professor
Michael E. Porter, Faust told the New York Times
that she often considers the mantra 'strategy is
what you don’t do.' "

— The Harvard Crimson  on May 28, 2015

This  journal on May 28, 2015 —

Related material —  Michael Porter: The Great and Powerful.

"Language is about the world— we use it to communicate
about things. So we must ask what this 'aboutness' is:
what is it and how does it work? That is, how does language
manage to hook up with reality?"

— Colin McGinn in Philosophy of Language :
The Classics Explained , MIT Press, Jan. 16, 2015, 
as quoted by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
in The New York Review of Books , Oct. 8, 2015

See also a Harvard Crimson  review of another book by McGinn.

A check of the New York Times 's version of the 
philosophers' stone yields…

"And as Du Bois, a student of Hegel’s, reminds us,
the one who is in the dominated position is aware
of the perspective of the master: She is conscious
of herself as being seen by the other. It is this
double-consciousness that we must learn to understand."

— Seyla Benhabib, quoted by the Times
     on Oct. 29, 2015, 3:30 AM ET

A check of Benhabib's words yields…

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through
the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."

— W. E. B. Du Bois

That, for example, looks on Harvard in amused contempt and pity…

See Con Vocation.

By chance, the latest* remarks in philosopher Colin McGinn's
weblog were posted (yesterday) at 10:04 AM.

Checking, in my usual mad way, for synchronicity, I find
the following from this  weblog on the date  10/04 (2012)—

• The Shining (politics and philosophy)
• Big Bird (Kerouac on jazz)
• Kids Grow Up (children's books and philosophy)

Note too the time of this morning's previous post here
(on McGinn)— 9:09 AM.  Another synchronistic check
yields Log24 posts from 9/09 (2012):

• Decomposition Sermon (mathematics and poetry)
• Grid Compass (philosophy and death)

Related to this last post:

Detail from a stock image suggested by the web page of
a sociologist (Harvard '64) at the University of Washington in Seattle—

Note, on the map of  Wyoming, Devil's Gate.

There are, of course, many such gates.

* Correction (of about 11:20 AM Aug. 3):
  Later  remarks by McGinn were  posted at 10:06 AM today.  
  They included the phrase "The devil is in the details."
  Yet another check for synchronicity leads to
  10/06 (2012) in this  journal with its post related to McGinn's
  weblog remarks yesterday on philosophy and art.
  That 10/06 Log24  post is somewhat in the spirit of other
  remarks by McGinn discussed in a 2009 Harvard Crimson  review.

Today's NY Times  "Stone Links" to philosophy include
a link to a review of a collection of Hilary Putnam's papers.

Related material, from Putnam's "What is Mathematical
Truth?" (Historia Mathematica  2 (1975): 529-543)—

"In this paper I argue that mathematics should be interpreted realistically – that is, that mathematics makes assertions that are objectively true or false, independently of the human mind, and that something answers to such mathematical notions as ‘set’ and ‘function’. This is not to say that reality is somehow bifurcated – that there is one reality of material things, and then, over and above it, a second reality of ‘mathematical things’. A set of objects, for example, depends for its existence on those objects: if they are destroyed, then there is no longer such a set. (Of course, we may say that the set exists ‘tenselessly’, but we may also say the objects exist ‘tenselessly’: this is just to say that in pure mathematics we can sometimes ignore the important difference between ‘exists now’ and ‘did exist, exists now, or will exist’.) Not only are the ‘objects’ of pure mathematics conditional upon material objects; they are, in a sense, merely abstract possibilities. Studying how mathematical objects behave might better be described as studying what structures are abstractly possible and what structures are not abstractly possible."

See also Wittgenstein's Diamond and Plato's Diamond.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday, April 2, 2012—

"I think there is in this country a war on religion.
 I think there is a desire to establish a religion
 in America known as secularism."

Nancy Haught of The Oregonian  on Leap Day, Feb. 29, 2012—

(See also this  journal on Leap Day.)

From New College: The Honors College of Florida—

See also, in this journal, "Greatest Show on Earth" and The Harvard Crimson—

For Women's Day—

• Reviews of GCB  from Dallas and Toronto
• Sweater, a post of 2:02 PM EST Monday
  (1:02 PM Monday, Dallas time)
• Schedule for a Monday afternoon event in Dallas
• NY Times  front page Monday evening, featuring
  remarks by "The Stone" philosopher Colin McGinn
• A 10 PM Monday link to a Harvard Crimson  review
  of a book by McGinn

See a Harvard Crimson  review of a book
by philosopher Colin McGinn.

At Heaven’s Gate

Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, RSS at 23:59 EDT:
Peter Woit's weblog Not Even Wrong—

"Lisa Randall’s new book is about to come out, it’s entitled
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking
Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World."

Angels & Demons  (the film)—

As she enters the lab she reacts in horror
as she sees an eyeball lying on the floor…

Click images for some backstory —

Woit on Randall—

"She has taken on the role of a public face of physics,
 and has written a book which is in part a very general defense
 of science and the materialist, rationalist world-view
 that modern science is based on."

See also yesterday's "The Stone" column in The New York Times—

"What Is Naturalism?"

I prefer philosophy enacted by Reba.

* A reference to Dan Brown, not Marianne Williamson

The Telegraph , April 29th—

Catherine Elizabeth "Kate" Middleton, born 9 January 1982,
will marry Prince William of Wales on April 29th, 2011.

This suggests, by a very illogical and roundabout process
of verbal association, a search in this journal.

A quote from that search—

“‘Memory is non-narrative and non-linear.’
— Maya Lin in The Harvard Crimson , Friday, Dec. 2, 2005

A non-narrative image from the same
general time span as the bride's birthday—

For some context, see Stevens + "The Rock" + "point A".
A post in that search, April 4th's Rock Notes, links to an essay
on physics and philosophy, "The Discrete and the Continuous," by David Deutsch.

See also the article on Deutsch, "Dream Machine," in the current New Yorker 
(May 2, 2011), and the article's author, "Rivka Galchen," in this journal.

Galchen writes very well. For example —

 Part 3 of 5  (See also Part 1 and Part 2) begins as follows…

"Incommensurable. It is a strange word. I wondered, why  did Kuhn choose it? What was the attraction? 

Here’s one clue. At the very end of 'The Road Since Structure,' a compendium of essays on Kuhn’s work, there is an interview with three Greek philosophers of science, Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu and Vassiliki Kindi. Kuhn provides a brief account of the historical origins of his idea. Here is the relevant segment of the interview.

T. KUHN: Look, 'incommensurability' is easy.

V. KINDI: You mean in mathematics?

T. KUHN: …When I was a bright high school mathematician and beginning to learn Calculus, somebody gave me—or maybe I asked for it because I’d heard about it—there was sort of a big two-volume Calculus book by, I can’t remember whom. And then I never really read it. I read the early parts of it. And early on it gives the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2. And I thought it was beautiful. That was terribly exciting, and I learned what incommensurability was then and there. So, it was all ready for me, I mean, it was a metaphor but it got at nicely what I was after. So, that’s where I got it.

'It was all ready for me.' I thought, 'Wow.' The language was suggestive. I imagined √2 provocatively dressed, its lips rouged. But there was an unexpected surprise. The idea didn’t come from the physical sciences or philosophy or linguistics, but from mathematics ."

A footnote from Morris (no. 29)—

"Those who are familiar with the proof [of irrationality] certainly don’t want me to explain it here; likewise, those who are unfamiliar with it don’t want me to explain it here, either. There are many simple proofs in many histories of mathematics — E.T. Bell, Sir Thomas Heath, Morris Kline, etc., etc. Barry Mazur offers a proof in his book, 'Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen),' New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003, 26ff. And there are two proofs in his essay, 'How Did Theaetetus Prove His Theorem?', available on Mazur’s Harvard Web site."

There may, actually, be a few who do  want the proof. They may consult the sources Morris gives, or the excellent  description by G.H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology , or, perhaps best of all for present purposes, the proof as described in a "sort of a big two-volume Calculus book" (perhaps the one Kuhn mentioned)…  See page 6 and page 7 of  Volume One  of Richard Courant's classic Differential and Integral Calculus  (second edition, 1937, reprinted many times through 1970, and again in a Wiley Classics Library Edition in 1988).

David Brooks's column in today's New York Times  suggests a search for the origin of the phrase used as the title of a book Brooks is reviewing— All Things Shining , by philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.

The phrase occurred, notably, in Terrence Malick's 1998 film "The Thin Red Line." I have not yet found an earlier usage.

(A search within  the book for "title" yielded no relevant results, and such searches for "Malick" and for "Thin Red Line" yielded no  results.)

For some background, see an August 20 weblog post by Kelly, Shining in Homer.

For some other background, see an August 20 post in this  weblog.

Update: The phrase occurs in Stephen Mitchell's 1989 translation from the Odes of Solomon—

And you have made all things new;
you have showed me all things shining.

Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—

Harvard 14, Brown 29.

Related philosophy about divine providence—

See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.

For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.

Harvard’s motto is Veritas, i.e., Truth.

Today’s Crimson says a new philosophy professor has joined the Harvard faculty.

The professor, Mark E. Richard, is the author of a 2008 book, When Truth Gives Out.

For related material, see this journal on Oct. 19, 2002: “What Is Truth?.” The conclusion of that entry quotes Jack Nicholson’s classic remark, “You can’t handle the truth.”

For one way to handle the truth, see Pilate Goes to Kindergarten.

Prominent literary intellectuals often like to make familiar reference to the technical terminology of mathematical logic or philosophy of language. A friend of mine overheard the following conversation in Cambridge during l’affaire Derrida, when the proposal to grant an honorary degree to that gentleman met serious academic opposition in the university. A journalist covering the fracas asked a Prominent Literary Intellectual what he took to be Derrida’s importance in the scheme of things. ‘Well,’ the PLI confided graciously, unblushingly, ‘Gödel showed that every theory is inconsistent unless it is supported from outside. Derrida showed that there is no outside.’

Now, there are at least three remarkable things about this. First, the thing that Gödel was supposed to show could not possibly be shown, since there are many demonstrably consistent theories. Second, therefore, Gödel indeed did not show it, and neither did he purport to do so. Third, it makes no sense to say that an inconsistent theory could become consistent by being ‘supported from outside’, whatever that might mean (inconsistency sticks; you cannot get rid of it by addition, only by subtraction). So what Derrida is said to have done is just as impossible as what Gödel was said to have done.

These mistakes should fail you in an undergraduate logic or math or philosophy course. But they are minor considerations in the world of the PLI. The point is that the mere mention of Gödel (like the common invocation of ‘hierarchies’ and ‘metalanguages’) gives a specious impression of something thrillingly deep and thrillingly mathematical and scientific (theory! dazzling! Einstein!) And, not coincidentally, it gives the PLI a flattering image of being something of a hand at these things, an impresario of the thrills. I expect the journalist swooned.

From Josephine Klein, Jacob’s Ladder: Essays on Experiences of the Ineffable in the Context of Contemporary Psychotherapy, London, Karnac Books, 2003–

Page 14 —
Gerard Manley Hopkins

“Quiddity and haeccity were contentious topics in medieval discussions about the nature of reality, and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have encountered these concepts during his Jesuit training. W. H. Gardner, who edited much of Hopkins’s work, writes that

in 1872, while studying medieval philosophy… Hopkins came across the writing of Duns Scotus, and in that subtle thinker’s Principles of Individuation and Theory of Knowledge he discovered what seemed to be a philosophical corroboration of his own private theory of inscape and instress. [Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Penguin, 1953, p. xxiii]

In this useful introduction to his selection of Hopkins’s work, Gardner writes that Hopkins was always looking for the law or principle that gave an object ‘its delicate and surprising uniqueness.’ This was for Hopkins ‘a fundamental beauty which is the active principle of all true being, the source of all true knowledge and delight.’ Clive Bell called it ‘significant form’; Hopkins called it ‘inscape’– ‘the rich and revealing oneness of the natural object’ (pp. xx-xxiv). In this chapter, I call it quiddity.”

The August 2007 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains tributes to the admirable personal qualities and mathematical work of the late Harvard professor George Mackey.  For my own tributes, see Log24 on March 17, 2006,  April 29, 2006, and March 10, 2007.  For an entry critical of Mackey’s reductionism– a philosophical, not mathematical, error– see Log24 on May 23, 2007 (“Devil in the Details”).

Here is another attack on reductionism, from a discussion of the work of another first-rate mathematician, the late Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT:

“Another theme developed by Rota is that of ‘Fundierung.’ He shows that throughout our experience we encounter things that exist only as founded upon other things: a checkmate is founded upon moving certain pieces of chess, which in turn are founded upon certain pieces of wood or plastic. An insult is founded upon certain words being spoken, an act of generosity is founded upon something’s being handed over. In perception, for example, the evidence that occurs to us goes beyond the physical impact on our sensory organs even though it is founded upon it; what we see is far more than meets the eye. Rota gives striking examples to bring out this relationship of founding, which he takes as a logical relationship, containing all the force of logical necessity. His point is strongly antireductionist. Reductionism is the inclination to see as ‘real’ only the foundation, the substrate of things (the piece of wood in chess, the physical exchange in a social phenomenon, and especially the brain as founding the mind) and to deny the true existence of that which is founded. Rota’s arguments against reductionism, along with his colorful examples, are a marvelous philosophical therapy for the debilitating illness of reductionism that so pervades our culture and our educational systems, leading us to deny things we all know to be true, such as the reality of choice, of intelligence, of emotive insight, and spiritual understanding. He shows that ontological reductionism and the prejudice for axiomatic systems are both escapes from reality, attempts to substitute something automatic, manageable, and packaged, something coercive, in place of the human situation, which we all acknowledge by the way we live, even as we deny it in our theories.”

— Robert Sokolowski, foreword to Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts

Father Robert Sokolowski Fr. Robert Sokolowski, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1962, he is internationally recognized and honored for his work in philosophy, particularly phenomenology. In 1994, Catholic University sponsored a conference on his work and published several papers and other essays under the title, The Truthful and the Good, Essays In Honor of Robert Sokolowski. — Thomas Aquinas College newsletter

The tributes to Mackey are contained in the first of two feature articles in the August 2007 AMS Notices.  The second feature article is a review of a new book by Douglas Hofstadter.  For some remarks related to that article, see Thursday’s Log24 entry “Not Mathematics but Theology.”

A Baffled Reader

A reader this morning commented on my first Xanga entry (July 20, 2002):

“To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think),” … William Safire regarding “blogs”.

I still don’t know what you think.  Yet … I try, try, try.

Here’s one thing that I think– today– based on my “Hate Speech for Harvard,” on “Devil in the Details” (Log24, May 18 and 23), and, more recently, on

1. last evening’s PA lottery number 005,
2. the I Ching hexagram of the same number, and
3. the New Yorker issue linked to at the end of the previous entry:

Revised version of the
New Yorker cover of 5/21/07

From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:

“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….”

Related material:

“In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things.” —Wikipedia

“In the 1920’s… the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are confident that there is no mysterious ‘vital principle,’ but that life is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world become quite pervasive.” –Harvard mathematician George Mackey, “What Do Mathematicians Do?“

Opposed to reductionism are “emergence” and “strong emergence“–

“Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic.” —Mark A. Bedau

Or comfortably.

Wittgenstein’s
Passion
 
From today’s
London Daily Mail:

Related
Philosophy:

Related
Art in Our Schools:

Skeptics’ Anniversary

From AP’s “Today in History” for Oct. 28:

“On this date:
In 1636, Harvard College was founded in Massachusetts.”

In the spring of 1960, Harvard sent to all incoming freshmen a reading list consisting, as I recall, of two books:

1.  Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1957), and

2.  A book on evolution, whose title I do not recall.  Perhaps it was Apes, Angels, and Victorians, by William Irvine (McGraw-Hill, 1955).

I found in later years that Gardner was not to be trusted (certainly not on the subject of mathematics– he never had even one college course in the subject). Darwin, however, still seems eminently reasonable.

For my own views on the religion of Scientism advocated by many at Harvard and by those who admire Gardner, see

For a musical version of some related views, see

For an update on the religion of Scientism, see yesterday’s Newsday:

The word “nonreligious” here should,  since Scientism itself amounts to a religion, be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.

Harvard's Barry Mazur likes to quote Aristotle's Metaphysics.  See 1, 2, 3.

Here, with an introductory remark by Martha Cooley, is more from the Metaphysics:

The central aim of Western religion —

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
                 masculine and feminine,
                      life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy —

                 Dualities of Pythagoras
              as reconstructed by Aristotle:
                 Limited     Unlimited
                     Odd     Even
                    Male     Female
                   Light     Dark
                Straight     Curved
                  ... and so on ....

"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

Harvard University, Department of English:

Today's birthday: Jerry Seinfeld.
Related material:
Is Nothing Sacred? and Symmetries.

Reply to Lucifer

The New York State Lottery evening number for Saturday, September 6, 2003, was

666.

See last year’s entries for Mary Shelley’s birthday,

The Number of the Beast and

A Chain of Links. 

These were written partly in response to the New York State Lottery midday number for Monday, August 26, 2002, which was also

666.

In reply to that occurrence, I commented on the website

Lucifer Media Corporation.

In reply to last Saturday’s return of the beastly lottery number, I recommend the following links on software guru Bill Joy:

Sept. 9 – Sun Co-founder Joy Steps Down:

“Joy co-founded Sun, originally an acronym for Stanford University Network, with McNealy in 1982. Before that, Joy was the designer of the Berkeley version of the Unix operating system and helped pioneer the concept of open source.
   More recently, Joy found himself at the center of controversy after he wrote a Wired magazine article on the challenges posed to mankind by new technologies such as nanotechnology, robotics and genetic engineering.”

and

Joy’s April 2000 Wired article, titled

Why the future doesn’t need us:

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

Joy says

“I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil….”

I, too, can date, at least approximately, an encounter with the philosophy of

transhumanism (a Lucifer Media link)

that Kurzweil embraces…  It was sometime in the first half of January, 1989… I know this because January 9, 1989, is the date of The New Yorker’s review of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press).

Brad Leithauser, reviewing Mind Children, says that if Moravec “is correct in supposing that human minds will be transferred into or otherwise fused with machines, it seems likely that traditional religious questions — and traditional religions themselves — will either melt away or suffer wholesale metamorphosis. Debates about Heaven or Hell — to take but one example — would hold little relevance for an immortal creature.”

Au contraire.  Immortal creatures– such as, according to Christianity, human beings– are the only creatures for whom such debates hold relevance.

For an example of such a debate, see

The Contrasting Worldviews of
Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis,

by Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi.

For more on Nicholi, see my entry of August 19, 2003,

Intelligence Test.

For the temple tablet associated with Nicholi in that entry, see my entry of September 6, 2003 (the NY Lottery “666” date),

Pictures for Kurosawa.

To sum up this entry, a phrase of C. S. Lewis seems appropriate:

Surprised by Joy.

ART WARS:

The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month.

From On Certainty, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969):

#508: What can I rely on?
#509: I really want to say that a language game is only possible if one trusts something. (I did not say “can trust something”).
— Quoted by Hilary Putnam in Renewing Philosophy, Chapter 8 (Harvard University Press, 1992)

An Arab on Deconstruction

From “Deconstructing Postmodernism,” by Ziauddin Sardar, at the website “The Free Arab Voice”:

Doubt, the perpetual and perennial condition of postmodernism, is best described by the motto of the cult television series The X-files: ‘Trust no One’….

Deconstruction – the methodology of discursive analysis – is the norm of postmodernism. Everything has to be deconstructed. But once deconstruction has reached its natural conclusion, we are left with a grand void: there is nothing, but nothing, that can remotely provide us with meaning, with a sense of direction, with a scale to distinguish good from evil.

Those who, having reviewed a thousand years of lies by Jews, Arabs, and Christians, are sick of language games, and who are also offended by the recent skillful deconstruction of the World Trade Center, may find some religious solace in the philosophy of Zen.

Though truth may be very hard to find in the pages of most books, the page numbers are generally reliable. This leads to the following Zen meditations.

From a review of the film “The Terminator”:

Some like to see Sarah as a sort of Mother of God, and her son as the saviour in a holy context. John Connor, J.C. , but these initials are also those of the director, so make up your own mind.
— http://www.geocities.com/
   hackettweb2/terminator.html

From a journal note on religion, science, and the meaning of life written in 1998 on the day after Sinatra died and the Pennsylvania lottery number came up “256”:

“What is 256 about?”
— S. H. Cullinane

From Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (Ballantine paperback, 1993) —
John Connor (aka J. C.) offers the following metaphysical comment on the page number that appears above his words (256):

“It seems to be.”
“Is your investigation finished?”
“For all practical purposes, yes,” Connor said.

Connor is correct. The number 256 does indeed seem to be, and indeed it seemed to be again only yesterday evening, when the Pennsylvania lottery again made a metaphysical statement.

Our Zen meditation on the trustworthiness of page numbers concludes with another passage from Rising Sun, this time on page 373:

Connor sighed.
“The clock isn’t moving.”

Here J. C. offers another trenchant comment on his current page number.

The metaphysical significance of 373, “the eternal in the temporal,” is also discussed in the Buddhist classic A Flag for Sunrise, by Robert Stone (Knopf hardcover, 1981)… on, of course, page 373.