Log24

"To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between
the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely
new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato." — Robert M. Pirsig

"It’s all in Plato, all in Plato;
bless me, what do  they
teach them at these schools?”

— C. S. Lewis in
The Narnia Chronicles

Compare and Contrast — Plato's Diamond.

From Ulysses , by James Joyce —

Compare and contrast:

Fans of Plato might enjoy tales of Narnia, but fans of
James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe might prefer
a tale by Michael Chabon from April 2001 about a
"doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania."

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).

Today’s New York Times  on a character in a 1978 film —

“Cluelessly upbeat and charmingly idiotic.”

Related material from a post Saturday —

Coda —

See as well this  journal on the above date — Sept. 24, 2015.

Part I

Embedding the Stone (March 23, 2012) —

The Meno Embedding

Part II

ReverbNation.com — Lawrence Class —

Continued from May 18, 2010.

Previous logo for the New York Times  feature "The Stone"—

Today's new logo, appearing retroactively—

Comparison—

From the October 3 "The Stone," Hegel on Wall Street—

The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves.  Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart.  Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”

— J.M. Bernstein of the New School for Social Research

A two-part self-understanding that is not  from Hegel—

1. An account of how a particular kind of self understands itself:

2. An account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart:

What is Poetry, Part II —

Gombrich vs. Gadamer

Excerpts from
Tetsuhiro Kato on

Gombrich and the
Hermeneutics of Art

Kato on Gombrich

“… according to Gombrich, an image is susceptible to become a target for ‘symbol detectives’…. But the hidden authorial intention… ([for example]… astrology, recalling the famous warning of Panofsky [1955: 32]), almost always tends to become a reproduction of the interpreter’s own ideological prejudice. Not to give into the irrationalism such psychological overinterpretation might invite…. we have to look for the origin of meaning… in…  the social context…. The event of image making is not the faithful transcription of the outside world by an innocent eye, but it is the result of the artist’s act of selecting the ‘nearest equivalence’… based on social convention….”

Kato on Gadamer 

“For [Gadamer], picture reading is a process where a beholder encounters a picture as addressing him or her with a kind of personal question, and the understanding develops in the form of its answer (Gadamer 1981: 23-24; Gadamer 1985: 97,102-103).  But, it must be noted that by this Gadamer does not mean to identify the understanding of an image with some sort of ‘subsumption’ of the image into its meaning (Gadamer 1985: 100). He insists rather that we can understand an image only by actualizing what is implied in the work, and engage in a dialogue with it. This process is ideally repeated again and again, and implies different relations than the original conditions that gave birth to the work in the beginning (Gadamer 1985: 100).

What matters here for Gadamer is to let the aesthetic aspect of image take its own ‘Zeitgestalt’ (Gadamer 1985: 101).”

Example (?) — the Zeitgestalt
of today’s previous entry:

See, too,
 The Quality of Diamond.

Kato’s References:

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1981. “Philosophie und Literatur: Was ist die Literatur?,” Phänomenologische Forschungen 11 (1981): 18-45.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1985. “Über das Lesen von Bauten und Bildern.” Modernität und Tradition: Festschrift für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. Gottfried Boehm, Karlheinz Stierle, Gundorf Winter. Munchen: Wilhelm Fink. 97-103.

Panofsky, Erwin. 1955. Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. New York: Anchor.

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”

Oscar

Deep Chomsky: Lying, Truth-Telling, and the Social Order

Michael  Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.