Log24

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Verbum

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:06 am

Continued from Feb. 18, 2017 —

 

Friday, June 24, 2022

Verbum Sat

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:14 am

Butterfield.

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Verbum Sat

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:07 pm

Vinnie Mancuso, in an article now dated December 25, 2018 —

Related art —

Escher, 'Verbum,' detail

Click image for further details.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Verbum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

Escher, 'Verbum,' detail

From a Log24 search 
for Escher Verbum

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Verbum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 am

The Log24 version  (Nov. 9, 2005, and later posts) —

VERBUM
SAT
SAPIENTI

 

Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher's Verbum


Solomon's Cube

Solomon's Cube
 

I Ching hexagrams as parts of 4x4x4 cube

Geometry of the I Ching

The Warner Brothers version

The Paramount version

See also related material in the previous post, Transformers.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Verbum Sat

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Khora.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Verbum*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:28 am

IMAGE- Link to word 'nikAya' in Sanskrit dictionary

  Click word for details.

  See also a related poetic meditation
  from one for whom…

  The world is not enough

* Continued.

Sunday, November 19, 2023

Six Dimensions

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:59 am

Heinlein:

"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four,
then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math
that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands.
Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three–
you seem to be smart at such projections."

I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done.
Maybe Escher could have done it."

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Saving the Appearances

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:18 pm

Douglas Hofstadter —

“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”

Goedel Escher Bach cover

Related images —

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Alphabet Meets Gestalt . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:25 pm

Continued from April 18 .

"Working with words to create art
and working with your hands to create art
seem like two separate activities to me."

Cover artist, The New Yorker , on April 17

See also Alphabet Blocks in this  journal
as well as Escher's Verbum.

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Sunday, August 21, 2022

Ophelia’s Song

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:27 pm

Lilyjcollins, https://www.instagram.com/p/ChiBYx2PsaO/

Or: Verbum Sat .

Monday, June 27, 2022

Dealing With Cubism

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

Continued from April 12, 2022.

"It’s important, as art historian Reinhard Spieler has noted,
that after a brief, unproductive stay in Paris, circa 1907,
Kandinsky chose to paint in Munich. That’s where he formed
the Expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter  (The Blue Rider) —
and where he avoided having to deal with cubism."

— David Carrier, 

Remarks by Louis Menand in The New Yorker  today —

"The art world isn’t a fixed entity.
It’s continually being reconstituted
as new artistic styles emerge." 

IMAGE- The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

(Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition (1911), Crystallography .)

"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime

See as well Verbum  (February 18, 2017).

Related dramatic music

"Westworld Season 4 begins at Hoover Dam,
with William looking to buy the famous landmark.
What does he consider to be 'stolen' data that is inside?" 

Saturday, June 25, 2022

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Alternate Past: LA/91506

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:36 am

(Title suggested by the beanie label "Alternate Future: NYC/10001")

Salinger's 'Nine Stories,' paperback with 3x3 array of titles on cover, adapted in a Jan. 2, 2009, Log24 post on Nabokov's 1948 'Signs and Symbols'

A version of the Salinger story title "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" —

"… her mouth is red and large, with Disney overtones. But it is her eyes,
a pale green of surprising intensity, that hold me."

Violet Henderson in Vogue , 30 August 2017

See also that date in this  journal.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Analogy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:36 am

Monday, March 4, 2019

Davos Logos

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:57 pm

A less sophisticated approach to logos —

See also Logos in this  journal.

For those who prefer Latin, there is Verbum.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

April 18, 2003 (Good Friday), Continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:03 am

"The purpose of mathematics cannot be derived from an activity 
inferior to it but from a higher sphere of human activity, namely,
religion."

Igor Shafarevitch, 1973 remark published as above in 1982.

"Perhaps."

— Steven H. Cullinane, February 13, 2019

From Log24 on Good Friday, April 18, 2003

. . . What, indeed, is truth?  I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown.  For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.

See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum , which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”

Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day.  See

The Shining of May 29.

“Examples are the stained glass windows
of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov

AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO

Motto of Plato’s Academy


 The Exorcist, 1973

Detail from an image linked to in the above footnote —

"And the darkness comprehended it not."

Id est :

A Good Friday, 2003, article by 
a student of Shafarevitch

" there are 25 planes in W . . . . Of course,
replacing {a,b,c} by the complementary set
does not change the plane. . . ."

Of course.

See. however, Six-Set Geometry in this  journal.

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Casting

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:23 pm

"When you cast a spell . . . ."

See Lily Collins in The Telegraph  today.  A related tale —

"On August 30, 2017, Lily Collins was cast … as Edith Tolkien,
love and later wife of Tolkien, who was also the inspiration of
the princess characters in The Lord of the Rings ."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien_(film)

The Log24  posts of August 30, 2017, are now tagged Verbum 2017.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Symmetric Generation, by Netflix

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:05 am

Suggested by the previous post . . .

'Out of nothing' opening of 'Maniac' at Netflix

"The pattern is the pattern."

Friday, September 21, 2018

Symmetric Generation, by Nao

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:30 pm

"The creation of a new world
        starts now.
Once again I am tied
        to the logic of this
Hyper-symmetrical-dimension."

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in 'Lost in Translation'

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Sequel

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 9:00 am

A sequel to the 1974 film
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot :

Contingent and Fluky

Some variations on a thunderbolt  theme:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

These variations also exemplify the larger
Verbum  theme:

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

A search today for Verbum  in this journal yielded
a Georgetown 
University Chomskyite, Professor
David W. Lightfoot.

"Dr. Lightfoot writes mainly on syntactic theory,
language acquisition and historical change, which
he views as intimately related. He argues that
internal language change is contingent and fluky,
takes place in a sequence of bursts, and is best
viewed as the cumulative effect of changes in
individual grammars, where a grammar is a
'language organ' represented in a person's
mind/brain and embodying his/her language
faculty."

Some syntactic work by another contingent and fluky author
is related to the visual patterns illustrated above.

See Tecumseh Fitch  in this journal.

For other material related to the large Verbum  cube,
see posts for the 18th birthday of Harry Potter.

That birthday was also the upload date for the following:

See esp. the comments section.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Boo Boo Boo*

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

Academics today—

Home Page of Steven Z. Levine
(A.B., A.M., Ph.D., all at Harvard University, 1968-1974)—

IMAGE-Bryn Mawr home page of Professor Steven Z. Levine

(Click to enlarge.)

Note that Levine states forthrightly that he won Third Prize for Bad Writing
from the international journal Philosophy and Literature  in 1998.

* Stanley H. Kaplan, mnemonic for “square root of two.”
On the void — See this morning’s post and “Is Nothing Sacred?

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Brightness at Noon, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"One wild rhapsody a fake for another."

– Wallace Stevens, "Arrival at the Waldorf," in Parts of a World  (1942)

"Camelot is an illusion.

That doesn't matter, according to Catherine.
Camelot is an artificial construction, a public perception.
The things that matter are closer, deeper, self-generated, unkillable.
You've got to grow up to discover what those things are."

— Dan Zak, Washington Post  movie review on Feb. 27, 2009. See also this journal on that date.

See as well a note on symmetry from Christmas Eve, 1981, and Verbum in this journal.

Some philosophical background— Derrida in the Garden.

Some historical background— A Very Private Woman  and Noland.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Brightness at Noon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

David Levine's portrait of Arthur Koestler (see Dec. 30, 2009) —

Image-- Arthur Koestler by David Levine, NY Review of Books, Dec. 17, 1964, review of 'The Act of Creation'

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

Image-- The 64 I Ching hexagrams in the 4 layers of the Cullinane cube

Geometry of the I Ching

See also this morning's post as well as
Monday's post quoting George David Birkhoff

"If I were a Leibnizian mystic… I would say that…
God thinks multi-dimensionally — that is,
uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp."

Sunday, April 18, 2010

A Generation Lost in Space

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:29 am

or, Deja Vu All Over Again

Top two obituaries in this morning's NY Times list–

David Simons, Who Flew High
on Eve of Space Age, Dies at 87

Dr. Simons, a physician turned Air Force officer, had sent animals aloft for several years before his record-breaking flight.

James Aubrey, who Portrayed the Hero
in ‘Lord of the Flies’, Is Dead at 62

Mr. Aubrey portrayed Ralph in the film version of the William Golding novel and had a busy career on stage and television in England.

Simons reportedly died on April 5,
Aubrey on April 6.

This journal on those dates–

April 5 —

Monday, April 5, 2010

Space Cowboys

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM Edit This

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-Eastwood.jpg

Google News, 11:32 AM ET today–

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100405-SpaceCowboysSm.jpg

Related material:

Yesterday's Easter message,
film notes from March 13,
and Dagger Definitions.

April 6 —

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Clue

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM Edit This

Excerpt from 'Cosmic Trigger'
 by Robert Anton Wilson

See also Leary on Cuernavaca,
John O'Hara's fleeting reference
to Cuernavaca in Hope of Heaven,
and Cuernavaca in this journal.

Team Daedalus

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 9:00 AM Edit This

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162

"Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys"

"Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction\

 

Commentary by T.S. Eliot

"At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death'—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward."

 

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Team Daedalus

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 am

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)– theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12" –Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, Society of Jesus, Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162

"Back in 1958… [four] Air Force pilots were Team Daedalus, the best of the best." –Summary of the film "Space Cowboys"

"Man is nothing if not labyrinthine." –The Vicar in Trevanian's The Loo Sanction

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Epiphany Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

January 06, 2007
ART WARS: Epiphany

Picture of Nothing
On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately about faith, about his faith in the power of abstraction, and abstraction as a kind of anti-religious faith in itself….”

Related material:

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–  theological analogy of Son’s procession  as Verbum Patris, 111-12″ — Index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J., Yale University Press 1957,  second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil’s Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: ‘In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'”
— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, from Slate‘s “High Concept” department

'In the beginning' according to Jim Holt

“Bang.”

“…Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal….”

For properties of the “nothing” represented by the 3×3 grid, see The Field of Reason. For religious material related to the above and to Epiphany, a holy day observed by some, see Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star and Shining Forth.


Some Context:

Quaternions in Finite Geometry

Click to enlarge.

See also Nativity.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Saturday September 5, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:31 pm
For the
Burning Man

'The Stars My Destination,' current edition (with cover slightly changed)

(Cover slightly changed.)

 
Background —

 
SAT
 
Part I:

Sophists (August 20th)

Part II:

VERBUM
SAT
SAPIENTI

Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher's Verbum


Solomon's Cube



Part III:

From August 25th

Equilateral triangle on a cube, each side's length equal to the square root of two

"Boo, boo, boo,
  square root of two.
"

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Sunday August 17, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:20 am
Maybe Escher
could have done it.

Escher, 'Verbum,' detail

Detail from
Escher’s
Verbum

(“In Touch with God“)

The title link of this entry
leads, via a Log24 entry, to
a story by Robert A. Heinlein.

For those who, like Rick Warren
(shown below in a current news page),

TIME photo of preacher Rick Warren embracing the Republican candidate (on his right) and the Democratic candidate (on his left)

prefer Jewish narratives,
I recommend

 1. Kesher Talk’s “Dick Morris:
Flaming Sword of Vengeance

2. Eyes on the Prize

3. Triangulation.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Friday April 18, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
In memory of

Gian-Carlo Rota,

mathematician, who died

at 66 on this date in 1999

"Numbers go to heaven
who know no more
of God on earth than,
as it were,
of sun in forest gloom."

— Meister Eckhart,
In Principio Erat Verbum

Related material:

The Shining of May 29,

 yesterday's entry, and

Against Reductionism.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Monday July 23, 2007

Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter

Greetings.

“The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)
would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of
taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”

El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis)
sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de
tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería este nuestro caso?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Los Avatares de la Tortuga

Autonomous Apparition

At Midsummer Noon:

“In Many Dimensions (1931)
Williams sets before his reader the
mysterious Stone of King Solomon,
an image he probably drew from
a brief description in Waite’s
The Holy Kabbalah (1929) of
a supernatural cubic stone
on which was inscribed
‘the Divine Name.’”
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070624-Waite.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Related material:
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure 

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

– Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”

See also
as well as
Hofstadter on
his magnum opus:
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Goedel Escher Bach coverHofstadter’s cover.

Here are three patterns,
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
Faces of Solomon's Cube, related to Escher's 'Verbum'

Click on image for details.

Saturday, January 6, 2007

Saturday January 6, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 pm


Picture of Nothing

On Kirk Varnedoe’s
2003 Mellon Lectures,
Pictures of Nothing“–

“Varnedoe’s lectures were ultimately
about faith, about his faith in
the power of abstraction,
and abstraction as a kind of
anti-religious faith in itself….”

The Washington Post

Related material:

The more industrious scholars
will derive considerable pleasure
from describing how the art-history
professors and journalists of the period
1945-75, along with so many students,
intellectuals, and art tourists of every
sort, actually struggled to see the
paintings directly, in the old
pre-World War II way,
like Plato’s cave dwellers
watching the shadows, without
knowing what had projected them,
which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

Log24, Aug. 23, 2005:

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″

— Index to Joyce and Aquinas,
by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162

“So did God cause the big bang?
Overcome by metaphysical lassitude,
I finally reach over to my bookshelf
for The Devil’s Bible.
Turning to Genesis I read:
‘In the beginning
there was nothing.
And God said,
‘Let there be light!’
And there was still nothing,
but now you could see it.'”

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
Slate‘s “High Concept” department

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070106-Bang.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.


“Bang.”

“…Mondrian and Malevich
are not discussing canvas
or pigment or graphite or
any other form of matter.
They are talking about
Being or Mind or Spirit.
From their point of view,
the grid is a staircase
to the Universal….”

Rosalind Krauss, “Grids”

For properties of the
“nothing” represented
by the 3×3 grid, see
The Field of Reason.

For religious material related
to the above and to Epiphany,
a holy day observed by some,
see Plato, Pegasus, and the
Evening Star
and Shining Forth.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

Thursday October 5, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:11 am
In Touch with God

(Title of an interview with
the late Paul Halmos, mathematician)

Since Halmos died on Yom Kippur, his thoughts on God may be of interest to some.

From a 1990 interview:

“What’s the best part of being a mathematician? I’m not a religious man, but it’s almost like being in touch with God when you’re thinking about mathematics. God is keeping secrets from us, and it’s fun to try to learn some of the secrets.”

I personally prefer Annie Dillard on God:

“… if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima, absolute zero, and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base, then the circle is unbroken.  And it is…. Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone.”

Some other versions of
the philosopher’s stone:

The image �http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060101-SixOfOne.jpg� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

And, more simply,
April 28, 2004:

This last has the virtue of
being connected with Halmos
via his remarks during the
“In Touch with God” interview:

“…at the root of all deep mathematics there is a combinatorial insight… the really original, really deep insights are always combinatorial….”
 
“Combinatorics, the finite case, is where the genuine, deep insight is.”

See also the remark of Halmos that serves as an epigraph to Theme and Variations.

Finally, it should be noted that
the 4×9 black rectangle

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061004-Halmos100x225.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

has also served
at least one interpreter
as a philosopher’s stone,
and is also the original
“Halmos tombstone.”

(See previous entry.)

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Wednesday January 4, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:04 am
Dragon School

In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School.  Carpenter died a year ago today.

From Log24 on Nov. 16, 2005:

 

Images

 

Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in the New Yorker:

"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."

"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."

"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051116-Time.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

From Paul Preuss,
Broken Symmetries
(see previous entry):

"Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods…."


From
Verbum Sat Sapienti?

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/EscherVerbum2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Escher's Verbum

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/DTinvar246.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Solomon's Cube


The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/HexagramsTable.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Geometry of the I Ching

 

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Saturday December 24, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
High Concept

“Concept (scholastics’ verbum mentis)–
theological analogy of Son’s procession
as Verbum Patris, 111-12″
— index to Joyce and Aquinas,    
by William T. Noon,
Society of Jesus,
Yale University Press 1957,
second printing 1963, page 162

Then there is
the Daughter’s procession:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051224-String.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For the String Theory
Appreciation Club, see
  Raoul Bott, 1923-2005.

For another
imaginary club, see
The Club Dumas (below).

For a non-imaginary club,
see the organization
that included Noon (above).

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Wednesday November 16, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:04 pm
Images

Adam Gopnik on C. S. Lewis in this week's New Yorker:
 
"Lewis began with a number of haunted images…."

"The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow."

"'Everything began with images,' Lewis wrote…."

"We go to the writing of the marvellous, and to children’s books, for stories, certainly, and for the epic possibilities of good and evil in confrontation, not yet so mixed as they are in life. But we go, above all, for imagery: it is the force of imagery that carries us forward. We have a longing for inexplicable sublime imagery…."

"The religious believer finds consolation, and relief, too, in the world of magic exactly because it is at odds with the necessarily straitened and punitive morality of organized worship, even if the believer is, like Lewis, reluctant to admit it. The irrational images– the street lamp in the snow and the silver chair and the speaking horse– are as much an escape for the Christian imagination as for the rationalist, and we sense a deeper joy in Lewis’s prose as it escapes from the demands of Christian belief into the darker realm of magic. As for faith, well, a handful of images is as good as an armful of arguments, as the old apostles always knew."

Related material:

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Click on pictures for details.

See also Windmills and
Verbum sat sapienti?
as well as

an essay

 at Calvin College
on Simone Weil,
Charles Williams,
Dante, and
"the way of images."

Wednesday, November 9, 2005

Wednesday November 9, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:09 pm
In honor of the 120th anniversary
of the birth of Hermann Weyl:

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Wednesday August 24, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 am

High Concept, continued:

“In the beginning there was nothing.
 And God said, ‘Let there be light!’
 And there was still nothing,
 but now you could see it.

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology,
    Slate‘s “High Concept” department

Related material:

  1. On the phrase “verbum mentis”
  2. From Satan’s Rhetoric, by Armando Maggi
    (University of Chicago Press, 2001):
Page 110:

“In chapter I I explained that devils first and foremost exist as semioticians of the world’s signs.  Devils solely live in their interpretations, in their destructive syllogisms.  As Visconti puts it, devils speak the idiom of the mind.37  …. The exorcist’s healing voice states that Satan has always been absent from the world, that his disturbing and unclear manifestations in the possessed person’s physicality are really nonexistent occurrences, nothing but disturbances of the mind, since evil itself is a lack of being.”   

Footnote 37, page 110:

“It is necessary to distinguish the devils’ ‘language of the mind’ and Augustine’s verbum mentis (word of the mind), as he theorizes it first of all in On the Trinity (book 15).  The devils’ language of the mind disturbs the subject’s internal and preverbal discourse.”

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Tuesday August 23, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

High Concept*

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis)–
 theological analogy of Son's procession
 as Verbum Patris, 111-12"
 — index to Joyce and Aquinas,
 by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957,
 second printing 1963, page 162

"So did God cause the big bang? Overcome by metaphysical lassitude, I finally reach over to my bookshelf for The Devil's Bible. Turning to Genesis I read: 'In the beginning there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was still nothing, but now you could see it.'"

— Jim Holt, Big-Bang Theology, Slate's "High Concept" department

Related material:

Nothing Ventured,
The God-Shaped Hole, and
Is Nothing Sacred?

 * See also John O'Callaghan, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003) and Joshua P. Hochschild, "Does Mental Language Imply Mental Representationalism? The Case of Aquinas’s Verbum Mentis," Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics, Volume 4, 2004 (pdf), pp. 12-17.

Friday, April 18, 2003

Friday April 18, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:17 pm

To the Society of Jesus (also known as the Jesuits):

Have a Good Friday, Traitors

Prompted by Pilate’s question “What is truth?” and by my March 24 attack on Noam Chomsky, I decided this afternoon to further investigate what various people have written about Chomsky’s posing of what he calls “Plato’s problem” and “Orwell’s problem.”  The former concerns linguistics, the latter, politics.  As my March 24 entry indicates, I have nothing but contempt for both Chomsky’s linguistics and Chomsky’s politics.  What I discovered this afternoon is that Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution, in 2001 appointed a Chomskyite, David W. Lightfoot, as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Why do we know so much more than we have evidence for in certain areas, and so much less in others? In tackling these questions — Plato’s and Orwell’s problem — Chomsky again demonstrates his unequalled capacity to integrate vast amounts of material.” — David W. Lightfoot, review of Chomsky’s Knowledge of Language

What, indeed, is truth?  I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown.  For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.

See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum, which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”

Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day.  See

The Shining of May 29.

“Examples are the stained glass windows of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov

AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO

Motto of Plato’s Academy


The Exorcist, 1973

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