"As Derrida said at Villanova,
"We wait for something we would not like to wait for.
That is another name for death."
— Brian D. Ingraffia, "Is the Postmodern Post-Secular?,"
p. 50 in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought ,
ed. by Merold Westphal, Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 44-68
See also Derrida at Villanova in this journal.
The link to Ingraffia's remarks was suggested by
this evening's New York Times obituaries—
An originally French-Canadian professor of mathematics
at Villanova University reportedly died at 91 on Dec. 28, 2015.
See a eulogy from Legacy.com.
See also The French Mathematician and the following image,
related to the architectural philosophy of Christopher Alexander,
from this journal on the above date.
Related material:
The previous post honored Maurice, one of yesterday's
saints. A note on another —
See Log24 searches for Villanova and Villanueva.
The latter search leads to a link to some posts tagged 922,
from St. Thomas of Villanova's feast day, Sept. 22.
St. Thomas of Villanova, Sts. Maurice and Companions.
See CatholicCulture.org.
A weblog post from Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012—
"Today is the 120th anniversary of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning's death."
— A Reluctant Sinner (Thanks to Andrew Cusack for the link.)
If Manning is a saint, then Saturday was his feast day.
Some background— Manning in this journal.
See also Saturday's Derrida at Villanova. The link there to
previous posts on that topic leads to a post on Derrida's promotion
of his neologism différance as a version of Plato's khôra.
I prefer Manning's discussion of a closely related concept,
the scholastic philosophers' materia prima .
See Hugh R. King's 1956 paper sneering at the scholastics'
concept, and Heisenberg's much better-informed remarks
on the related concept of potentia —
For a related fictional account of a religious quest for "possibilities"
and "excluded middles" between "zeroes and ones," see
Ingraffia on The Crying of Lot 49 .
Related material– Saturday night's Derrida at Villanova and Villanueva.
"What exactly was Point Omega?"
This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—
The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."
For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified—
The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.
For related darkness at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra—
The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institution— Deconstruction in a Nutshell—
For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.
"Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold"
The above building is home to the Derridean leftists
of the Villanova philosophy department.
“center loosens,
forms again elsewhere”
|
"The most obvious problem with Derrida's argument in The Gift of Death is his misconception of Christianity. In his description of Christian mystery, the crucified figure of Jesus is strikingly absent, having been replaced by a mysterious 'infinite other.' In this respect, Derrida's understanding of Christianity is essentially gnostic; the humanity of Jesus is displaced by gnostic mystery. Although Derrida claims to describe historical Christianity, in fact, his argument is based on a serious distortion of Christian practice and theology. Although the title might seem an obvious reference to Christ's atoning death, Derrida's book can only be characterized as an overt and unacknowledged displacement of the Crucifixion and its central place in Christian worship."
— Peter Goldman, now at Westminster College in Salt Lake City |
See also Highway 1 Revisited (August 1, 2006).
To the leftist philosophers of Villanova
From "Make a Différance"
(Women's History Month, 2005)—
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
Quodlibet*
Compare and contrast
the diamond in the football
with the jewel in the lotus.
* "A scholastic argumentation upon a subject chosen at will, but almost always theological. These are generally the most elaborate and subtle of the works of the scholastic doctors." —Century Dictionary
Project Management at Villanova
Yesterday's noon post, "Lying Forth," linked to a passage by Walter A. Brogan, Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University.
A related Brogan remark for Harrison Ford's birthday—
"The last few pages of the text 'Différance' [an essay by Derrida] are a refutation of the nostalgia and hope involved in Heidegger's ontology, a rejection of the quest for the lost origin and final word."
Walter A. Brogan, "The Original Difference," pp. 31-40 in Derrida and Différance, ed. by David C. Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 32
See, too, "Make a Différance."
"Heidegger suggests that we experience the saying of language as a shining forth:
'It lets what is coming to presence shine forth, lets what is withdrawing into absence vanish. The saying is by no means the supplemental linguistic expression of what shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows.' (pp. 413-414).
But what is the basis and origin of this possibility of saying? The happening of saying in the clearing, its allowing things to shine forth, can also be called an 'owning.' Owning is the event of a thing’s coming into its own, of its showing itself as itself. Heidegger also calls it 'propriating,' 'en-owning,' or Ereignis:
'Propriation gathers the rift-design of the saying and unfolds it in such a way that it becomes the well-joined structure of a manifold showing. (p. 415)'"
— "Heidegger: On the Way to Language," by Paul Livingston
Page references are apparently to Heidegger's Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins paperback, 1993.
See also Shining Forth.
Rigor
“317 is a prime, not because we think so,
or because our minds are shaped in one way
rather than another, but because it is so,
because mathematical reality is built that way.”
– G. H. Hardy,
A Mathematician’s Apology
The above photo is taken from
a post in this journal dated
March 10, 2010.
This was, as the Pope might say,
the dies natalis of a master gameplayer–
| New York Times, March 16, 2010–
Tim Holland, Backgammon Master, Tim Holland, who was widely considered the world’s greatest backgammon player during that ancient board game’s modern heyday, in the 1960s and ’70s, died on March 10 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 79. <<more>> |
In Holland's honor, a post
from Columbus Day, 2004—
Tuesday October 12, 200411:11 PM Time and Chance
Today’s winning lottery numbers
|
A quote from Holland on backgammon–
"It’s the luck factor that seduces everyone
into believing that they are good,
that they can actually win,
but that’s just wishful thinking."
For those who are, like G.H. Hardy,
suspicious of wishful thinking,
here is a quote and a picture from
Holland's ordinary birthday, March 3—
"The die is cast." — Caesar
Today’s New York Times on a rabbi who died in Jerusalem on Sunday, Dec. 5:
“In the 1950’s, he was a vocal advocate for the relaxation of New York City’s blue laws, which forbade many kinds of commerce on Sundays but not on Saturdays. The laws were repealed in the 1970’s. Solomon Joseph Sharfman was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in Treblinka, Poland; his family immigrated to the United States five years later. His father, Rabbi Label Sharfman, worked as a shochet, or ritual slaughterer….”
Saturday’s lottery numbers from Pennsylvania, the State of Grace:
A Sunday Sermon:
Related material:
(See Song in Red and Gray
and The Dot and the Line.)
Today’s lottery numbers
in Pennsylvania
(State of Grace):
Nite and Day….
with an apology
to St. Cole Porter,
whose feast is today.
Today's winning lottery numbers
in Pennsylvania (State of Grace):
Time and Chance
“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”
— Ecclesiastes 9-11
“With the passage of time, everyone participated in the ever-increasingly secret lottery.”
— Summary of Borges’s Lottery
The winning evening lottery number for Sunday, September 19, 2004, and for Thursday, September 23, 2004, in the State of Grace (Kelly) was
408.
See a 9/20/04 story about 408
and a 1/4/03 story about Grace and jazz.
From the latter:
Now you has jazz.
— Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956
Note that yesterday’s entries dealt with “the jazz church” and that Sunday, Sept. 19, 2004– the first of the “408” days above– was the date of death of Ellis Marsalis Sr., patriarch of a family of jazz musicians. The second of the “408” days above– yesterday– was Ray Charles’s birthday.
In Ray We Trust
June 28, 2004 cover
by Eric Palma
Pi continued:
(see 9/15/04)
Renegade mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette, left) and the leader of the Kabbalah sect, Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) have a chance encounter on a Chinatown street corner.
The Magic Schmuck
"Confucius is said to have received only one inappropriate answer, i.e., hexagram 22, GRACE — a thoroughly aesthetic hexagram. This is reminiscent of the advice given to Socrates by his daemon — 'You ought to make more music' — whereupon Socrates took to playing the flute. Confucius and Socrates compete for first place as far as reasonableness and a pedagogic attitude to life are concerned; but it is unlikely that either of them occupied himself with 'lending grace to the beard on his chin,' as the second line of this hexagram advises. Unfortunately, reason and pedagogy often lack charm and grace, and so the oracle may not have been wrong after all."
— Carl Jung, Foreword to the I Ching
Yesterday, class, in keeping with our morning German lesson, our evening (5:01:22 PM ET) entry was Hexagram 22, Pi (pronounced "bee"). The Chinese term pi may be translated in various ways… As ornament, as adornment, or as in a German web page:
| I-Ching 22 | Pi | Der Schmuck |
The Wilhelm translation of pi is "grace." This suggests we examine yesterday's evening lottery number in the State of Grace, Pennsylvania:
408.
As kabbalists know, there are many ways of interpreting numbers. In keeping with the viewpoint of Ecclesiastes — "time and chance happeneth" — let us interpret this instance of chance as an instance of time… namely, 4/08. Striving for consistency in our meditations, let us examine the lessons for…
4/08 2003 — Death's Dream Kingdom —
and 4/08 2004 — Triple Crown.
From the former:
"When smashing monuments, save the pedestals; they always come in handy."
From the latter:
"The tug of an art that unapologetically sees itself as on a par with science and religion is not to be underestimated…. Philosophical ambition and formal modesty still constitute Minimalism's bottom line."
In keeping with the above, from
this year's Log24.net
Rosh Hashanah service…
A Minimalist
Pedestal:
|
|
For a poetic interpretation
of this symbol, see
Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View).
11:59 PM: The Last Minute
For the benefit of Grace (Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), here are the September 15 lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the State of Grace (Kelly):
Midday: 053 Evening: 373.
For the significance of the evening number, 373, see Directions Out and Outside the World (both of 4/26/04). In both of these entries, and others to which they are linked, the number 373 signifies eternity.
The two most obvious interpretations of the midday number, 53, are as follows:
“Time and chance
happeneth to them all.”
Ecclesiastes 9-11
The Only Pretty Ring Time
On May 14 five years ago, the night Sinatra died, the Pennsylvania (State of Grace) lottery evening number was 256: see my note, Symmetries, of April 2, 2003.
On May 14 this year, the Pennsylvania lottery evening number was 147. Having, through meditation, perhaps established some sort of minor covenant with whatever supernatural lottery powers may exist, this afternoon I sought the significance of this number in Q's 1939 edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. It is the number of "It was a Lover and his Lass," a song lyric by William Shakespeare. The song includes the following lines:
In the spring time,
the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing,
Hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.
For the Sinatra connection, see
Metaphysics for Tina.
The selection of Q's book for consultation was suggested by the home page of Simon Nickerson at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and by the dedication page of Q's 1925 Oxford Book of English Prose, which names Nickerson's school.
Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas:
"The association is the idea."
For translation of the Greek phrase in Q's 1925 dedication, see
Greek and Roman Grammarians
on Motion Verbs and Place Adverbials
Malcolm D. Hyman
Harvard University
January 4, 2003
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