Did an Oxford-comma error lead the press to overstate British gains at the...
DebatehaslongragedaboutuseoftheOxfordcomma (aka the serial comma). This troubling comma has its own Twitter feed, and it can be crucialfor interpreting laws.I was raised in accordance with The Canadian...
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Sundry items making no coherent whole
I've added content to the following old posts:America's Critical-Thinking Movement in the 1930s & '40sSome quotations on factsJohn Albert Chadwick, WWI vet who left Cambridge logic for an...
View ArticleAnnus horribilis!
Well, that was a horrible year.My father died. I was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. My mother-in-law died. Other bad things happened.I look forward to posting again, starting with some...
View ArticlePhilosophy of/in Literature links
Nicole Im interviews philosophical novelist Joanna Kavenna.Viorica Patea on 'Ana Blandiana and Hölderlin's Eternal Question'.Erin Blakemore on 'Jane Austen and the Value of Flaws'. Duncan Richter on...
View ArticleCaporetto
One hundred years ago the terrible WWI Battle of Caporetto began (on Oct. 24). The battle was named for a town that is now in Slovenia (and is called 'Kobarid' in Slovene) and that used to be in...
View ArticleHegel in Canada
I've been reading up on the history of Canadian philosophy. Anglo-Canadian academic philosophy was strongly influenced by British, particularly Scots, Hegelians. In 1994, JohnBurbidge published 'Hegel...
View ArticleFollow-ups on earlier posts
Follow-up 1: Almost one year ago, I posted a list of UK philosophers who were among the combatants in WWI. I've added another name to that list: Leon Roth, who served in the Jewish Battalion of the...
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Towns in my history (part 1)
I was born after the first malls had opened, but they still confronted me as a deviation from the norm, which had been established for me by the traditional, downtown hub of Goderich, Ontario. The...
View ArticleMgr Ronald Knox anticipating Popper's critique of psychoanalysis
Here's a bit of 'found philosophy' in Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox's first mystery novel, The ViaductMurder (1925):If you’re out for [money], I should take to psycho-analysis. The system’s the...
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Towns in my history (part 2)
I posted about my childhood home of Goderich, a town centred on a round 'Square'. At its hub, which was actually an octagon, the clean lines of an Art Deco courthouse cut right angles amid a gnarled...
View ArticleRonald Knox and Gestalt switches
Here's Mgr. Ronald Knox using (in 1927) a visual-perception analogy to point out a change in belief that involves no new data but, instead, seeing old data in a new way:[S]uddenly, when I’m thinking of...
View ArticleUltracrepidarian
"Ultracrepidarian: someone who has no special knowledge of a subject but who expresses an opinion about it." (Cambridge Dictionary)A neat word coined by WilliamHazlitt. I found these uses of it:1....
View ArticleLeibniz in quarantine, a de-motivational post
We've heard that Isaac Newton developed calculus while in quarantine. It turns out that another calculus pioneer, Leibniz, was also in quarantine, but much later.In October, 1713, Leibniz was...
View ArticleCommunity in solitude
Catherine Malabou (2020):We know that Karl Marx made fun of eighteenth-century robinsonades like Rousseau’s. Marx said that the origin of the social can by no means be a state of nature where isolated...
View ArticleByron's quarantine poem, another de-motivational post
Yesterday, I posted about Leibniz's uninspiring time in quarantine.Byron, too, seems to have derived little from the measure. Like many travelers in the Mediterranean of his day, Byron had to put in...
View ArticleMisosophy: hatred of wisdom. A label applied to Voltaire, Schopenhauer,...
Misosophy, n. Hatred of wisdom. So says the OED. The earliest use of the word cited by the OED is in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's posthumously published "Notes of Hooker" (in the 1830s). Coleridge there...
View ArticleMisology - a hatred of argument, reasoning, or enlightenment
"Misology: a hatred of argument, reasoning, or enlightenment." That's Merriam-Webster's definition. Here's the definition in Dagobert Runes' Dictionary of Philosophy (1942): "Misology: (Gr. miseo: to...
View ArticleAfterwit: knowledge that comes too late
Afterwit, a handy word that seems to have faded from common use in the 17th century.The OED offers these two definitions:Recognition of a mistake made earlier, leading to a change in one's actions,...
View ArticleIpsedixitism, Part 1
"Ipsedixitism: dogmatic assertion or assertiveness" (Merriam-Webster). "Ipse dixit: an arbitrary and unsupported assertion" (Collins). "Ipsedixitism: ... the practice of dogmatic assertion" (The...
View ArticleThe High Priori road
Let others creep by timid steps, and slow,On plain experience lay foundations low,By common sense to common knowledge bred,And last, to Nature's Cause through Nature led.All-seeing in thy mists, we...
View ArticleSinging cicadas
Singing cicadas abound in ancient Greece. Already, before the CE, they sing like a king in Anacreon's "Ode tothe Cicada" (6th century) and sing ... well ... better than donkeys in the prologue to...
View ArticleMachine music (Cicadas, pt 2)
Cicadas figure in poetry as little artists singing with the Muses, but, for many, these insects' mechanical drone is the antithesis of music. Here's Nathaniel Potter in 1839: The cicadae breed...
View ArticleCutting sounds (Cicadas, pt. 3)
My last post included quotations in which the sound of cicadas was compared to that of a blade-grinding wheel. The blades being sharpened included scissors, knives, and razors. Eugenio Montale likens...
View ArticlePopular post-secondary programs among authoritarian rulers
I've compiled a list of what 20th- and 21st-century authoritarian leaders of nation states studied at the post-secondary level. I have not yet fully surveyed every region. I'm sure I must have made...
View ArticlePeter de Florez, mystery man behind MIT's De Florez Fund for Humor
Sept. 29 is the deadline for applications to MIT's De Florez Fund for Humor, which "was created in 1988 by MIT alumnus Peter de Florez '38."Peter's father was US Rear Admiral Luis de Florez, who...
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