* The ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque is up at Practica.
* Stanley Jaki discusses the Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel (1873-1944).
* Tim Enloe has a post on Bernard of Clairvaux's influence on Martin Luther.
* The Tsalagi (a.k.a. Cherokee) syllabary. I've always found this to be a fascinating subject. Cherokee, of course, was originally not written at all; but a Cherokee silversmith by the name of Sequoyah, who was also called George Gist, changed all that. After the war of 1812, Sequoyah began to experiment with different ways to organize a writing system, and finally hit on the basic syllabary that made the Cherokee Nation a literate and literary nation almost overnight, and which, with some modifications due to typography, is still in use today. This website has a pronunciation guide for each syllabic letter. Here is Sequoyah's original syllabary.
* Incidentally, although (depending on where you live) you might not have heard it, there is a big dispute at present between the Cherokee Nation and some members of Congress. In March of this year the Cherokee Nation voted in a constitutional amendment to restrict membership in the Nation to those of Cherokee descent. This might not seem all that controversial, but those who are primarily blocked from citizenship by this amendment are the Freedmen, former slaves of Cherokees. Because of this, Congressperson Diane Watson introduced legislation (HR 2824) that would sever with government relations with the Cherokee Nation, cutting off federal funding and recognition. The official position of the Cherokee Nation is that the amendment is currently undergoing judicial review, both in tribal and federal courts, and that the matter should be left to the courts.
* Some works of the great algebraic logicians:
George Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic
George Boole, An Investigation into the Laws of Thought
John Neville Keynes, Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic
Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic
William Stanley Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic
William Stanley Jevons, Studies in Deductive Logic
William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science
Augustus De Morgan, Syllabus of a Proposed System of Logic
Augustus De Morgan, Formal Logic
John Venn, Symbolic Logic
Louis Couturat, The Algebra of Logic
Alexander Macfarlane, Principles of the algebra of logic, with examples
C. S. Peirce, ed., Studies in Logic
Because you can never read too many good nineteenth-century logicians.
* Mark Wynn discusses Tennant's theistic argument from the beauty of nature (PDF; ht).
* The Saint John's Bible is an attempt at manuscript illumination in the twenty-first century (ht).
* Ralph Luker collects some of the responses to Rauchway's defense of academic freedom. I've long since come to the conclusion that, when it is used rhetorically, 'academic freedom' is often just an excuse academics put forward for acting like self-indulgent prima donnas; but it's worth reminding oneself that, however much academics abuse it (and abuse is not difficult to find, I think), there is a way to think through the notion of academic freedom rationally so that it is shown to have great importance -- great enough that it deserves to be emphasized despite abuses. And one gets some of this by reading Rauchway's brief discussion in combination with the responses to it.
ADDED LATER:
* The CHE has a mention of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. The organization's website is here.
