* With regard to my previous post, Ocham has reminded me of this page at the Logic Museum. For a while (and I hope to get back in the practice after awhile), I did 'LFPP' posts -- Land of Forgotten Philosophy Papers -- which summarized philosophy papers that have become pretty nearly completely forgotten but had worthwhile arguments and valuable insights that were worth remembering. The paper by Land at the link above is certainly one of those. In any case, Land's paper ties in nicely with some thinking I was doing last night. I was reading Keynes's arguments on existential import, which are lovely, it occurred to me that one problem with them is the idea that the matter is really relevant to the doctrine of opposition (at least in the straightforward way he assumes). It's easy to see why one would think that in symbolic logic of the sort he would have known; but I would imagine that one desiderata for a good square of opposition is that it be built up, as entirely as possible, from oppositions of quantity and quality, and nothing else, and the fact that existence keeps popping up as part of the square is a bit worrisome. Land's argument touches on points very close to this issue.
* The Jerome Lejeune Foundation is a medical foundation devoted to funding research and treatment of genetic diseases related to mental handicaps. Jerome Lejeune was the geneticist who discovered trisomy-21, the genetic of cause of Down's syndrome, thus proving that it wasn't (as many people unfortunately had thought) a symptom of 'racial deterioration'; he then went on to link a number of other mental handicaps to chromosomic disorders, doing so much work that he is sometimes called the father of modern genetics. He worked for most of his career toward finding a cure for Down's syndrome; he did not succeed, and died feeling that he had failed his Down's syndrome patients. He died on April 3, 1994; the Catholic Church began its investigation into whether he should be beatified in the spring of this year.
* The upcoming The Dark Is Rising movie looks positively horrid. On the plus side, casting Christopher Eccleston was a good thing.
* Poetry as philosophy at "Just Thomism"
