Your True Love Better Have a Lot of Money

As we end the Twelve Days of Christmas, we find that the Christmas Price Index is up 9.2% to $23,439.38. One of the interesting features of the index is that goods (partridges in pear trees and the like) have steadily become the least expensive part of the index, giving way to services (like ladies dancing). Overall PNC calculates the True Cost of Christmas -- in which your True Love gives you not just the gifts on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, but all of the cumulative gifts for each day, for grand total of 364 gifts -- at $96,824.29.

A Poem Draft

Very rough; I sort of threw it together on the plane ride from Minneapolis to Austin.

Flame

Reason, no electric light,
flickers on and off with life,
casting shadows in the night;
not like some smooth, steady sun
throwing gold rays by the ton
equally on everyone,
but like a fire lit at camp,
reddish in the dew and damp,
casting light in frenzied dance.
Some are brighter, some are less,
some will see where others guess,
but each must honestly confess
that reason's flame is not so bright
to cast all shadows from the night,
is none too steady in its light,
but flickers here and blazes there
and here dies down to ashes bare
and sputters in the rainy air.
But who is fool enough to say
that lights that are not bright as day
cannot still light up our way?
And who will say that smaller hearths
than that which lights the world's own heart
in true light can have no part?
Say rather that we never lack
the means to fight and harry back
the dark of night, the inky black!
It dances, but is never dead;
it aided where its light has led;
it keeps us safe till morning-red.

Seventh Day of the Month

At the beginning of the year some bloggers review their posts for the year; I've never had enough interest in doing so to do a formal review. But it has always seemed fitting to do something for the New Year, so here's another edition of my usual substitute for a real review of the year: these are the posts that were published on the seventh day of each month of the year 2010.

January
Deg Gud Till Aere, Oss Till Gavn

February
Three Poem Drafts
The Sight of a Bear or a Fox

March
Links and Links

April
Gilman on the Problem of Evil

May
'Every event has a cause'

June
Represent!

July
To Have Nought is Ours

August
On Myers on Baber

September
Whewell and Found Poetry

October
Philippa Foot (1920-2010)
Linkable Thinkables

November
Rarest-Veinèd Unraveller

December
Cogito Ergo Sum XIV
Beam on Our Bewilder'd Mind
Pardon II

The most popular post, in terms of views, was my 2005 post Rule of Law vs. Rule by Law, which absolutely exploded into popularity during 2010. The second most popular post in 2010, which the rule by law post dethroned from being the most viewed post several years in a row, is the 2004 Best Known Philosophical Sentences; it is still, far and away, the most viewed post of all time on this blog; even though it was beat out for first place in 2010, practically every day someone somewhere in the world types into a search engine "philosophical sentences" and gets this post. I don't have precise enough statistics to say what was the most viewed post from 2010 in 2010; but I suspect very strongly from what I've seen in my referrer logs that it was Immanuel Kant's Guide to a Good Dinner Party, which dominated through most of August and early September because it was picked up on several other blogs and on Twitter.

The two blogs from which I consistently get the most traffic are Just Thomism and Edward Feser; the blog that has sent the most traffic my way, however, is the First Things blog, First Thoughts, but it's in the form of occasional avalanches.

Foot and Anscombe

Interesting passage from an interesting article on Philippa Foot, who is, of course, interesting herself:

In the wake of the news of the concentration camps, Foot was haunted by the notion that there was no way to rationally overcome a moral standoff with a Nazi. She wanted to argue that moral evaluation (“It is wrong to kill innocent people”) is not fundamentally different from factual evaluation (“It is incorrect that the earth is flat”). A cynic should no more be able to deny the moral implications of a relevant body of evidence than a flat-earther can deny the factual implications of astronomical data. It was Anscombe, a devoted Catholic, who liberated Foot, a lifelong atheist, to dare to think in this outmoded fashion. Foot had been speaking of the conventional contrast of “ought” and “is,” and Anscombe feigned confusion. “She said: ‘Of what? What?’ ” Foot recalled. “And I thought, My God, so one doesn’t have to accept that distinction! One can say, ‘What?’!”

Would that more philosophers would at least ask "What?" when talking of the ought/is distinction.

Descartes Walks into a Bar...

This is a repost from 2006. The second one, of course, is the most famous Descartes joke ever.

Descartes walks into a bar, and tells the bartender, "I'm excited about the live entertainment tonight!" The bartender says, "Yeah, the trick pony is pretty cool." "The trick pony! I thought it was Karaoke Night! I was looking forward to it so much." "Well," says the bartender, "we can do that, too." So they got out their schedule and put Descartes before the horse.

Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Are you having a beer?" Descartes says, "I think not," and ceases to exist.

Descartes walks into a bar, then goes out the back, circles around, and comes back in. He does this several more times, and finally the bartender says, "You're going in circles!" And Descartes says, "Thank God!"

Descartes walks into a bar. Then he says, "Ouch!" You would, too, if you walked into a bar.

Back

Well, I'm back now from Montana, having visited Billings, a.k.a., the Star of Big Sky Country, skied at Red Lodge, and seen Chico Hot Springs. It's late and I'm not yet sure what I have to do tomorrow, so I'm not quite sure when ordinary posting will begin back up, but it will be soon.

Cheers,
Brandon

By Infant Tongue and Looks of Babish Eyes

The Epiphany
by Robert Southwell

To blaze the rising of this glorious sun,
A glittering star appeareth in the East,
Whose sight to pilgrim-toils three sages won
To seek the light they long had in request;
And by this star to nobler star they pace,
Whose arms did their desirèd sun embrace.

Stall was the sky wherein these planets shined,
And want the cloud that did eclipse their rays;
Yet through this cloud their light did passage find,
And pierced these sages' hearts by secret ways,
Which made them know the Ruler of the skies,
By infant tongue and looks of babish eyes.
Heaven at her light, Earth blusheth at her pride,
And of their pomp these peers ashamed be;
Their crowns, their robes, their train they set aside,
When God's poor cottage, clothes, and crew, they see
All glorious things their glory now despise,
Sith God contempt, doth more than glory prize.

Three gifts they bring, three gifts they bear away;
For incense, myrrh and gold, faith, hope and love;
And with their gifts the givers' hearts do stay,
Their mind from Christ no parting can remove;
His humble state, his stall, his poor retinue,
They fancy more than all their rich revenue.