Till the Oft-Rerisen Bells from Young Atlantis Call

 Cycles
by Clark Ashton Smith 

The sorcerer departs . . . and his high tower is drowned
Slowly by low flat communal seas that level all . . .
While crowding centuries retreat, return and fall
Into the cyclic gulf that girds the cosmos round,
Widening, deepening ever outward without bound . . .
Till the oft-rerisen bells from young Atlantis call;
And again the wizard-mortised tower upbuilds its wall
Above a rebeginning cycle, turret-crowned. 

New-born, the mage resummons stronger spells, and spirits
With dazzling darkness clad about, and fierier flame
Renewed by aeon-curtained slumber. All the powers
Of genii and Solomon the sage inherits;
And there, to blaze with blinding glory the bored hours,
He calls upon Shem-hamphorash, the nameless Name.

In the epilogue to Zothique: The Final Cycle, Ronald S. Hilger notes that this was written just a few months before Smith's death in 1961, and is his last poem.

The Whole Plenitude of Excellencies and Qualities

 The distinguishing characteristic of man, and the peculiar eminence of his nature and his destiny, as these are universally felt and acknowledged by mankind, are usually defined to consist, either in reason, or in the faculty of speech. But this definition is defective in this respect, that, on one hand, reason is a mere abstract faculty, which to be judged, requires a psychological investigation or analysis; and that on the other hand, the faculty of speech is a mere potentiality, or a germ which must be unfolded before it can become a real entity. We should therefore give a much more correct and comprehensive definition, if, instead of this, we said: The peculiar pre-eminence of man consists in this—that to him alone among all other of earth's creatures, the word has been imparted and communicated. The word actually delivered and really communicated is not a mere dead faculty, but an historical reality and occurrence; and for that very reason, the definition we have given stands much more fitly at the head of history, than the other more abstract one. 

 In the idea of the word, considered as the basis of man's dignity and peculiar destination, the internal light of consciousness and of our own understanding, is undoubtedly first included—this word is not a mere faculty of speech, but the fertile root whence the stately trunk of all language has sprung. But the word is not confined to this only—it next includes a living, working power—it is not merely an object and organ of knowledge—an instrument of teaching and learning; but the medium of affectionate union and conciliatory accommodation, judicial arbitrement and efficacious command, or even creative productiveness, as our own experience and life itself manifest each of those significations of the word; and thus it embraces the whole plenitude of the excellencies and qualities which characterize man.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of History, Volume I, James Burton Robertson, tr.,  Lecture 1.]

The Desert Where a City's Bones are Strewn

 A Dead City
by Clark Ashton Smith 

Twilight ascends the abandoned ramps of noon
Within an ancient land, whose after-time
Unfathomably shadows its ruined prime.
Like rising mist the night increases soon
Round shattered palaces, ere yet the moon
On mute, unsentried walls and turrets climb,
And touch with pallor of sepulchral rime
The desert where a city's bones are strewn.

She comes at last: unsepultured, they show
In all the hoary starkness of old stone.
From out a shadow like the lips of Death
Issues a wind, that through the ruins blown,
Cries like a prophet's ghost, with waiting breath,
The weirds of finished and forgotten woe.

Rosemary and May

 After Death
by Christina Rossetti 

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
'Poor child, poor child:' and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm though I am cold.

Rosemary and may (hawthorn) are fragrant plants one would likely use as rushes to freshen up a room, so that might be all that is in view, but in the language of flowers, rosemary usually means fidelity and may usually means hope, and I wonder if that is also in the background here.

Links of Note

 * Bernard Mees, The Origin of King Arthur's Name, at "The Age of Arthur"

* Christopher Berard and  Morris Tichenor, The Deeds of King Arthur in a Medieval Dante Commentary, "Medievalists.net"

* Jeffrey J. Watson, A Knowledge Argument Without "Knowledge" (PDF)

* Gabriel Bickerstaff, Identity Through Change: Aristotle Versus the Hercliteans in Metaphysics Γ (PDF)

* Henry Higuera, Multiplication Ancient and Modern, at "The St. John's Review"

* Philip Ball, How Does Life Unfold? A Landscape Metaphor Comes Into Its Own, at "Quanta Magazine"

* Andrew McGovern, Degrees of Perfection in St. John of the Cross, at "A Thomist"

* Jacob Saliba, Wisdom's Otherness: The Lessons of Gabriel Marcel, at "Church Life Journal"

* Susanna Clarke, In Defence of Fantasy Fiction, at "The Observer"

* Matthew Minerd, The Scale of the (Rightly Ordered) Human: Habitus and the Measure of Technology, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Flame & Light, What Is Horror?

* Christan B. Wagner, 6 Misconceptions about the "Perverted Faculty Argument", at "Thomism.com"

* Dilip D'Souza, The Laws that Ants May, or May Not, Follow, at "3 Quarks Daily"

Dashed Off XXXII

 stopdash > period > semicolon-dash > semicolon > comma-dash > dash > comma > space

the Church as bright, blazing, and bannered

the standard connexive schemas (both Aristotelian and Boethian) as capturing kinds of implicature

A crowd of people on a corner can be explained simply by an explanation of each person's being there only if the possibility of their being there together has a distinct prior explanation.

belief vs a sense of believability

Fictional characters can include impossible (inconsistent) versions of themselves.

"When a material body is transported from one point to another, it involves an action that depends on the speed of the body and on the distance it travels. However, the action is neither the speed nor the distance taken separately; rather it is proportional to the sum of the distances traveled multiplied each by the speed at which they were traveled." Maupertuis

(1) Life as such is not title for killing.
(2) Life does not become title for killing even when inconvenient.

One of the natural responses of the human person to reflection on being is to hymn it.

Part of scientific progress has always been aleatory, taking advantage of what chance presents.

from-, to-, and about-experiences

analogical arguments vs metaphorical uses of argument

"...metaphor draws into the intelligibility of the better-known-to-us those things that are lesser-known-in-themselves and thereby builds bridges of language to new concepts only yet incipiently realized in expression." Brian Kemple

metaphor as "the permanent possibility of expanding the field within which logic works" (Deely)

Semiosis is itself a sign of thought, or at least of its possibility.

unlimited semiosis -> God as infinite intelligible

For something to be expressive, there must be something in it by which it can be expressive.

limitlessness of play -> God as infinite intelligible

The sense in which a representamen 'gives rise' to an interpretant is not an efficient causal sense but the form sense of the interpretant being informed by or inclusive of the representamen as mediating its object.

Redescription is not interpretation but only a tool for it.

The permanence of permanent possibility is always from actuality.

Rorty takes it to be derogatory to say that his opponents treat texts as 'honorary persons', but treating texts as 'honorary persons' is just a neutral description of the act of interpretation. For instance, I just attributed this to 'Rorty', when in reality I got it from a text interpreted as 'honorary Rorty', an attribution required by the ethics of honorary persons; and the claim Rorty makes is based itself on treating the texts of his opponents as 'honorary' intellectual opponents.

* Interpret in such a way that one's standard of interpretation could be consistently treated by a rational being as the strandard of interpretation by all rational beings.
* Interpret in such a way as to treat natural or moral personhood always as an end of interpretation and never merely as a means.
* Interpret according to such a standard of interpretation as could be the standard of interpretation for an ideal republic of letters.

The universe of semiosis cannot be capture in a semiotic encyclopedia, which can only be an articulation of it.

We obviously may use texts without interpreting the texts themselves (as opposed to their context);.e.g., by using it as an example or a lorem-ipsam or in asemic writing.

We know there is a distinction between intentio operis and intentio lectoris, because in reading the reader finds resistance to his intention, and also something whose intentional structure continues independently and over against his own intention, as a causal matter of interpretation.

Total depersonification of a text makes it no longer recognizable as a text.

We conjecture in interpreting, but interpretation is not constituted only by infinite conjecture.

Every interpretation is potentially divisible into further interpretations; many of the quirks of postmodern accounts of interpretation repeat the kinds of errors made by people trying to treat the infinitely divisible as the actually infinitely divided.

A lump of clay very obviously has a coherence that does not depend only on what previously happened on the last turn of the wheel; it would be useless for pottery otherwise.

We not only treat texts as honorary persons, we treat persons as honorary texts.

A single interpreter is already an interpretive community.

To experience something as a sign is to experience it as something with more.

cognitive powers as general standing interpretances

Every interpretable sign in use is structured by its aptness to be interpreted, by its actually being interpreted, and by its ultimate interpretation in which the actual interpretation is wholly adequate to its aptness to be interpreted.

As a sign moves from one system of signs to another, it generates new meaning.

The ultimate interpretant cannot be a habit, but only that which makes habit possible.

The interpretant that receives is the interpretant that imposes (active and passive interpretancy).

The notion that you can change your moral standard on the basis of what is pleasant, clever, and useful is the temptation of Eve.

The first step in good parenting, sometimes forgotten, is just to be an adult doing adult things in a way that takes into account that there are children around.

For salt to keep its savor, it must stay distinguishable.

Acts don't have to be equivalent to be related.

That truth manifests more fully in dialectic does not mean it doesn't manifest in rhetoric.

The human race has been engaged in a niche construction project for its entire discernible history, niche-building on an extraordinary timescale, and no end in sight.

Finding common ground among values and preferences requires realism about the common ground.

We are able to reflect on our actions because we are able to reflect otherwise.

People often say that standards have risen when they ahve merely become more specific.

Political progressivism changes as city-cores, and thus urbanizing, changes.

Not all grounds are necessarily grounds.

A life is not a vote, and cannot be aggregated as if it were a vote.

Kalambo Falls preserves a 500000 year old wooden structure.

We speak with signs because we are signs.

the infinite intelligible as the Agent Future of inquiry

evidence as a relation to contingent cognition

Inquiry is not merely a matter of finding truths but also of knowing what to do with them.

the virtue ethics implicit in fiction
-- perhaps better: the implied internal aretology of fiction

The verb describes that which makes things communicable.

Gratitude for good makes us more able to seek and find other good.

It is misleading to talk about the social utility of religion because religion is one of the determining factors in social utility, one of the things that makes things have any social utility at all.

We guide our actions by classifying them, giving preference to the relevant classifications associated with higher ends; these classifications establish what counts as success or acceptability of action and its achievement.

Privacy is something we generally only have with the assistance of others.

Elections create oligarchies, and therefore elected offices must be divided in separation of powers.

Mathematics qua liberal art studies and makes use of necessary possibles by means of mental creations; this raises the question of whether there are necessary possibles for rhetoric.

Intuition is important in mathematics because we learn how to construct mathematical elements from the appearances of divine mathematical construction.

"Mathematics is that portion of our intellectual activity which transcends our biology and our environment." Errett Bishop

Brouwer takes the intution of twoity to be more fundamental than that of a unit (the unit is conceived as that which may be in a twoity, e.g., that which may be added to something like itself).

Most of the mistakes that are ever made in mathematical proof-writing involve treating as final steps of proof development what are in fact just possible intermediate steps.

Proof by inspection in mathematics generally seems to indicate a case in which the conclusion arises directly from the application of a technique that the very set-up of the problem would require to be already granted as adequate.

A more deeply understood but less adequate method may get you farther than a more poorly understood but more adequate method.

ethical proof by intension and remission of reciprocity

ad hom & ad ver proof in ethical reasoning
-- qualified retorsion
-- Socrates gives an ad hom refutation of Thrasymachus, but as Glaucon & Adeimantus note, this only extends as far as Thrasymachus (it is not ad iud)
-- Polus and Callicles both attempt to give ad ver refutation of Socrates, but fail. Socrates, on the other hand, successfully gives an ad ver refutation of Callicles.

Classics have depth because you can pick them up at different stages and learn more; the depth is in a sense in the reader, and the classic is adequate to it.

We live in a world in which we sometimes benefit by luck more than any skill could guarantee.

Consent does not release from duties.

"Since act remains itself by going beyond itself, and to do this is proper to cognition, act simply speaking is intelligent and thus alive." James Chastek

It is a mistake to think there is a set of texts that are 'open' and a set of texts that are 'closed'; all texts are open and all texts are closed, in different ways.

A problem with Eco's account of metaphor in The Role of the Reader is that the 'Minucius Mandrake' does not seem to be functioning as a metaphor. (Indeed, there are all sorts of problems with using Finnegan's Wake as a source of examples for how languages generally work.) Even on Eco's own account it is more properly an allusive neologism.
-- Eco also confuses an argument for metaphor buidling on metonymies -- a common phenomon -- for an argumetn for metaphor depending on metonymies -- a claim that is, at most optimistic, a stretch. This leads him to ignore innovative metaphors that break or reorganize prior codes, and ignore prior expectations of substitution, and, what is more, the common metaphorical practice of conceit in which one starts with a shocking or jarring metaphor and then creates the substitutions for it. I take any two nouns in different classes and transfer, and *then* explore how viable or interesting or useful the metaphor is for a given context. Again, poets often come up with metaphors driven by rhyme or alliteration (actual resemblance but of signifiers) rather than metonymy. And, of course, metonymies often presuppose metaphors -- we talk about the Crown, when we mean the King, not merely as a metonymy but as a metaphor for royal authority (which explains perhaps why we do not talk about the (Royal) Stocking). We in fact crown as a metaphor, and this gives force to the metonymic use of Crown to speak of the King.

We understand possible worlds by contrast with impossible worlds.

argument by sample argument

We do not value by feeling alone.

creation ex nihilo as a type for divinization (cf. St. Bernard to Peter, Cardinal Deacon)
-- God, fullness of Being, calls forth what is not so that it is. // God, fullness of Love, calls forth that which is nothing in love, so that it is in Love.

St. Boethius

 Today in some calendars is the memorial of St. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, best known for his Consolation of Philosophy. From his little treatise, "The Trinity Is One God, Not Three Gods":

Theology does not deal with motion and is abstract and separable, for the Divine Substance is without either matter or motion. In Physics, then, we are bound to use scientific, in Mathematics, systematical, in Theology, intellectual concepts; and in Theology we will not let ourselves be diverted to play with imaginations but will simply apprehend that Form which is pure form and no image, which is very being and the source of Being. For everything owes its being to Form. Thus a statue is not a statue on account of the brass which is its matter, but on account of the form whereby the likeness of a living thing is impressed upon it: the brass itself is not brass because of the earth which is its matter, but because of its form. Likewise earth is not earth by reason of unqualified matter,11 but by reason of dryness and weight, which are forms. So nothing is said to be because it has matter, but because it has a distinctive form. But the Divine Substance is Form without matter, and is therefore One, and is its own essence. But other things are not simply their own essences, for each thing has its being from the things of which it is composed, that is, from its parts.