Ah, Here's to the Vine

 The 'Boozer's' Health
by William Milton Byram 

Ah, here's to the vine
That bears the fair wine
That banishes trouble away!
Forever be thine
Good Bacchus thy wine 
That vanquishes sorrow today!
And a health to the corn
Which we need at morn
To drive the mean headache away! 

May thy glory shine
One friend of mine
With freedom's foes ever at bay!
Long life to the vine,
That bears the fair wine,
That vanquishes sorrow to-day!
And a health to the corn,
Which we need at morn,
To drive the mean headache away!

Reflective Knowledge

 A reflection on the knowledge we have, that is, knowing that we know, so increases our knowledge that the new knowledge relates to the former in the way that more relates to less, or even the infinite to the finite. With reflective knowledge we rule and control direct knowledge as we will; only reflective knowledge brings direct knowledge under our free will. We would never have discovered the art of writing if we had not reflected on language. Numbers are an invention arising from reflection on the ideas of numbers. Algebraic letters are the result of a reflection on numbers. Analytical functions arose from a third reflection on algebraic letters. This is the real meaning of the apparent play on words: 'we know that we know that we know'! It is the simplest formula expressing the order of ideas, to which the Analytical Functions of Lagrange belong.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 111n131.]

Dashed Off XIX

 To write poetry, you have to be willing to go down rabbit holes.

When we consent to things, we are often not only consenting on our own behalf, but on behalf of everyone else for certain aspects of that to which we consent.

The brain is a theater of rituals.

All sciences, as such, are beautiful.

Gn 3:12 as Marian prophecy

Christianity is the life of Christ made shareable.

Archeological attestation of Kings of Judea and Israel:
(1) Kurkh Monolith: Ahab (I)
(2) Mesha Steele: Omri (I)
(3) Tel Dan Steele: Ahaziah 'of the House of David' (I)
(4) Summary Inscription 7: Johahaz [Ahaz] (J)
(5) Black Obelisk: Jehus 'son of Omri' (I)
(6) Tell al-Rimah Steele: Johoash [Joash] (I)
(7) Shema Seal: Jeroboam II (I)
(8) Iran Steele: Menahem (I)
(9) Summary Inscription 4: Pekah & Hoshea (I)
(10) Jeconiah Rations Tablet: Jeconiah (J)
(11) Hezekiah Birka: Hezekiah 'son of Ahaz' (J)
(12) Esarhaddon Prism: Manasseh (J)

The power structure of David's Israel, as given in Scripture, seems to be:
(1) a general power base in Hebron and the tribe of Judah
(2) some support from the religion network centered at Shiloh
(3) possession of Jerusalem from defeat of Jebusites
(4) slow and incomplete religious centralization at Jerusalem
(5) (mostly) broadly friendly relations and support from Philistines and Gath
(6) some authority over Saul's power base, arising from defeat of Eshbaal (Ishbosheth)
(7) success at playing off surrounding powers in military squabbles.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly tried to make experimentalists second-class citizens in the republic of science.

mechanism as that which may be imitated in experimental design

construction in mathematics // experimentation in physics

Different kinds of probability (epistemic, etc.) depend on the teleologies being considered.

the transfer of polytheistic divine epithets to God by triplex via

The tribunal of conscience has authority to:
(1) authorize
(2) order in accordance with obligation
(3) prohibit from exceeding authority
(4) impose conditions
(5) review
(6) act in aid of its own jurisdiction.

Conscience is supreme in its own jurisdiction, but its jurisdiction is not a supreme jurisdiction. Conscience is a tribunal itself subject to judgment.

Measurement requires a causal system capable of reducing possibilities.

Large-scale charitable endeavor requires coordination with the local.

Magic and mystery are parts of everyone's history.

The recording ability of the state is not a machinery but a cooperation. Trying to treat it too much like a machinery always creates failures.

deontic presence (association with what is not-obligatory-not)

"Just as our Redeemer is one person with the congregation of the good, and so is head of the body and we the body of His head, so also the Ancient Enemy is one person with the whole collection of the reprobate since he as head excels them in iniquity while they are servants to his persuasions and cling to him as a body joined to a head." Gregory, Moralia 4.18

"Causal analysis is emphatically not just about data; in causal analysis we must incorporate some understanding of the process that produces the data, and then we get something that was not in the data to begin with." Judea Pearl

given that I know that X --> given that it is true that X --> given that X

Every solution is optimal according to some standard; what is important is the relevant and appropriate standard.

no'am: pleasantness, delightfulness, beauty, favor, grace
-- from na'am, to be pleasant/delightful/lovely
-- translated in LXX as charis
Ps 27:4 the beauty of the Lord
Ps 90:17 beauty/favor of the Lord
Pr 3:17 pleasant way
Pr 15:26 pleasant words
Pr 16:24 pleasant words
Zech 11:7,10 Favor/Beauty

Differences in understanding are handled by wisdom.

Law is part of the human panoply of survival; other animals have fang and claw and swift muscle, but we have law.

the intelligibility of the concept of reliability --> the truth-aptness of induction
(If anything is recognizable as possibly reliable, it can only be because of induction.)

murmurations of kindnesses

Obligation as such becomes available to prudence, and in prudence becomes more than obligation. It suggests preferabilities for what is permissible; it provides inspiration for new options; it connects to other obligations by symbol and by analogy.

Prudence transforms the acts and works of other habits, both interpretatively and by incorporating them into a greater plan.

'Democracy' is not the sort of thing that can be defended; what can be defended is the Demos, the People.

It is a common error in many modern societies to think that saying concrete things in abstract words makes it more important.

It is difficult to be moderate and consistent in political contexts.

Modern societies are often intentionally only instrumentally literate.

Despite popular presentations that put the emphasis on belief, the subjectivity of subjective Bayesianism should really be thought of as 'the probabilities can vary from case to case', with belief a figure of speech (and *sometimes* perhaps an example).

principiation, mediation, convergence

Arrogant complacency is death in politics.

Every manifold of modal states derives from a difference-maker.

History consistently indicates that Torah gives the Jewish people an advantage or, perhaps more strictly accurately, Jews following Torah create a community that is highly durable, highly flexible, and, within the constraints of broader causal context, tends toward what makes a community prosper.

Lk 23:43 // Dt 30:18

The Calvinist TULIP should be seen not merely as a list but as a progression: We begin in sin (Total Depravity), but God in grace has chosen us (Unconditional Election) and provided a remedy for those chosen (Limited Atonement), which is granted us not in a way dependent on our weak grasp but on God's mighty strength (Irresistible Grace), so that we have perfect security in Him (Perseverance of the Saints).

"There is no such thing as just being good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so." Geach

We are more interested in richness or harmonious diversity of pleasures than pleasure as such.

One of the evils of 'utility monsters' is that they are monotonous and boring.

Taxonomies of philosophical theories are inherently interesting.

Effective altruism consistently has difficulties with scale -- it is hard to scale up to both complex things and to many different things, and hard to scale down to fine-grained detail work.

Most people regard general welfare as an important goal but (correctly) recognize that it depends on getting a lot of other things right -- namely particular things in the vicinage that can then be a platform for more.

Very few things contribute more to general welfare than raising children well.

People generally have fewer problems with effective altruism than with the combinations of EA with utilitarianism.

Beneficence requires other virtues to set the stage for it.

Christans as "philosomaton genos" (Celsus)
as "spermologoi" (Acts 17:18)
(note that Luke's comment at v 21 could perhaps be ironic because of this)

Creeds are landmarks.

monuments as standing testimony

Science textbooks are the dissection of the remains of scientific inquiry.

In the Church, the martyrs continue to be witnesses.

The human body is intrinsically liturgical.

The obsolete is often simply what we have forgotten how to use.

To do great things and to do them only well is not something that happens in politics.

To reform successfully, you need to have clear lines of authority.

Two things are more successful than anything else at getting 'engagement': kitsch and provocation.

Tradition at a very small scale we call "studying"; tradition at a very large scale we call "civilization".

A civilized society studies its ways.

The sensible is always explained in terms of the merely intelligible.

The philosophy of nature of any given age is always a system of analogies.

'Spend less than you make' and 'make more than you spend' are different goals,e ven though the means are usually the same; the priorities will at times be different. Likewise with 'be wrong less than you are right' and 'be right more than you are wrong'. Even the means are not always the same, though, because we do not always have equal freedom to affect both sides of the comparison.

that we have an idea of free will --> that we have free will
(the ignorance-of-causes position, depsite its problems accounting for phenomena, keeps recurring in part to block this natural inference)

human rights --> civil rights --> courtesy rights (i.e., aspects of civil rights extended to non-citizens)

price as a causal structure including anticipatory links
proposing a price // causal inquiry

omnipotence as a notwithstanding power

Love celebrates in both bright times and dark times.

What gives life meaning is what death cannot nullify.

Even where local anti-realism makes sense for part of a domain, global anti-realism does not, because the local anti-realism, to be intelligible, requires a framework of facts about the viability, usefulness, and effectiveness of possible constructions. Every anti-realism presupposes some kind of realist framework, and one would have to have a principled reason for classifying the framework itself as being in an entirely different domain from that which it frames.

The Massabki Brothers

 Today is the feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers in the Maronite calendar. The following is my brief note on them from 2016, very slightly revised.

*****

July 10 is the Feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers, Abdel Mooti Massabki, Francis Massabki, and Raphael Massabki. They lived in Damascus during a time when tensions were very high in the Ottoman Empire. A great civil war broke out in the region of Mount Lebanon and Syria in 1860 between Maronites and their Druze governors. The fighting was fierce, and the Maronites at an inevitable disadvantage against Druze forces backed by Ottoman troops. In July 1860, the fighting came to Damascus, and the results were brutal as much of the relatively peaceful Christian population was slaughtered by Druze and Muslim paramilitary groups while the government looked the other way -- thousands of Christians died in the Damascus Massacre, perhaps as many as ten thousand, and the Christian quarter of the city was almost entirely destroyed. The massacre might well have been total had it not been for cases of Christians being saved by their Muslim neighbors, especially in poor areas around the city. Of note as well was the work of Abdelkader El Djezairi, an Algerian Sufi freedom fighter who was living in exile in Damascus at the time; having forewarning of the trouble, he and his fellow Algerians sheltered hundreds of Christians in his house as he sent his sons out into danger in order to bring Christians to safety. 

But there were many who had no such protection, and no recourse but to pray. The Massabki brothers, prominent Maronites in the city, were praying in a Franciscan church on July 9, 1860 and given the choice to die or convert to Islam. They were beatified in 1926 by Pius XI.

The Feast of the Three Blessed Massabki Maronite Martyrs

Let us praise Christ the Martyr;
He shed His blood for our sins
and crowns those who persevere.
Behold the Massabki saints!
Their crown is of purest gold.
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

O brothers, You prayed in faith
and died in Christ, in His Church,
forgiving persecutors,
like the Lord upon His Cross.
Thus you are honored with Him!
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

Jesus said, "Follow." You did.
You heard the call of heaven
and for love of Christ endured.
Trusting in Christ's great mercy,
You won crowns of victory.
Holy martyrs, pray for us!

The Principal Thing

 To be a person of taste, it seems necessary, that one have, first, a lively and correct imagination; secondly, the power of distinct apprehension; thirdly, the capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation, &c.; fourthly, Sympathy, or Sensibility of heart; and, fifthly, Judgment, or Good Sense, which is the principal thing, and may not very improperly be said to comprehend all the rest. 

 James Beattie, Of Imagination, Chapter IV.

The Mysterious Depths of Water

Among my most widely read posts here at "Siris" is the 2011 post, Water Is Not H2O, which is about how water is more complicated than it seems. The title, of course, is a provocative way of stating one of the key arguments: While H2O is the water-forming molecule, the behavior of that molecule guarantees that any amount of water that exists for a while will also be composed of H, O, H2, O2, H2O2, and similar combinations, and many of the properties of what we call 'water' depend on this fact that any significant amount of water existing for more than a moment is not just H2O. This is actually standard point made in philosophy of chemistry, one that has usually not diffused out to philosophers in other fields. But I also noted a few other things relevant to the nature, with the ultimate conclusion:

Water is an interacting society, not a molecule, and it is a society of related molecules, not just H2O; among those molecules H2O is just the most prominent family, not a single kind of molecule; and light water (what we usually think of as H2O) is just the most prominent branch of that family.

So I was interested to see a recent science news item come up about studies of the molecular structure of water:

A study published in Nature Physics provides new molecular-level evidence from simulations that liquid water is not a single uniform substance, but a constantly shifting mixture of two distinct microscopic structures.

As the article notes, this is not a new idea. It's not surprising, because it confirms what chemists and physicists had already suspected. For reasons tied to the behavior of water, it has long been hypothesized that water molecules shift around between two kinds of structures. This is known as the two-state model, and the reason why it was already taken to be probably true is that water seems schizophrenic, sometimes acting as if it were highly structured and sometimes as if it were very loose and disordered, but rarely in between. Naturally the easiest explanation of this is that it actually sometimes is highly structured and sometimes quite disordered, and rarely in between; and what we know of water molecules doesn't rule this out. The big puzzle was that it was very difficult to find any evidence of this, beyond the behavior that led to the model in the first place. One might think that you could confirm it by just checking how the molecules are related to each other, but it's actually quite difficult to get good direct evidence of the overall structures of vast numbers of molecules in constantly changing relationships. And in particular there was no clear idea of how the two states would even be related to each other in the actual behavior of water.

So, as I understand it, having looked at a number of these pop science articles and having briefly skimmed through what I could find of the relevant papers without forking any money over to get behind paywalls (and without pirating anything!), the state of things is something like the following.

The new discovery is repeatedly called 'direct molecular evidence for the two-state model', in this and other articles, and it is, but in a more complicated way than I think that makes it sound. Nobody has seen these two structures themselves, and there's a lot that is still unknown. The two-state model, to work at all, requires that there be a state of water known as liquid-to-liquid transition, in which water splits into a high-density state and a low-density state. It wasn't obvious that water had such a transition because you can only get it under certain conditions, in a very, very, very cold state in which liquid water is still liquid but is almost right at the edge of becoming solid. This is very difficult to set up, because water freezes so easily, and usually does so long before this point, so you have to supercool the water in such a way that it stays liquid. Computer simulations suggested that something like this state probably existed, but even the best computer simulations were quite messy; physical chemists could guess where it would have to exist if it did exist, but they had to make assumptions that were not yet proven; and nobody had yet been able to produce it in a way that got useful measurements. Improvements in computer simulation, however, made it possible to give a more precise statement of the relevant numbers for measurements related to energy and density under certain conditions, and the answer was coherent, and also consistent both with the two-state model and what else we know of water. And, without trying to make the model fit some more recent evidence based on new technology and measurement processes using X-ray lasers (which we began to get earlier this year; see here also  ), the model happens to fit new measurements that we were only just recently able to obtain.

Thus the 'direct molecular evidence' is that the two-state model now has clear and definite computer simulation of water that shows us how, given everything else we know about water, the two states would have to be related to each other, and new measurements under roughly the conditions expected by the model are consistent with what the precisified model says we should get. That is, the two-state model went from being a rather hazy idea with a lot of guesswork to being a fairly precise idea with definite features, and, importantly, when the hazy idea was made precise and definite, it fit both the old evidence and some new measurements we were just now able to start getting. William Whewell would really like this example, because he was always a champion of the idea that one of the routes of progress in the sciences was just making ideas more clear and precise; here, the computer simulation is evidence of the two-state model because it makes the two-state model much more clear and precise without breaking it in any way, despite measurements that have been improving at the same time. Nobody has seen or traced out the actual structures (because it is still very difficult to do); the evidence is not direct in that way. We just have new direct measurements that confirm their existence, in exactly the way the theory indicates that they should.

What is perhaps almost as important is that a new line of inquiry was opened up by this. The computer simulation indicates that the two structures change their behavior depending on the temperature and pressure, in ways that we might be able to confirm or disconfirm in the future.

Thus the two-state model, our best idea of how water might work, is almost certainly right, although there is still room for unexpected discovery. Thus water is not only an interactive society of many different molecules, of which H2O is only the most important, but an interactive society whose molecules are related in at least two different ways, each of which contributes to different aspects of water's behavior. Water is a surprisingly deep subject.

At Morn in Brake or Bosky Avenue

The Mocking-Bird
by Sidney Lanier 

Superb and sole, upon a pluméd spray
That o'er the general leafage boldly grew,
He summ'd the woods in song; or typic drew
The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay 
Of languid doves when long their lovers stray,
And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew
At morn in brake or bosky avenue.
What e'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say.
Then down he shot, bounced airily along
The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song
Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. 
Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain:
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree? 

Tense Logics and Counterfactuals

 Considerations relevant to tense logic go back to Aristotle, but modern tense logic begins with Arthur Prior, who recognized that you could have with tenses an analogue of alethic modal logics (with necessities and possibilities). The Diamond or weak modality operators are:

P: at some point in the Past
F: at some point in the Future

The Box or strong modality operators are:

H: Has always been so in the past
G: Going to always be so in the future

Thus you can get a 'tense logic' in two different directions from a reference point, with pastward strong and weak modalities and futureward strong and weak modalities. In each direction, many standard things for modal logic hold true, including that the relevant strong and weak modalities are interdefinable, e.g.,

Pp = ~H~p
Fp = ~G~p

It follows from this that for every modal logic you can name, you can give a tense interpretation of it. Of course, many of these are weird tense logics -- but, by definition, they are logically possible ways a kind of tense could work. In terms of our ordinary grammatical tenses, we need to have a logic that has strings of modal operators. For instance, getting something like

It had been the case that John went to the store

requires that we be able to talk about what is to the past of something in the past:

PP(John goes to the store).

[ADDED LATER: As Aron notes in the comments, this is actually not a good example for this argument.] We also, of course, need to be able to talk about what is to the future of what is in the past, what is to the past of what is in the future, what is in the future of what is in the future, and so forth. One of the earliest important results in tense logic proved that, if we are dealing with a time that is completely linear (no branches), all possible ways of talking about it can be reduced to fifteen combinations of two tense operators. There are thus fifteen possible tenses, if we think of time as being something like a line. Most languages do not use all fifteen. (They also often combine tense with other things, so not all grammatical tenses can be captured by a tense logic alone.)

But of course, we can have tense logic interpretation for any modal logic we want, and we don't have to think of time as linear. It's common to think of time as branching in at least one direction (usually the future). You can also think of many times. For instance, instead of thinking of time as a line, you could think of it as a plane or volume. Thus, in addition to the past, we could have an eckwise and andwise direction (to borrow terms from the short story, "The Dark Tower"). Every point in time would have a pastward, a futureward, an eckwise, and an andwise direction. The eckwise and andwise would work exactly like past and future, but would just not be to the past or to the future. We couldn't guarantee that they were perpendicular, which requires not just tense but a precise way to measure time, but we could recognize them as not all on one line.

This might seem rather silly. But in fact this is not very different from how spacetime works in relativity theory; it gets more complicated when you bring in precise measurements, but if we are only looking at tenses, thinking of several dimensions of time is not any different from thinking of spacetime. Spatial directions too have 'tenses' (forward and backward).

And, of course, in science fiction, we often find people treating counterfactual possibilities as alternative tenses. This is actually older than you might expect; the late medieval scholastics in discussing the logical operation of ampliation identified five logical tenses: past, present, future, possible, imaginable. In medieval logic, it's generally taken to be the case that propositions (or 'enunciations') can be true or false depending on the present moment they are said, but it was also recognized that we sometimes 'ampliate' (make wider) what we are considering. 'John went to the store' is talking about John, who exists now, but is not confined to what John is doing now.

Because of this, we would expect to find analogues of counterfactual conditionals -- counterpresential conditionals, we might call them. And this is what we do find. They're not even very strange:

If John went to the store, he has already bought milk.

If John will go to the store, he will then get milk.

Can we just treat counterfactuals as just another kind of tense? This is almost built in -- tenses, at least in tense logic, are just interpretations of Box and Diamond, strong modality and weak modality, and counterfactuals, at least in alethic modal logics, are also such interpretations. But the kinds of modal logic that most people think make sense of temporal tenses are not obviously the ones you would propose for counterfactuals (and vice versa). The analogy is strongest when we think specifically of 'not being present'. But it maybe gets weaker if we really think about past, future, or alternate possibilities. But we also have to keep in mind that there is no one single view of how time works. Certainly counterfactuals seem more like alternate branches in branching time than parallel linear times. (If we try to understand counterfactuals in this way, we seem to need time to branch in both the pastward and the futureward direction. But perhaps counterfactuals also require an eckwise and an andwise direction.)

Standardization

By some official oversight, which I am quite unable to explain, we are still allowed to write private letters if we put them in public pillar-boxes. The Postmaster-General does not write all our letters for us; even the local postman has as yet no such local powers. I cannot conceive how it is that reformers have failed to note the need for uniting, reorganizing, coordinating, codifying, and linking up all this complex, chaotic, and wasteful system, or lack of system. There must be vast amounts of overlapping, with some six young gentlemen writing letters to one young lady. There must be a terribly low educational standard, with all sorts of poor people allowed to put into a private letter any spelling or grammar they like. There must be a number of bad psychological habits being formed, by foolish people writing their sons in the Colonies or their mothers in the workhouse. And all this anarchy and deterioration could be stopped by the simple process of standardisation of all correspondence.

G. K. Chesterton, Government and the Rights of Man. 

A Quarter of a Millenium

 On the Fourth of July two years ago, reflecting on some comments made by Abraham Lincoln in 1858, I said:

At the present time, about 248 years after the beginning, the United States is a mighty nation of about 340 million people, and we own and inhabit somewhere near six percent of the world's dry land and an even larger share of the world's habitable land, having added Alaska, Hawaii, and various islands to its bulk, as well as having regularized some borders and territories that were still in flux in Lincoln's day. There were only 32 states in 1858, Minnesota having just been admitted in May. We are the world's fourth largest country by land area, the world's third largest country by population. We cover just under two percent of the entire earth's surface and have just under five percent of the world's population. We are by far the world's wealthiest country, having about one and a half times the total wealth of the second wealthiest country. We are an agricultural superpower, the largest agricultural exporter by monetary amount (about eight percent of the entire world market) and the second largest by tonnage; we are an industrial superpower, the second largest manufacturing exporter (about 16 percent of the entire world market). And, of course, nobody needs to be reminded that we are a military superpower.

To which can be added many other things. We are the only nation to have put footsteps on the Moon, an extraordinary achievement that cries out for a national epic that has not yet been written. We made the airplane viable, industrialized the automobile, made personal computing successful, created the Internet, invented GPS. It has been a busy quarter of a millenium. May those who are alive in 2276 look back at something even more impressive than we have seen.

But all of this is in many ways secondary, because none of these is the greatest achievement of the United States. The greatest achievement of the United States is the United States itself. There is a core of who we are that stands on its own, and would still stand even if we were considerably less overwhelming, a set of ideas forged by fire and preserved by tradition and passed down from the generation of the Founders: popular sovereignty, federation, division of powers, natural rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness, civil equality, constitutional respect, unity of nation, pragmatic daring, republican vigilance for liberty, appeal to a higher and more moral law. The labels are abstract, but the actual working is very concrete. In the century in which the United States was born, the British Constitution was seen as the wonder of the world, a strangely impossible mix of balanced oppositions in a patchwork that worked so well that it seemed nearly miraculous. The United States is also very much a near-miracle. But of course the chaos of the British Constitution was not really a chaos; all of the apparent inconsistency was the complexity required to do justice to the one key original idea that the Englishman, even the ordinary Englishman with no title, truly mattered, expanded to the notion that free Britons never would be slaves. By happenstance and providence and very occasional clear sight, and despite all its mess and imperfection, it had built up in such a way as to make that idea breathtakingly visible. Much the same, I think, can be said of us.

We are certainly no Kingdom of Ends, but we are also no mere ideal in a philosopher's head. The difficulty in this world is to maintain a clear view of the importance of the person, both as individual and as in community, that doesn't flatten the person into a mere idea within a mere scheme. Attempts to build a society that can do this generally fail; the best successes are dim and wavering and muddled. But if there is one thing that I hope will still be true in another 250 years, it is that we still capture some of it. May it be!

Radio Greats: The Fourth of July (Yankee Yarns)

This is a re-post, with minor revision, from 2016. 

Alton H. Blackington was a photojournalist who loved New England and who was also a passionate pursuer of human interest stories. He liked the weird, the silly, the heartwarming stories people told about their heritage. (Old-fashioned parts of New England have an almost unlimited number of such anecdotes, full of ghosts and clever tricksters and silly greenhorns and extravagant exaggerations drolly passed off as undeniable fact.) He had a knack for re-telling them. Yankee Yarns, running from 1943 to 1951, was the distillation of all these traits. 

"The Fourth of July", from 1951, tells a tale of some boys from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, who decide, after the town passes a law prohibiting noise on the night of Fourth of July, that they will make a big to-do anyway. They end up causing a bit more bedlam than even they were expecting to cause....

Dashed Off XVIII

 causal and compositional reasoning as the primary source of questions

'spurious' is a causal term

Everything in liturgy requires title:
(1) divine scripture
(2) passions of the martyrs (hagiography)
(3) Church tradition
--- --- (a) global traditions
--- --- (b) local traditions consistent with global
(4) practical necessity
(5) episcopal authorization for purpose consistent with liturgy

The church of LDS interprets 1 Cor 15:29 as justification for the baptism for the dead (cf. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Dead, but cf.  also Tertullian, Against Marcion) -- in Mormon vicarious baptism, a living person is baptized as proxy on behalf of the deceased; it's difficult to find any account of how this works theologically (but see D&C 128). [It does not make the dead members of the church, but 'makes available' the ordinance to them because 'what the Saints record on earth is recorded in Heaven'; thus the expansion to other ordinances as well. Socially, since it must be done in a temple, it provides a way for young people to get early acquaintance with temple practices.]

All physical theories are mathematical representations of ensembles and systems of experiments.

Causal reasoning is necessary for distinguishing effective and ineffective experimental strategies, a distinction with which every experimentalist is familiar. (Cp. Cartwright's more general point.)

nomological machine (Cartwright): a stable-enough arrangement of components whose features acting in consort give rise to relatively stable input/output relations
"What matters about nomological machines, whether constructed from iron and steel or from flesh and blood, is tha tthey are made of parts with features that have powers and potentialities." Cartwright

No physical theory can be interpreted except in light of associated experiments and observations.

'Conforming a science to cause and effect' is more generally called 'experiment'; and anything that doesn't have it is not a natural science at all.

Mature natural sciences don't need a 'supplement' of causal notions and principles; mature sciences are experimental and therefore already have them as part of their evidential panoply.

Both  phenomenon and noumenon must be understood under the concept of being.

Our relation to the cosmos is not merely objective but intersubjective, or at least quasi-intersubjective.

logic as a symbol of wisdom

fictions cum fundamento in re (e.g., idealizations)

We need our lives not merely to be structured a certain way but to express something.

Every non-self-defeating theory must have something like a veracitas Dei, i.e., a real, general, stable principle of reliability and accuracy.

The natural tendency of academia is to bureaucratize away things that were originally occasions of creative ingenuity.

Every actual object of cognition requires an explanation of its being an object of cognition.

Our own existence is a persumptive existence, but the presumption is inevitable.

The perception-memory-imagination relations mean that we all do a rudimentary form of phenomenological variation.

God as that which is present to all presences

Our internal sense of time is a sense of differential obscurity; the perceptive relatively less obscure, the retentive more obscure, the protensive even more obscure. But our sense of this is also differentially obscure; yesterday's sense more obscure than today's.

The body is an extraordinary assemblage of measuring apparatuses.

At all times, the life of the Church is Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter; the Church is always living all three days.

Nobody actually believes that violence is the last resort; it would be closer to say that shamefully abject surrender is the last resort; people go to violence well before that.

Stupidity in an educational context is entirely a matter of cultivated habit, not native ability.

Cognitive claims will often also express noncognitive mental states. Where expressivists generally err is in jumping too quickly to the notion that this is all they do.

The magnetism that Stevenson attributes to ethical claims is due to authority, not the claim as such, and is common with other kinds of claims taken as authoritative, e.g., scientific claims. Likewise, the aura of feeling he attributes to ethical words is often found around scientific terms as well (e.g., due to the 'romance of science' or historical associations over time).

People do not commend things on the basis of particular properties but on the basis of fit in context.

In order to obey imperatives, we must reason with them.

People often claim taht things are not consistent which are clearly logically so (e.g., being married and committing adultery). One wya to interpret this is in terms of a lack of smooth coherence of attitude.

Almost all discussions of metaethics assume that ethics is much simpler and much less rich than it actually is; even kindergarten ethics is usually more sophisticated than what one would assume if one went only on metaethical discussions.

1 Cor 11:34 & tradition (e.g., there are practices arranged by the apostles but not given directly in Scripture)

The body is always already a quasi-object of the mind, an availability for being an object that to the mind is already beginnign to be object in many ways.

In experience of the divine, people regularly experience things 'around' the divine, the royal pageantry and insignia of divine majesty, so to speak.

mediate divine presence & theological metonymy

our bodies as standing systems of physical abilities
-- We cannot adequately reason about and use our bodies without considering them as potential as well as actual.

We experience our bodies as interweavings of the material correlates of the voluntary with that which is involuntary, the field of doing and enduring. In certain experiences, we find a shifting -- the correlated of the voluntary stops being so (e.g., by drunkenness) , or the involuntary comes into the scope of the voluntary (e.g., waking up).

We have to incorporate our body into ourselves; we are constantly doing this and sometimes modify our way of doing it. Sometimes we do it primarily by directed attention, sometimes by use, sometimes by how we deal with pain and pleasure in action, sometimes by holding readiness, etc.
-- This is related to the mansions of St. Teresa & Edith Stein.

We have presential knowledge of oru bodies as we do of our minds.

present to vs present for

stories as giving us a better sense of the possibilities of personalities and relationships

our body as anticipated object of others

To wrap us all up into monads, Leibniz had to fold the entire universe into us, and to stop thinking of us as substances, you have to diffuse us entirely through the universe.

Our bodies are our first experience in end-giving and also our first experience in having ends imposed on us.

In 1 Apol 63, Justin seems clearly to distinguish Christ and Spirit. (Cf. Trypho 87-88)

Christ is the Apostle of God (Hb 3:1) and makes his chief students Apostles of God.

The artificial necessarily presupposes potentiality; nothing can be an artifact that is not an actualization of potential in a certain way according to art. The natural, however, does not have such a limitation. This sugges that the natural has three versions:
(1) That which is merely potential without prior potential
(2) That which is purely actual
(3) That which is actualized potential, directly or indirectly, but not according to art

make-plan vs use-plan
(they are related in that a use-plan of ingredients or parts can be directed toward a make-plan, and a make-plan can be directed toward a use-plan)

reactive attitudes --> moral quasi-persons (things personish in a respect)

Openmindedness is not conducive to truth as such, but to certain kinds of inquiry, by removing common impediments to such inquiry.

We experience not merely to experience but to comprehend, and comprehension of any experience requires going beyond that experience.

Human ardor goes in and out, lathough for some it is like great tides and for others like little lapping waves; a common mistake is to assume that the receding is a vanishing rather than a prelude to a different surge. This is true in romantic love, commitment to profession, religious devotion, parental love, and devotion to inquiry. One of the functions of deontic structures like roles and institutions is to keep us involved in important things throughout, so that our tidal nature enriches rather than cuts short the relationships and pursuits that matter.

magic tricks // slapstick
-- Magic tricks work like jokey things in that they are interweavings and nestings of small things with a potential for the wanted reactino, whcih build up when organized together properly; they also both rely on foiled expectation.
-- Magic tricks are like slapstick particularly in that they are physical and therefore easily allow you to build things up not just serially (like stand-up usually must) but parallel or vertically (so, e.g., the trick or joke is actually several tricks or jokes striking simultaneously).
-- A difference is in the relation to incongruity -- slapstick usually plays it up to get the laugh, magic trick usually plays down the incongruity of what would obviously be incongruous, in order to avoid making it look like an obvious cheat and get the puzzlement. Nonetheless, this is not an absolute (jokes used to misdirect, joke tricks, etc.) -- partly because the two easily blend (as in the movie, Now You See Me).

The rule of law begins with reason as legislative.
-- the principle that constitutional law must be interpreted from the bench as broadly coherent and rational (i.e., if inconsistent only partly and by accident) and such as a deliberative body reasoning together might give

"An experience is a reference to a further experience. It is a constant return to the same in ever new ways." Patocka

Every work of fine art is already philosophical, whether a result of philosophical meditation or a result of a philosophical lark, a playing on ideas. This does not mean, of course, that its philosophical character is fully developed; it may be no more than a gesture at one step in philosophical thinking. But the greatest works of art certainly become more. Fine art, like logic, although perhaps less properly, is an organon of philosophical thought. It is the transcendental character of beauty that seems to make it so, beauty's complicated coextension with being.

"Every name befitting God befits him either causatively, similitudinally, adjunctively, or negatively." Alanus of Lille

The habits for using propositions well, for using arguments well, and for using systems of arguments well are all quite distinct, and one often finds philosophers who only have one or two of the three, because they all take work to build, and some forms of training shortchange one or the other.

The Greatest Question

 Yesterday the greatest Question was decided, which ever was de­bated in America, and a greater perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A Resolution was passed without one dissenting Colony “that these united Colonies, are, and of right ought to be free and independent States, and as such, they have, and of Right ought to have full Power to make War, conclude Peace, establish Commerce, and to do all the other Acts and Things, which other States may rightfully do.” You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the Causes, which have impell’d Us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it, in the Sight of God and Man. A Plan of Confederation will be taken up in a few days.

[“John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-02-02-0015. (Original source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2, June 1776 – March 1778, ed. L. H. Butterfield. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 27–29.)]

First Principles and Skepticism

 If we wish to find some proof that human beings are of their nature persuaded of the first principles of reasoning, we need look no further than the history of scepticism. As we have seen, any scepticism which truly denied the principles of reasoning would destroy the possibility of thought and of reasoning. But there has never been a sceptic really prepared to abandon resoning for the sake of immersing himself in total mental and verbal silence. All sceptics have used reason to propagate their opinion. By this very fact they admit and use the first principles of reasoning without being conscious of what they are doing. Moreover, they do this naturally because the first principles cannot be denied. The very act of denial presupposes and requires them.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary and Watson, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) pp. 76-77 (sect. 1144).]

The Town, the Churchyard, and the Setting Sun

On Visiting the Tomb of Burns
by John Keats 

The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
Though beautiful, cold -- strange -- as in a dream
I dreamed long ago, now new begun.
The short-liv'd, paly summer is but won
From winter's ague for one hour's gleam;
Through sapphire warm their stars do never beam:
All is cold Beauty; pain is never done.
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
The real of Beauty, free from that dead hue
Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it? Burns! with honour due
I oft have honour'd thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face; I sin against thy native skies.

This was written in Dumfries, on July 1, 1818. Keats said that he wrote this sonnet in a 'strange mood, half asleep', and it's a good example of how the mood in which a poem is written can sometimes carry over into the poem. 

The Perpetual Pastors of the Church

 Today is the feast of St. Peter and Paul, Apostles. From Pope Leo XIV's homily for the day:

In this light, we can interpret the mission entrusted by the Lord to Peter and his Successors for the benefit of the entire holy People of God. It is a mission to listen, with his help, to the voice of each person; to discern inspirations; to guide the way; to correct errors; to instruct, encourage, exhort and accompany our brothers and sisters so that, docile to the action of the same Spirit (cf. 1 Cor 12:1–11), they may cooperate in the salvation of one another and of all humanity. Moreover, Peter’s example is an invitation to every Christian to become a builder of unity, placing God at the center of one’s life and drawing close to one’s brothers and sisters, attentive to their circumstances and needs (cf. Francis, Catechesis, 9 October 2024). In this way, we learn to live with one another in charity, so that the message might be fully proclaimed (cf. 2 Tim 4:17). 

 This is also the teaching of Paul, the other great apostle we celebrate today and the tireless herald of the Good News. He, too, has distinctive symbols: the book and the sword, which are closely linked to one another. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews explains this well when he writes that, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword,” capable of penetrating “until it divides soul from spirit” and of discerning “the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb 4:12).

From one of Pope St. Leo I's homilies for the feast:

The whole world, dearly-beloved, does indeed take part in all holy anniversaries, and loyalty to the one Faith demands that whatever is recorded as done for all men's salvation should be everywhere celebrated with common rejoicings. But, besides that reverence which today's festival has gained from all the world, it is to be honoured with special and peculiar exultation in our city, that there may be a predominance of gladness on the day of their martyrdom in the place where the chief of the Apostles met their glorious end. For these are the men, through whom the light of Christ's gospel shone on you, O Rome, and through whom you, who was the teacher of error, was made the disciple of Truth. These are your holy Fathers and true shepherds, who gave you claims to be numbered among the heavenly kingdoms, and built you under much better and happier auspices than they, by whose zeal the first foundations of your walls were laid: and of whom the one that gave you your name defiled you with his brother's blood. These are they who promoted you to such glory, that being made a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal state, and the head of the world through the blessed Peter's holy See you attained a wider sway by the worship of God than by earthly government. For although you were increased by many victories, and extended your rule on land and sea, yet what your toils in war subdued is less than what the peace of Christ has conquered.

Evening Note for Sunday, June 28

 Thought for the Evening: Vicarious Intention

There are clearly situations in which people have vicarious intention, i.e., intention on behalf of another. An obvious example is parenting, which often involves intending on behalf of one's child; various kinds of representation and mediated agency are more complicated forms. This is not something for which we have any obvious theory. There are a few things that need to be considered, however.

(1) Vicarious intention is distinct from intention on one's own behalf with another in view. Most of our social intentions (including in situations that can involve vicarious intention) involve intending for ourselves while nonetheless taking others into account. Vicarious intention requires a tighter integration of the other into one's intention. 

(2) Vicarious intention is, or is typically, personative. The person vicariously intending for another is usually personating them, i.e., acting as part of their person, as their agent in personal action. This personative role has to involve a number of things:

(i) a personator
(ii) a personated
(iii) an end of personation
(iv) a deontic structure appropriate to that end
(v) a range of actions allowed by that structure that are relevant to actual situations

For instance, a parent (i) can make a decision on behalf of a child (ii) for the child's good (iii); the child's good involves a set of obligations and responsibilities that the parent must consider and that 'authorize' the parent to make and treat certain kinds of decision as if their child were the one making decision (iv). This constitues the whole panoply of power and action involved in parenting (v).

(3) The vicarious intention is the intention of both the principal intender and the one on whose behalf the principal intender intends. Given such a personative role, then the actual decision on behalf of the child is an action done with vicarious intention. Note that we should distinguish decisions on behalf of the child from decisions for the child; the latter need not be vicarious at all, and can simply be an imposition of authority. When acting in a personative role, the parent is standing in the child's place, making the child's decision.

(4) One of the contexts in which vicarious intention is found is in infant baptism. As St. Thomas puts it, the infant "can be said to intend, not by their own act of intention, since at times they struggle and cry; but by the act of those who bring them to be baptized" (ST 3.68.9 ad 1). This has all of the features noted above. Obviously we have personator (i) and personated (ii); the end of personation (iii) is the spiritual care for the child, which requires and authorizes (iv) relevant adults to take steps toward the child's salvation and spiritual health (v).  The full rite makes the personator cooperative here -- it is not just the parents/sponsors but the whole Church with them that is intending on behalf of the child. However, the latter introduces an aspect to this kind of vicarious intention that is not common to all forms of vicarious intention, namely, charitable communion; as Aquinas also says, the Holy Spirit "unites the whole Church together, and communicates the goods of one member to another" (ST 3.68.9 ad 2). One of the effects of this is that much more can be vicariously intended than could usually be done.

The closest analogue to this in non-grace contexts seems to be political representation. While it doesn't have the communion made possible by the virtue of charity, it does have a community, and a common good. But more than that, I think the particular aspects of common good that create the deontic structure authorizing vicarious intention are fixed by human nature. In particular, they are due to humans being political animals and therefore requiring civil society for their complete development. It is thus natural for us to form into a moral person, the civil society, and this requires that there be decision-makers making the moral person's intention, on behalf of all of the members relevantly concerned. This is rather different from that which the Church exercises specifically as a sacramental body of Christ (although the Church also has this kind), but it also, within the range of actions allowed by the end and deontic structure, allows much more to be vicariously intended than could usually be intended.

It is worth noting that infant baptism is an unusually complicated case, because the vicarious intention is layered: the parent as member of the Church, the Church as a political community, the Church as a sacramental communion.  The result is that baptism of a child is an act within a family (part of the parent's educative work on behalf of the child), an act of initiation into the society of the Church, and an act of faith, hope, and love exercised on behalf of the child in the order of grace.

In any case, this is all quite rough, but one must begin somewhere.

Various Links of Note

* Matthew Minerd, Christocentrism in the French School: Revisiting Charles-Louis Gay, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Johan E. Gustafsson, A Godelian Ontological Proof with More Plausible Axiological Principles (PDF)

* Miriam Ellis discusses a previously unknown letter by J. R. R. Tolkien.

* The Vesuvius Challenge, which is scanning the burned papyri from Herculaneum, has reached a milestone: they have fully deciphered the first scroll, PHerc 1667, and have a preprint paper on it. Since the scroll was itself in not-very-good-shape, what they have is fragmentary, but enough to know that it probably discussed Stoic ideas. (They suggest that it was a Stoic work, but it could also be an Epicurean work discussing and criticizing Stoicism, or the Stoic part of a doxographical account about several philosophical schools.) And, of course, even given its fragmentary nature, its always possible we may find another partial copy of the same thing, either here or somewhere else, or that future scholarship may discover that some reference already extant may be an allusion to this work.

* David Horan's translation of the Platonic dialogues at the Foundation for Platonic Studies.

Currently Reading

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim
Antonio Rosmini, Certainty
Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale

In Audiobook

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan
Ursula K. LeGuin, Worlds of Exile and Illusion
Jim Butcher, Small Favor

Eirenaios

 Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. From Adversus Haereses, Book III, Chapter 19:

But again, those who assert that He was simply a mere man, begotten by Joseph, remaining in the bondage of the old disobedience, are in a state of death having been not as yet joined to the Word of God the Father, nor receiving liberty through the Son, as He does Himself declare: If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed. But, being ignorant of Him who from the Virgin is Emmanuel, they are deprived of His gift, which is eternal life; and not receiving the incorruptible Word, they remain in mortal flesh, and are debtors to death, not obtaining the antidote of life. To whom the Word says, mentioning His own gift of grace: I said, You are all the sons of the Highest, and gods; but you shall die like men. He speaks undoubtedly these words to those who have not received the gift of adoption, but who despise the incarnation of the pure generation of the Word of God, defraud human nature of promotion into God, and prove themselves ungrateful to the Word of God, who became flesh for them. For it was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and He who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God. For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?

Seal of All the Fathers

 Today is the feast of St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria and Doctor of the Church. From his Commentary on Hosea, chapter 2:

We are therefore saved when God has mercy and compassion on us; we have been made righteous, "not because of any works of righteousness that we have done, but according to the abundance of his mercy," as Scripture says. We were also sumoned to the spiritual relationship through faith, and by being thus summoned we come to know the one who is God by nature. Consequently, he says, I shall betroth you to myself in faith, and you will know the Lord. Faith made its entrance in advance, therefore, and we were enriched also in this way by knowing Christ -- and this, in my view, is the meaning of what is said to some: "If you will not believe, neither will you understand." Now, the fact that the clear understanding of the mystery of Christ achieves a share in eternal life for those worthy of it the Son himself confirms in speaking to God the Father in heaven: "Now, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the one true God,a nd Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."

[St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Twelve Prophets, Volume 1, Robert C. Hill, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2007) p. 90.]

Thou Best the Heart Can Raise

 Ode to Tranquillity
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tranquillity! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame!
Thou ne'er wilt leave my riper age
To low intrigue, or factious rage;
For oh! dear child of thoughtful Truth,
To thee I gave my early youth,
And left the bark, and blest the steadfast shore,
Ere yet the tempest rose and scared me with its roar. 

Who late and lingering seeks thy shrine,
On him but seldom, Power divine,
Thy spirit rests! Satiety
And Sloth, poor counterfeits of thee,
Mock the tired worldling. Idle hope
And dire remembrance interlope,
To vex the feverish slumbers of the mind:
The bubble floats before, the spectre stalks behind. 

But me thy gentle hand will lead
At morning through the accustomed mead;
And in the sultry summer's heat
Will build me up a mossy seat;
And when the gust of Autumn crowds,
And breaks the busy moonlight clouds,
Thou best the thought canst raise, the heart attune,
Light as the busy clouds, calm as the gliding moon. 

The feeling heart, the searching soul,
To thee I dedicate the whole!
And while within myself I trace
The greatness of some future race,
Aloof with hermit-eye I scan
The present works of present man --
A wild and dream-like trade of blood and guile,
Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!

Dashed Off XVII

 Sanctions are not a generally motivating factor when it comes to law; people who follow the laws are only sometimes thinking of the sanctions, and in fact many times people are not very aware of what the sanctions are, at least outside extreme cases. People seem more motivated by, 'This is how we do things' -- i.e., socially -- than by 'Or else', and people both demand the 'or else' to wield against social deviation specifically and get angry if it is wielded against people doing 'what everyone does'.

To be right often, we must be wrong often.

Evaluating is often harder than creating and applying is often harder than analyzing.

Since social institution always presupposes normativity of some kind, normativity as such can't be socially instituted; it arises naturally in social contexts; get a bunch of sufficiently cognitive agents in cooperation, and you have normativity. It just is part of what such cooperation has to involve.

We construct norms because normativity is natural to us.

durability of argument-form
(1) Take an argument.
(2) In use, people tend to vary it a bit.
(3) An argument is more durable if minor plausible variations keep conclusion roughly the same.

"A man without religion is a maimed man." Gaudi

Language is a system of rites.

"A consturction only becomes interesting when it can be placed side by side with other analogous constructions for forming species of the same genus." Poincaré

The mathematics for physics is drawn out of causal structures, particularly of measuring devices.

Social progress in any aspect involves many small improvements over many domains, which eventually start interacting with each other.

"Home is the part of the universe so thoroughly elaborated by our tendencies that it has become for us, so to say, an enlarged sphere of disposability." Patočka

fictive lived-experiencing of the past

Nothing we actually know is merely singular.

The capacity to abstract is essential to sign use, because things are signs in a respect.

In speech we instrumentalize our voice & philosophers of language often do nto do justice to this.

Signs often come in complexes so that we can pick one representamen out of the whole as convenient (e.g., spoken words -- written words -- associated gestures & expressions -- iconic representations).
-- Metonymies and synechdoches perhaps come out of treating things themselves as such sign-complexes.

Measurement always involves getting the right causal interactions under the right conditions.

In language we often use words to operate on and modify words and their meanings.

intension/remission -- quality as quasi-quantity
estimate/approximation -- quantity as quasi-quality

Every human person has an implicit wisdom; the difficulty is unfolding it.

Mt & Lk: Christology by causation
Mk: Christology by remotion
Jn: Christology by eminence

agak-agak -- v., to estimate/guess; adj, involving guesswork
agaration: estimation

When human beings reject a transcendent order, they gravitate to a totalitarian one.

being as showing itself to other being, being as showing other being to yet other being

Temporal measurement requires presence to a clock, and spatial to a boundary; presence is thus more fundamental.

Fully to understand oneself as a creature requires the concept of nothingness. (the 'distance between being and nothing')

"It was not nonexistent things that needed salvation, so that a command alone would have sufficed, but the human being, already in existence, who was corrupted and perishing." Athanasius

When we look at genuine and successful prediction, it always begins with retrodiction.

(1) Either infinite regress of causes or state.
(2) If infinite regress, there is something with unlimited power for effect, i.e., the series and what maintains it.
(3) If state, there is a first cause, with unlimited power for effect.

In artistic matters, the sacred becomes secularized and the secular becomes sacralized.

regulative, educative, and nobilitative right & wrong

Shared biological reasoning has the force, in reasoning, of mutual obligation.

It is important to the function of physical theory that its equations not be happenstance equations, that they are Box and not merely True. V=kP needs to be true not here and there, now and then, but true in all relevant possibilities. (The tricky thing, of course, is that we may not know the exact range of relevant possibilities -- studying this is one of the standard paths of scientific discovery.)

"It is amazing how much one can learn from just following the grammar of scientific utterances."Judea Pearl
"Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do."

One of the fundamental problems in modern politics is that honest attempts to correct evils lead easily to temptations to injustice.

'a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort'

grave goods as a sign of respect for persons as persons

Charles Elton and niche-convergence: "the tendency...for animals in widely separated parts of the world to draft into similar occupations" (Animal Ecology)

-- Achinstein on design-, use-, and service-functions

'Epistemic virtues' in analytic philosophy are generally just moral virtues in contexts of inquiry. (They are inquiring subjective parts of moral virtues.)

As we move from art -> prudence -> knowledge -> understanding -> wisdom, we move roughly from dealing with the less common to dealing with the more common. ('Roughly' because each higher can 'use' the lower quasi-instrumentally.)

All virtues have 'self-regarding' and 'other-regarding faces, btu the 'roles' of these faces differ according to the virtue.

Human beings know together, but even in knowing together do not know in precisely the same way.

We are all both persons and ghosts or echoes of the persons we are.

We always share some credit for the success of our inquiries with others.

Since intellect thinks allt hings, the presence of what is foreign to thinkign all things hinders and obstracts it; what appeared within would impede what was without.

Judicial review is powerful because it is in fact a notwithstanding power. However, judicial review is also the progressive explicit recognition by the courts of limtiations to their own authority.

It is not so much that truth must be tested and deepened over time as that we must be.

The oldest known extant statue is the Lion-Man of Hoblenstein-Stadel, carved out of ivory with flint knife between 35000 and 40000 years ago. It had to be reconstructed out of more than 200 fragments, 'glued' together with a reversible mix of beeswax, artificial wax, and chalk. It was found with bone tools, worked antlers, beads, and pendants. A similar but smaller image was found at Hohle Fels.

The earliest known extant humanish artifacts are knapped stone tools at Lomokwi 3 in Kenya, from about 3.3 million years ago, predating the genus Homo, and thus associated with either Kenyanthropus or Australopithecus. The next definite tools are Oldovan, beginning about 2.9 million years ago, and Acheulan (apparently a significant leap forward) about 1.7 million years ago & associated with Homo erectus, which is not only manipulating and hammering stone but creating hand axes. The Mousterian, beginning about 160000 years ago and associated with Neanderthals, shows a massive variety of tools using stone and antler with remarkable precision. The Aurignaian, beginning 43000 years ago, associated with Homo sapiens, expands this even further and includes jewelry, cave art, and figurines.

If I meet a lion in the prehistoric savannah and tell it I am no threat, is this religion? If I have made a figurine and show it to the lion to communicate the same, is this religion? If I get by unscathed and think the lion understood my message, is this religion? If the figurine represents an actual line and I talk to the figurine as if a friend, is this religion? If I like the figurine because I feel lionlike, is this religion? If I identify with the figurine, which I take to represent both me and the lions, is this religion? If I take it to represent lions generally, including myself, is this religion? If I wear and display the figurine whenever I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I ask the figurine to help me when I need to deal with lions, is this religion? If I share food and drink with the figurine to get on the good side of lions, is this religion? Anthropologically, these are all kinds of things that human beings do spontaneously in some form or other.

The use of human body lice, which are clothing-dependent, to date clothing suggests that humans wore clothes about 40000 to 170000 years ago; residues and deposits suggest about 120000 years ago. Clothing tools are known to have existed (sewing needles in particular) about 50000 years ago (associated with Denisovans).

The earliest definite evidence of controlled use of fire is at Wonderwork, from about 1 million years ago; any earlier & it becomes unclear whether it was really controlled. Yulambo Falls shows clear evidence of fire-use tools about 180000 years ago. The earliest extant fired pottery is from Xianrendong about 20000 years ago.

term, connection, direction

To find invariants, you need causal reasoning about what varies.

It is an error to think that because Euclidean diagrams can be visually inspected that they therefore work entirely by visual inspection.

"As strange as it may sound, the notion of probability raising cannot be expressed in terms of probabilities." Judea Pearl
"The proper way to rescue the probability-raising idea is with the do-operator; we can say that X causes Y if P(Y|do(X)) > P(Y)."

Qualities of the Heart

 Talent is a gift, the use we put it to depends on ourselves. Now talent of itself affords no guarantee of being well employed, rather it may tempt us to abuse the gift. The heart, on the contrary, inclines us to make a proper use of such talent as we may possess. More valuable therefore are the qualities of the heart, which give a right direction to our actions; virtue, in fact, is the only thing in man deserving of praise, inasmuch as it is his own. 

 Antonio Rosmini, Letters, Chiefly on Religious Subjects, pp. 599-600 (To Don Paolo Orsi, 27 Jan 1827).

Links of Note

 * The Death and Evolution of Education, at "The Lyceum Institute"

* Christian, Russek, & Griffiths, Resolving Feynman's restaurant problem reveals optimal solutions and human strategies

* Dario Compagno, Identifying Intended Effects with Causal Models (PDF)

* Charles Hughes Huff, Deuteronomy Is Not a Punishment, on the 'Hahn School' interpretation of Deuteronomy, at "in media mabul

* Michelle Van Loon, The Sure Way of Edith Stein, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Matthew Minerd, Ens Morale: The Scholastic Metaphysics of Morals, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Gregory B. Sadler, The Original Turing Test

* Jane Psmith reviews David Gelernter's 1939

* Sandrine Bergès, A philosophy of home, at "Aeon"

* Ryan Moulton, Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

* Rob Alspaugh, The Evolution of the Diablo Cosmology, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* There is good reason to think that two sermons by St. Augustine have been newly rediscovered.

* Cordithicus, St. Thomas Aquinas Was Not Obese

* Abraham Anderson, Rousseau, Hume, and the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (PDF)

Fortnightly Book, June 21

 A little behind here. I've been puzzling what to do for the next Fortnightly Book, and I've decided to do a re-read: Michael Flynn's Eifelheim. It is based on a novella originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1986, and the novel itself was published in 2006. So later this year (October for the novella, November for the novel) it will be forty years since the original novella and twenty since the novel itself was published, which seems to make this a good time to do it. 

This will be the third Flynn novel I've done for the Fortnighly Book, and I have in fact been intending to do it for some years now. As was the case with In the Country of the Blind, the novel has a frame at a different time; in that book the modern story was the primary tale, and the frame was the backstory. In this work, however, the main story is a medieval tale, and the frame is a modern frame about some of the consequences. 

In the fourteenth century, without any clear reason, the town of Eifelheim in the Black Forest seems simply to have vanished, and the entire area becomes associated with strange events in devilry. The disappearance alone could be explained by plague or something similar; but one would expect from other cases, given its location, that it would be resettled, and a general cause doesn't explain the specific associations. Something strange happened in Eifelheim in the fourteenth century, something so momentous that it will have significant effects even when it is rediscovered in our day: Aliens crashed nearby. But the story itself is more complicated....

A Poem Re-Draft and Two New Poem Drafts

Leaves Falling 

A man may love a woman, and a woman love a man,
so take my hand in yours, though we have no path or plan,
that we may dance in springtime when the flowers bloom in cheer,
and pirouette, with spinning to defy the turning year. 

Then after comes a summer, when we wear a splendid crown,
and then we weep in autumn when the leaves are falling down.
A love may be as pure as sky and burn with blazing light,
undoing every darkness and making day from night,

but we ourselves, like water, through our fingers slip away;
can love be everlasting when we have no strength to stay?
Beginnings come to endings for all things we love and know;
we weep while leaves are falling, then after, only snow. 

So take my hand in dancing, for the time will swiftly run,
but we may love together for a while in hope and sun;
perhaps it will give smiles that endure to our recall,
yea, even as our tears well up as leaves begin to fall.

Cloud of Unknowing

A very vasty shadow,
unknowing like to wings,
is spread across the heavens
within which star-suns sing.

All shadows in that shadow
are sleeping, rich with peace;
though they are waxing, waning,
it stays and does not cease.

The night is but a duskling,
though midnight is its hue,
its blackness not the blackness
of the dark beyond all view.

For in that darkness shadows
are blazing like to flame
and all that we think darkness
is darkness but in name.

The horror that you suffer,
the thing you do not know,
against that nightmost darkness
is but a glow-worm's glow.

We feel our way like blind men;
in shade we trip and fall;
but in darkness in its glory
we scarce can move at all,

so when it falls upon us,
we cannot do but kneel
and pray there as we waver
before the darkness real.

Christmas

The stars in the quiet
shine softly above
as wind in its silence
is whispering of love.
The world in its sorrow
may weep for the day,
but high in the heaven
the angels all say:
Fear not, fear not,
but bow down to pray,
and know him, and love him,
the babe born today.

The sins of the nations
rise high to the sky;
the heathen are raging
with violence and lie;
but look to your Savior,
who shows you the way,
and meet your salvation
as shepherds now say:
Fear not, fear not,
but bow down to pray,
and know him, and love him,
this bright Christmas Day.

Bai T. Moore, Murder in the Cassava Patch

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

From behind the rusty bars of a cell in Monrovia's South Beach Prison facing the Atlantic Ocean, I can now try to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country one bright Sunday morning in the year 1957. 

It rose over the discovery in a cassava patch, of the mutilated body of Tene, the daughter of a well known Dewoin family who live in Bendabli, just a stone's throw from Amina, the former Paramount Chief's town, twenty miles from Monrovia on the Monrovia-Bomi Hills motor road.

Summary: Gortokai, or Kai, for short, is in love with a beautiful local Bendabli girl, Tene. There is something about the relationship to begin with. While they are not physically related, Kai and Tene were raised as brother and sister, because Tene's parents took him in when he was young. When Kai decides he wants to marry Tene, some people think it wrong, but technically it is not against any of the rules; the primary problem is that Kai has no family, so he has no family to represent him in the negotiations over Tene's brideprice. He has to rely on Kema, Tene's sister.  Something is off about Kema's role in the matter, too; she is very obliging, and suspiciously so. Because Tene is so beautiful, and because she is, it would seem, not the sort of girl to lack for suitors, Kai is easily convinced by friends that he needs to take steps to make sure that Tene loves him, and so he goes to an old sand reader, Bleng, who confirms his suspicions and offers to provide him powerful love medicine to conjure her love. All of this is rolling, in a chain of events, to a bad end, the bad end with which the story opens.

Murder in the Cassava Patch is in a sense a story about a society falling apart -- rather ironically, because the story takes place during the period of William Tubman's national unification policies. But it is precisely this that is creating problems. Liberia is modernizing and becoming, slowly, wealthier, but the cracks in traditional Liberian like Bendabli are beginning to show. The younger folk don't take the old traditions quite seriously, but they have not come up with anything that actually replaces them, so there is a kind of lost quality to all the young people in the tale. But there is a more immediate factor, and that is drink. There is rum or palm wine on almost every page. Even Kai's name, Gortokai, means 'Brown-Jug Man'; he is literally named after the jugs in which Dutch gin was stored. The drinking is not purely social; it is extensive, and often associated with bad judgment. Alcohol can dull pain or boredom, but it also dulls your ability to pull yourself out of your problems. 

Murder in the Cassava Patch is a tale of scheming arising out of blind desire. One of the interesting questions throughout is how much we can trust anything Kai says; indeed, almost everyone in the novella seems to be dissembling in one way or another. Kai wants Tene; Tene wants out of Bendabli; Kema wants money. These goals lead them each to hide what they are actually doing, and in each case it ends up being counterproductive. Neither Bleng nor Kai's friends seem entirely above-board about anything. But Kai is our narrator, and at times there seem reasons to think that he is spinning parts of the story in his favor. The overall story at a glance can seem quite simple, but at every turn Moore has layered in psychological complexities until everything is a tangle. 

Favorite Passage:

Bleng placed the bag on the mat and began to unfasten it. I had my eyes glued on every movement he made. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the sand reader poured the contents of the bag into the mat. They were an assortment of quartz crystals, large yellow beads, smooth pebbles and some strange-looking beans. One of the pebbles rolled under my stool. I tried to reach for it. Bleng stopped me. 

 "No one is allowed to touch these sacred objects unless I give them permission. God gave them to me in a dream and taught me how to use them to help mankind. He told me not to let anyone touch them, else they would loose their magic power.“ 

 The contents of the bag were collected and tossed into the air and allowed to scatter on the mat again. Bleng viewed the objects with penetrating eyes for a minute or two without uttering a word. He broke the silence, by murmuring the word "Tene“ to himself several times, nodding in between. The old man cleared his throat and offered to tell me what he saw in the crystals. For some reason which I cannot explain, I turned pale and felt nervous. Bleng looked straight into my eyes; "young man,“ he uttered. I felt a sudden thump against my chest. It was my heart, beating like a machine. "Tene's heart is divided.“ The old man revealed.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Selecting and Shaping like the Gardener

 Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant merely to receive good laws, good food or good conditions, like a tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of liberty are those which speak of man as a creator. We use the word “make” about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man “makes his way” through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans. When a man “makes a friend,” he makes a man. And in the third case we talk of a man “making love,” as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the word, the artist.

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Free Man", A Miscellany of Men.]

Antisthenes

 A man said to [Antisthenes] one day, “Many people praise you.” “Why, what evil,” said he, “have I done?” 

When he turned the rent in his cloak outside, Socrates seeing it, said to him, “I see your vanity through the hole in your cloak.” 

On another occasion, the question was put to him by some one, as Phanias relates, in his treatise on the Philosophers of the Socratic school, what a man could do to show himself an honourable and a virtuous man; and he replied, “If you attend to those who understand the subject, and learn from them that you ought to shun the bad habits which you have.” 

Some one was praising luxury in his hearing, and he said, “May the children of my enemies be luxurious.” 

Seeing a young man place himself in a carefully studied attitude before a modeller, he said, “Tell me, if the brass could speak, on what would it pride itself?” And when the young man replied, “On its beauty.” “Are you not then,” said he, “ashamed to rejoice in the same thing as an inanimate piece of brass?” 

A young man from Pontus once promised to recollect him, if a vessel of salt fish arrived; and so he took him with him, and also an empty bag, and went to a woman who sold meal, and filled his sack and went away; and when the woman asked him to pay for it, he said, “The young man will pay you, when the vessel of salt fish comes home.”

[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book VI, "Life of Antisthenes".] 

Fortnightly Book Distribution (June 2026)

In 2018, I did an experiment in seeing how the Fortnightly Books were distributed, globally. What I decided on was the country of the author. That's not always useful for ancient authors -- there's no real sense in which St. Maximus Confessor is an Israeli author, despite having been born within the modern borders of Israel. It also runs into problems with British literature, because the authors who contribute to what we think of as British literature are born all over -- Kipling and T. H. White were born in India, J. R. R. Tolkien was born in South Africa, etc. One can make sense of Kipling as an Indian author, but it's literally just happenstance that Tolkien was born in South Africa, and it has nothing to do with his literary work. Nonetheless, birthplace of author (sometimes probable birthplace), as determined by modern borders, turned out to be the best way to do it, for the most part. I was thinking about it recently, so here I have updated it to the most recent Fortnightly Book, Flaubert's Sentimental Education.

Algeria

Augustine, Confessions

Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars


Austria

Douglas, South Wind

Canada

Davies, The Salterton Trilogy

China

Cao Xueqin & Gao E, A Dream of Red Mansions

Czech Republic

Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

Werfel, The Song of Bernadette


Denmark

Undset, Saint Catherine of Siena, Ida Elisabeth; Gunnar's Daughter, Kristin Lavransdatter; Saga of Saints

Egypt

--, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC


England

--, Beowulf

--, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo

--, The Complete Old English Poems

[Certain Members of the Detection Club: Chesterton, Whitechurch, Cole & Cole, Wade, Christie, Rhode, Kennedy, Sayers, Knox, Wills Crofts, Jepson, Dane, Berkeley], The Floating Admiral

Adams, Watership Down

Austen, Sanditon, The Watsons, Lady Susan, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park

Baring, The Coat Without a Seam, In My End Is My Beginning

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

Brontë (A), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Brontë (Ch), Villette

Burdekin, Swastika Night

Burney, Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla

Caldwell, Never Victorious, Never Defeated

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Christie, And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, Appointment with Death, 13 at Dinner, The Tuesday Club Murders, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!

Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Collins, The Moonstone

Cooper, The Dark Is Rising Sequence

Coward, Future Indefinite

Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, Hard Times; Bleak House; Sketches by Boz

Edgeworth, Belinda

Eliot, Romola

Gordon (Lord Byron), Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

Heyer, A Civil Contract

Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm, Year of the Griffin

Julian, The Showings

Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

King-Hall, The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765

Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained

Newman, Loss and Gain

Plunkett (Lord Dunsany), The King of Elfland's Daughter

Renault, Fire from Heaven

Sayers, Have His Carcase, The Man Born to Be King, Murder Must Advertise; Striding Folly

Scruton, Notes from Underground

Sewell, Black Beauty

Shakespeare, Histories

Shelley (M), Frankenstein

Shelley (P), Prometheus Unbound

Stapledon, Odd John; Starmaker; Sirius

Waugh, Edmund Campion, Brideshead Revisited, Helena

Wells, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds

Williams, Many Dimensions, War in Heaven, The Place of the Lion, Shadows of Ecstasy, The Greater Trumps, Descent into Heaven, All Hallows' Eve

Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe

Finland

Lönnrot, The Kalevala, The Kanteletar


France

--, The Quest of the Holy Grail

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Balzac, Eugenie Grandet, The Wild Ass's Skin, The Quest of the Absolute

Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques

Bédier, The Romance of Tristan & Iseult

Dumas, The Three Musketeers (with Maquet)

Du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson

Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education

Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine

Hugo, Les Misérables

Huysmans, The Damned; En Route; The Cathedral

Leblanc, Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar; Arsene Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes; The Hollow Needle; 813; The Crystal Stopper; The Confessions of Arsene Lupin; The Golden Triangle; The Secret of Sarek

Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

Rambaud, The Battle

Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac

Stendhal, The Red and the Black

Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Mysterious Island, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, The Kip Brothers, Travel Scholarships, The Self-Propelled Island, A Castle in Transylvania, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mighty Orinoco, Invasion of the Sea, Family Without a Name, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Paris in the Twentieth Century, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Keraban the Inflexible, The Steam House

Georgia

Strugatsky (A & B), Hard to Be a God, Monday Starts on Saturday, The Doomed City; Roadside Picnic; The Inhabited Island


Germany

--, The Nibelungenlied

Ende, The Neverending Story

Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; Faust

Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Schiller, William Tell

von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry

Greece

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

Euripides, Medea, Hippolytus; Helen

Homer, The Odyssey

Sophocles, The Theban Plays of Sophocles

Hungary

Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; I Will Repay, The Elusive Pimpernel, The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel

Iceland

--, Eyrbyggja Saga

--, Faroe-Islander Saga

--,  Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories

--, Njal's Saga

--, Orkneyinga Saga

--, Saga of the Volsungs

--, Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok

--, The Poetic Edda

--, The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki

--, The Saga of the Jomsvikings

--, The Vinland Sagas

Sturluson, Heimskringla, Egil's Saga, The Prose Edda


India

--, The Song Celestial

Kipling, Kim

White, The Once and Future King

Iraq

--, The Epic of Gilgamesh

Ireland

Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Shaw, Two Plays for Puritans, Man and Superman

Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Stoker, Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars

Wilde, The Plays of Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, Short Stories

Israel

Josephus, The Jewish War

Maximus the Confessor, The Life of the Virgin


Italy

Danta, Purgatorio

Eco, The Island of the Day Before, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

Manzoni, The Betrothed

Piccolomini, Secret Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope

Tomasi (di Lampedusa), The Leopard

Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters

Vida, Christiad


Japan

Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Endō, Silence

Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Sono, Watcher from the Shore

Jersey

Wace, The History of the Norman People; Roman de Brut

Nigeria

Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

Northern Ireland

Lewis, Till We Have Faces, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters

O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Norway

Asbjornson & Moe, The Complete Norwegian Fairy Tales

Hamsun, Growth of the Soil

Vesaas, The Ice Palace


Philippines

Joaquin, Cave and Shadows, May Day Eve and Other Stories

Poland

Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis


Russia

Asimov, The Foundation Series, The Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr, The End of Eternity, The Gods Themselves, The Complete Robot, Robot Dreams, Nightfall and Other Stories

Chekhov, Two Plays

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Rand, Anthem, Atlas Shrugged

Solzhenitsyn, August 1914, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Zamyatin, We


Scotland

Blind Harry, The Wallace

Brown, Magnus

Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

Graham, The Wind in the Willows

MacDonald, Lilith, Phantastes

MacInnes, North from Rome

Scott, Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley; Old Mortality

Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae, Kidnapped; Treasure Island

Taylor, Farewell to Valley Forge


South Africa

Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Roverandom, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales

South Korea

Kim Man-Jung, The Nine-Cloud Dream


Spain

Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada (St. Teresa), The Life, The Interior Castle

Unamuno y Jugo, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir


Switzerland

Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson

Syria

--, The Protevangelium of James


Turkey

Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi

Michael Psellos, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers

Morier, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan

Ukraine

Conrad, Nostromo


USA

Adler, Philosopher at Large

Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase 

Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions

Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin 

Brockden Brown, Wieland, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist

Brown, Storming Heaven, Shadows of Steel 

Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, Return of Tarzan 

Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop; My Ántonia, O Pioneers!

Cooper, The Deerslayer; The Spy 

Crichton, Jurassic Park 

Dodson, Away All Boats 

Donlon, Outpost of Freedom 

Douglas, Magnificent Obsession 

Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 

Ferber, Cimarron 

Flynn, In the Country of the Blind; In the Belly of the Whale

Gilman, Herland 

Goldman, The Princess Bride

Harte, Tales of the Gold Rush 

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Twice-Told Tales 

Haycox, The Adventurers 

Herbert, The Santaroga Barrier

Hodge (B), If You Can Get It

Hodge (C), Unstable Felicity

Howard, Conan the Barbarian

Howells, The Big Company Look 

Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hyman, No Time for Sergeants 

Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Klein, Triptych 

L'Amour, Sackett, The Sackett Brand; Hondo

Landey, Triptych 

L'Engle, The Time Quartet

London, The Sea-Wolf 

Lovecraft, The Whisperer in the Darkness 

Markle, The Teka Stone 

Marquand, Think Fast, Mr Moto 

Michener, Journey

McIntyre, The River Witch 

Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz 

Morrison, The Devious Way 

Mossiker, Napoleon and Josephine 

Nguyen, Things We Lost to the Water

Ormonde, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 

Powers, Declare 

Price, The Beloved Invader 

Roark, The Lady and the Deep Blue Sea 

Slaughter, Sword and Scalpel 

Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events 

Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Court, The Grapes of Wrath 

Stone, Love Is Eternal 

Straczynski, Demon Night 

Tarkington, Monsieur Beaucaire 

Terry, Tom Northway 

Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte, The Innocents Abroad 

Wangerin, The Book of the Dun Cow

Washington, Up from Slavery 

Wister, The Virginian


Vietnam

Nguyễn Du, The Song of Kiều

Wales

--, The Book of Taliesin

--, The Mabinogion

Unknown

First, Second, Third, and Fourth Maccabees

The Book of a Thousand Nights and A Night Volume I, Volume II