But I'm always partial to the illustration found on the titlepage of Swinbourne's Picture Logic, in part because of the caption:
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Lion and the Mouse, in Pictures
While I'm on the subject of fables, one of the things that's nice about Google Books is being able to browse the pictures in fable books and readers. I always like the one about the Lion and the Mouse the best. Here are some examples. You can click on the image to get to the relevant book.
But I'm always partial to the illustration found on the titlepage of Swinbourne's Picture Logic, in part because of the caption:
But I'm always partial to the illustration found on the titlepage of Swinbourne's Picture Logic, in part because of the caption:
Parturiunt Montes, Nascetur Ridiculus Mus
From Christopher Smart's metrical version of the fables of Phaedrus:
Phaedrus was a first century author known for Latinizing Aesop; this is one of Aesop's fables, a very short one:
Phaedrus's Latin version is fairly similar. This particular image is also found in Horace's Art of Poetry v, as part of his advice to writers to begin simply and not bombastically. It is from Horace that I take the title of the post; it's perhaps my favorite Latin proverb, and finds handy application everywhere. The mountains are in labor; a ridiculous mouse will be born!
XVIII. THE MOUNTAIN IN LABOR.
The Mountain labor'd, groaning loud,
On which a num'rous gaping crowd
Of noodles came to see the sight,
When, lo ! a mouse was brought to light!
This tale 's for men of swagg'ring cast,
Whose threats, voluminous and vast,
With all their verse and all their prose,
Can make but little on't, God knows.
Phaedrus was a first century author known for Latinizing Aesop; this is one of Aesop's fables, a very short one:
A Mountain was once greatly agitated. Loud groans and noises were heard, and crowds of people came from all parts to see what was the matter. While they were assembled in anxious expectation of some terrible calamity, out came a Mouse.
Phaedrus's Latin version is fairly similar. This particular image is also found in Horace's Art of Poetry v, as part of his advice to writers to begin simply and not bombastically. It is from Horace that I take the title of the post; it's perhaps my favorite Latin proverb, and finds handy application everywhere. The mountains are in labor; a ridiculous mouse will be born!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Reading and the Coxcomb
Reading is the most rational employment, if people seek food for the understanding, and do not read merely to remember words; or with a view to quote celebrated authors, and retail sentiments they do not understand or feel. Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart, though some, by them, "are made coxcombs whom nature meant for fools."
Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, p. 49. The coxcombs remark is an allusion to Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism":
Yet, if we look more closely, we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind:
Nature affords at least a glimm'ring light,
The lines, though touched but faintly, are drawn right;
But as the slightest sketch, if justly traced,
Is by ill-colouring but the more disgraced,
So by false learning is good sense defaced:
Some are bewildered in the maze of schools,
And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.
That is, learning can make people with a little sense but nothing more even worse, by making them people with less than that little sense who give themselves airs of elegance and wit.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Notes and Links
* An SEP article on GEM Anscombe is up. I think she actually gets shortchanged in parts; but it does get the basics right.
There's also a new article on Plato's Myths and another on Nicole Oresme.
* Martin Luther and being a theologian
* A fragment by C. S. Lewis of what was intended to be a collaborative book between Lewis and Tolkien called Language and Human Nature (but which, despite a publication date being announced, was never actually completed) has been found. It's too bad the collaboration fell through; that would be a book to read.
* Jonah Lehrer has a brief but good article on neuroaesthetics at Psychology Today, and some excellent comments on it at his blog.
* Catarina Dutilh Novaes has been pulling together a list of women who do work in philosophical logic (often thought of as a man's field). It really does represent an impressive amount of work in the field (obviously there are a few big names on the list, but Novaes herself is stunningly talented -- everything I've read by her has been extraordinarily good). Some of the names I've come across before (like Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Carrie Jenkins, and of course a number of others), and some I haven't yet but will certainly look into.
* The Everyday Thomist discusses Aquinas on Job and divine providence
* Do you know who was technically bishop of the moon under canon law during the moon landings?
* David Hart discusses The Little Prince and gnosticism.
* While he doesn't seem to have originated the idea of a fallacy of false analogy, the point at which the idea of such a fallacy seems to have entered into general awareness and become part of our philosophical folklore seems to have been A System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill. On Mill's view there is a legitimate form of analogical inference, which is basically nothing other than an inductive argument to raise the probability that this or that cause is operative in a certain kind of phenomena. (Which is almost certainly why a number of late nineteenth century authors treat false analogy as a lapse in causal reasoning, non tali causa pro tali causa.) In other words, analogy is a form of generalization; and false analogy is a form of bad generalization. The bare analogical inference, then, is not enough; you need in addition a reason to think that it takes into account all the relevant conditions. It is because of this that his description of false analogy almost makes it sound like all analogy is out the window:
Thus all analogical inference is fallacious unless there is "evidence to connect the two circumstances by way of causation." This is the probable reason why all discussions of the supposed fallacy are so confused: they are the end result of trying to take Mill's very stringent strictures on analogy (which follow from certain features of his own view of generalization) and loosening them so that they are more lenient toward analogical inferences themselves. The result is incoherence: you can admit any analogy on the newer accounts, but also reject any analogy, because there is no underlying account of reasoning.
* Sherry's Hundred Hymns List continues:
#56 Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
#55 My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less
#54 Holy God, We Praise Thy Name
#53 All Glory, Laud, and Honor
* Currently watching:
Game Theory with Ben Polak
Politics and Strategy with Kathleen Bawn
There's also a new article on Plato's Myths and another on Nicole Oresme.
* Martin Luther and being a theologian
* A fragment by C. S. Lewis of what was intended to be a collaborative book between Lewis and Tolkien called Language and Human Nature (but which, despite a publication date being announced, was never actually completed) has been found. It's too bad the collaboration fell through; that would be a book to read.
* Jonah Lehrer has a brief but good article on neuroaesthetics at Psychology Today, and some excellent comments on it at his blog.
* Catarina Dutilh Novaes has been pulling together a list of women who do work in philosophical logic (often thought of as a man's field). It really does represent an impressive amount of work in the field (obviously there are a few big names on the list, but Novaes herself is stunningly talented -- everything I've read by her has been extraordinarily good). Some of the names I've come across before (like Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh, Carrie Jenkins, and of course a number of others), and some I haven't yet but will certainly look into.
* The Everyday Thomist discusses Aquinas on Job and divine providence
* Do you know who was technically bishop of the moon under canon law during the moon landings?
* David Hart discusses The Little Prince and gnosticism.
* While he doesn't seem to have originated the idea of a fallacy of false analogy, the point at which the idea of such a fallacy seems to have entered into general awareness and become part of our philosophical folklore seems to have been A System of Logic, by John Stuart Mill. On Mill's view there is a legitimate form of analogical inference, which is basically nothing other than an inductive argument to raise the probability that this or that cause is operative in a certain kind of phenomena. (Which is almost certainly why a number of late nineteenth century authors treat false analogy as a lapse in causal reasoning, non tali causa pro tali causa.) In other words, analogy is a form of generalization; and false analogy is a form of bad generalization. The bare analogical inference, then, is not enough; you need in addition a reason to think that it takes into account all the relevant conditions. It is because of this that his description of false analogy almost makes it sound like all analogy is out the window:
There is another, more properly deserving the name of fallacy, namely, when resemblance in one point is inferred from resemblance in another point, though there is not only no evidence to connect the two circumstances by way of causation, but the evidence tends positively to disconnect them. This is properly the Fallacy of False Analogies.
Thus all analogical inference is fallacious unless there is "evidence to connect the two circumstances by way of causation." This is the probable reason why all discussions of the supposed fallacy are so confused: they are the end result of trying to take Mill's very stringent strictures on analogy (which follow from certain features of his own view of generalization) and loosening them so that they are more lenient toward analogical inferences themselves. The result is incoherence: you can admit any analogy on the newer accounts, but also reject any analogy, because there is no underlying account of reasoning.
* Sherry's Hundred Hymns List continues:
#56 Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
#55 My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less
#54 Holy God, We Praise Thy Name
#53 All Glory, Laud, and Honor
* Currently watching:
Game Theory with Ben Polak
Politics and Strategy with Kathleen Bawn
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A Natural Superabundance
When a philosopher reflects on poetry, he observes first of all that poetry lies in the line of art or of creative activity. And art as such does not have as its end knowledge, but producing or creating -- not after the fashion of nature, as radium produces helium or as a living being begets a living being, but rather in a mode proper to spirit and freedom: the point here is the outward productivity of the intellect.
The intellect is by its nature expressive; it produces inwardly the mental words or concepts which are for it means of knowing, but which are also effects of its spiritual abundance, expressions or internal manifestations of what it knows.
And by a natural superabundance, the intellect tends of itself to give expression and manifestation outwardly -- to sing. It flows not only into its concepts or internal words, it demands that it overflow into a work: a natural desire which, since it seeks to cross the frontiers of the intellect itself, cannot be realized except by means of the movement of the will and the appetitive powers, which thus enable the intellect to go beyond itself according to its natural desire, and which thereby determine in an entirely general way the original dynamism of art's activity.
[Jacques Maritain, "Poetic Experience"]
The intellect is by its nature expressive; it produces inwardly the mental words or concepts which are for it means of knowing, but which are also effects of its spiritual abundance, expressions or internal manifestations of what it knows.
And by a natural superabundance, the intellect tends of itself to give expression and manifestation outwardly -- to sing. It flows not only into its concepts or internal words, it demands that it overflow into a work: a natural desire which, since it seeks to cross the frontiers of the intellect itself, cannot be realized except by means of the movement of the will and the appetitive powers, which thus enable the intellect to go beyond itself according to its natural desire, and which thereby determine in an entirely general way the original dynamism of art's activity.
[Jacques Maritain, "Poetic Experience"]
Inadvertent Humor from Ryle
I love this sentence:
The author is Gilbert Ryle, in his article "Ordinary Language". Can you guess what the "important difference" between the two groups is supposed to be?
There is an important difference between the employment of boomerangs, bows and arrows, and canoe-paddles on the one hand and the employment of tennis rackets, tug-of-war ropes, coins, stamps and words on the other hand.
The author is Gilbert Ryle, in his article "Ordinary Language". Can you guess what the "important difference" between the two groups is supposed to be?
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