At White Sulphur Springs
In the darkness and cold,
though the winds rise to wail,
we will stand, and our hearts
shall not fail.
From the heat of the earth
we were born, we were made,
with a flame in our minds
like a blade.
Though the ice-shackles form,
though the gales come in force,
we will draw endless warmth
from our source.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Links of Note
* For the obvious reasons, the next two weeks will be a slow time around here.
* Through Make-A-Wish a sick Belgian boy, who had grown up hearing his grandfather's stories about the American contribution to the liberation of Belgium from the Nazis, was able to spend some time getting a small taste of what it is like to train as an American soldier.
* At the IEP, Erik Hansen has an article up on Immanuel Kant's account of radical evil.
* 3AM interviews John Haldane.
* A portion of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin, a small Anglican order of nuns, is becoming Catholic as part of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. The CSMV was established in the nineteenth century by William John Butler, who was a minor (but very active) participant in the Oxford Movement. Butler would be disappointed; he regarded loyalty to the Church of England as one of the foundational principles of the community. But in this the CSMV, a tiny portion of the Oxford Movement that has in a sense continued to the present day, has exhibited the usual features of the Oxford Movement itself, namely, the split into those whose Anglo-catholicism tended to Rome and those whose Anglo-catholicism did not.
* Philosopher's Carnival 146 is up at "Talking Philosophy". I didn't find any of the posts particularly interesting, but I thought the format of the carnival itself was.
* Matthew Flannagan discusses Peter Singer's arguments on infanticide:
Part One
Part Two
* John Wilkins on Classification and the periodic table
* I mentioned the Great Maple Syrup Heist a few months ago, and now it looks like a break has finally been made in the case.
* An interesting discussion of John Quijada's artificial language, Ithkuil. Quijada's Ithkuil website is also interesting.
* Through Make-A-Wish a sick Belgian boy, who had grown up hearing his grandfather's stories about the American contribution to the liberation of Belgium from the Nazis, was able to spend some time getting a small taste of what it is like to train as an American soldier.
* At the IEP, Erik Hansen has an article up on Immanuel Kant's account of radical evil.
* 3AM interviews John Haldane.
* A portion of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin, a small Anglican order of nuns, is becoming Catholic as part of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. The CSMV was established in the nineteenth century by William John Butler, who was a minor (but very active) participant in the Oxford Movement. Butler would be disappointed; he regarded loyalty to the Church of England as one of the foundational principles of the community. But in this the CSMV, a tiny portion of the Oxford Movement that has in a sense continued to the present day, has exhibited the usual features of the Oxford Movement itself, namely, the split into those whose Anglo-catholicism tended to Rome and those whose Anglo-catholicism did not.
* Philosopher's Carnival 146 is up at "Talking Philosophy". I didn't find any of the posts particularly interesting, but I thought the format of the carnival itself was.
* Matthew Flannagan discusses Peter Singer's arguments on infanticide:
Part One
Part Two
* John Wilkins on Classification and the periodic table
* I mentioned the Great Maple Syrup Heist a few months ago, and now it looks like a break has finally been made in the case.
* An interesting discussion of John Quijada's artificial language, Ithkuil. Quijada's Ithkuil website is also interesting.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Give Me My Freedom and the Burning Stars
The Prisoner
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
I lash and writhe against my prison bars,
And watch with sullen eyes the gaping crowd.
Give me my freedom and the burning stars,
The hollow sky, and crags of moonlit cloud!
Once I might range across the trackless plain,
And roar with joy, until the desert air
And wide horizons echoed it amain:
I feared no foe, for I was monarch there!
I saw my shadow on the parching sand,
When the hot sun had kissed the mountain's rim;
And when the moon rose o'er long wastes of land,
I sought my prey by some still river's brim;
And with me my fierce love, my tawny mate,
Meet mother of strong cubs, meet lion's bride.
We made our lair in regions desolate,
The solitude of wildernesses wide.
They slew her...and I watched the life-blood flow
From her torn flank, and her proud eyes grow dim:
I howled her dirge above her while the low,
Red moon clomb up the black horizon's rim.
Me, they entrapped...cowards! They did not dare
To fight as brave men do, without disguise,
And face my unleashed rage! The hidden snare
Was their device to win an untamed prize.
I am a captive...not for me the vast,
White dome of sky above the blinding sand,
The sweeping rapture of the desert blast
Across long ranges of untrodden land!
Yet still they fetter not my thought! In dreams
I, desert-born, tread the hot wastes once more,
Quench my deep thirst in cool, untainted streams,
And shake the darkness with my kingly roar!
At this point in the grading, which is going more slowly than usual and seems to be compounded with some kind of bug or weird allergy doing evil things to my sinuses, I need something rousing. Lucy Maud Montgomery is, of course, Prince Edward Island's greatest literary figure. She is most famous for Anne of Green Gables, but she also wrote a considerable amount of high-quality poetry. While the conceit of this poem is a common one, the execution is quite exquisite -- it would be difficult to do better than she has done here.
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Njal's Saga
Introduction
Opening Passage:
Summary: The Saga of the Burning of Njal starts out quietly enough, with marriage and fortune-making, among the farmers and freeholders of southwestern Iceland. It's a community in which everyone knows everyone, at least by reputation. The tight-knittedness is emphasized by the genealogies that run through the work: a large number of these people are related, whether by blood, or by marriage, or by foster-sonship. Over a generation or two the society grows more and more out of control as bad blood mixes with bad blood. Decent men and women attempt to fix the damage, but it spins out until the community is utterly and violently divided.
What makes it tragic, of course, is that all the people involved are ordinary people. Yes, they are very honor-conscious in a very honor-oriented culture, but many of them go out of their way to keep the peace. Yes, there are people who are less than virtuous, but even if we look at the worst of these, people like Thjostolf and Mord Valgardsson, are not what we would think of as atrociously wicked: Mord is no more than a greedy and ambitious man envious of the successes of other people, and Thjostolf is a thug who, while lacking much sense of justice, has very little influence on the society around him and nonetheless had a certain measure of loyalty to a small handful of the people around him. Much of the actual chaos is due to decent and honorable people trying to keep the peace to the extent they can, who nonetheless soon find themselves pushed just a little too far over lines they cannot ignore, or who, forced to rely on mere technicalities of law, end up weakening the bonds of the community as they put out fire after fire.
Until, of course, the literal fire, in which the family of Njal is burned alive. Njal, his wife Bergthora, and their young grandson Thord die in bed, accepting their fate. Njal's sons die trying to escape. Only Kari Solmundarson, Njal's son-in-law, escapes. The law, which is the central feature of Icelandic life, is soon seen to be completely impotent for restoring balance and justice as both sides, the Burners and their opponents, manage to tangle each other up in mere legalities that only stir up even more anger. One of the most telling signs of deterioration is that early on Mord Valgardsson suggests burning someone alive in their house at one point, and everyone reacts with shock at the suggestion; and yet, of course, this is precisely what ends up happening with Njal, and the ones who do it try to get out of the consequences by complicated court maneuvers.
It would be easy to overlook the degree to which we are like them. It is easy to focus on their sensitivity to matters of honor, or the peculiarities of their justice system, and treat them as an oddity. But Njal's Saga is not a story of men so caught up in their honor that they nearly destroy themselves; it is a story of men, deeply sensitive to their honor, who nonetheless repeatedly swallow insult and humiliation and even the killing of family members, all in the hope of peace -- but repeatedly find that it is never enough. Likewise, we with our pseudo-populist sensibilities, might be inclined to think that it is absurd that they all go around killing each other in retaliation and getting away with paying settlements, rather than leaving it to a legitimate government. But such an attitude would overlook the key point of this very Scandinavian way of handling things: they were the government. They made the laws. They kept the laws. They enforced the laws. And most importantly, when they enforced the laws, they always held themselves accountable to the law in the way they did it. This is so engrained in their thinking that even at the height of bloodshed, it never occurs to a single person simply to ignore the law: everything must be brought back to the law in some way, somehow. Even the outlaws respect the law. (There is a very real sense in which Njal's Saga is a legal drama.) And we are not really in a position to be high and mighty: you have only to look at a list of race riots in the past century to see stories, sometimes brutally similar, of decent men and women bearing with irritation, hindrance, insult, killing, trying to keep the peace, until one day things just snap. And the thing of it is, everyone handled it better than we would handle similar situations. As I mentioned before, there are no real villains in the piece. Not everyone is decent, but most are, and all the major players are reasonable. Flosi Thordarson, who is guilty of the burning of Njal, was not an evil man. Kari, who starts systematically hunting down the Burners, never ceases to be reasonable even while refusing to stop. Everyone right to the end can be made to see the arguments on the other side, and, sometimes, to bend because of them.
In a sense, the story of the events on and around the Ranga River are a lesson in the fact that nothing but humility can hold a deliberative society of free people together. The story is split into two parts, the pagan era and the Christian era; in the pagan era what keeps the peace is people swallowing their pride, and in the Christian era what finally brings peace back is people like Hall of Sida actively giving up the idea of heroic response, actively accepting the possibility of dishonor and shame, simply to save lives. Flosi does not take vengeance for Kari's acts of vengeance. He goes on pilgrimage to get absolution from the Pope. And when he comes back, he extends hospitality to Kari and his men when they need it, and thus the breach is healed. Humility alone restores what honor and law cannot.
One thing I haven't noted is the humor. It is very dry, very quiet, but it runs through the entire work, and is a great contributor to the fact that very few characters in the saga are flat. All the major characters are seen from many different angles, and with the kind of realism that is only possible with a sense of humor. And I would suggest, in fact, that the realism of character in the saga often exceeds the realism of many modern novels and historical works for precisely this reason: the anonymous author has the humorous interest (and, occasionally, quiet exasperation) for the people he is talking about that people usually have for close friends and members of their family -- which novelists only rarely for their characters at all, and historians only occasionally for the subjects of their study.
Favorite Passage:
Recommendation: An excellent and gripping history, somewhat fictionalized, about a communal tragedy that never loses sight of real, well-rounded characters. Highly recommended.
Opening Passage:
There was a man called Mord Fiddle, who was the son of Sighvat the Red. Mord was a powerful chieftain, and lived at Voll in the Rangriver Plains. He was also a very experienced lawyer --- so skilful, indeed, that no judgment was held to be valid unless he had taken part in it. He had an only daughter called Unn; she was a good-looking, refined, capable girl, and was considered the best match in the Rangriver Plains. (p. 39)
Summary: The Saga of the Burning of Njal starts out quietly enough, with marriage and fortune-making, among the farmers and freeholders of southwestern Iceland. It's a community in which everyone knows everyone, at least by reputation. The tight-knittedness is emphasized by the genealogies that run through the work: a large number of these people are related, whether by blood, or by marriage, or by foster-sonship. Over a generation or two the society grows more and more out of control as bad blood mixes with bad blood. Decent men and women attempt to fix the damage, but it spins out until the community is utterly and violently divided.
What makes it tragic, of course, is that all the people involved are ordinary people. Yes, they are very honor-conscious in a very honor-oriented culture, but many of them go out of their way to keep the peace. Yes, there are people who are less than virtuous, but even if we look at the worst of these, people like Thjostolf and Mord Valgardsson, are not what we would think of as atrociously wicked: Mord is no more than a greedy and ambitious man envious of the successes of other people, and Thjostolf is a thug who, while lacking much sense of justice, has very little influence on the society around him and nonetheless had a certain measure of loyalty to a small handful of the people around him. Much of the actual chaos is due to decent and honorable people trying to keep the peace to the extent they can, who nonetheless soon find themselves pushed just a little too far over lines they cannot ignore, or who, forced to rely on mere technicalities of law, end up weakening the bonds of the community as they put out fire after fire.
Until, of course, the literal fire, in which the family of Njal is burned alive. Njal, his wife Bergthora, and their young grandson Thord die in bed, accepting their fate. Njal's sons die trying to escape. Only Kari Solmundarson, Njal's son-in-law, escapes. The law, which is the central feature of Icelandic life, is soon seen to be completely impotent for restoring balance and justice as both sides, the Burners and their opponents, manage to tangle each other up in mere legalities that only stir up even more anger. One of the most telling signs of deterioration is that early on Mord Valgardsson suggests burning someone alive in their house at one point, and everyone reacts with shock at the suggestion; and yet, of course, this is precisely what ends up happening with Njal, and the ones who do it try to get out of the consequences by complicated court maneuvers.
It would be easy to overlook the degree to which we are like them. It is easy to focus on their sensitivity to matters of honor, or the peculiarities of their justice system, and treat them as an oddity. But Njal's Saga is not a story of men so caught up in their honor that they nearly destroy themselves; it is a story of men, deeply sensitive to their honor, who nonetheless repeatedly swallow insult and humiliation and even the killing of family members, all in the hope of peace -- but repeatedly find that it is never enough. Likewise, we with our pseudo-populist sensibilities, might be inclined to think that it is absurd that they all go around killing each other in retaliation and getting away with paying settlements, rather than leaving it to a legitimate government. But such an attitude would overlook the key point of this very Scandinavian way of handling things: they were the government. They made the laws. They kept the laws. They enforced the laws. And most importantly, when they enforced the laws, they always held themselves accountable to the law in the way they did it. This is so engrained in their thinking that even at the height of bloodshed, it never occurs to a single person simply to ignore the law: everything must be brought back to the law in some way, somehow. Even the outlaws respect the law. (There is a very real sense in which Njal's Saga is a legal drama.) And we are not really in a position to be high and mighty: you have only to look at a list of race riots in the past century to see stories, sometimes brutally similar, of decent men and women bearing with irritation, hindrance, insult, killing, trying to keep the peace, until one day things just snap. And the thing of it is, everyone handled it better than we would handle similar situations. As I mentioned before, there are no real villains in the piece. Not everyone is decent, but most are, and all the major players are reasonable. Flosi Thordarson, who is guilty of the burning of Njal, was not an evil man. Kari, who starts systematically hunting down the Burners, never ceases to be reasonable even while refusing to stop. Everyone right to the end can be made to see the arguments on the other side, and, sometimes, to bend because of them.
In a sense, the story of the events on and around the Ranga River are a lesson in the fact that nothing but humility can hold a deliberative society of free people together. The story is split into two parts, the pagan era and the Christian era; in the pagan era what keeps the peace is people swallowing their pride, and in the Christian era what finally brings peace back is people like Hall of Sida actively giving up the idea of heroic response, actively accepting the possibility of dishonor and shame, simply to save lives. Flosi does not take vengeance for Kari's acts of vengeance. He goes on pilgrimage to get absolution from the Pope. And when he comes back, he extends hospitality to Kari and his men when they need it, and thus the breach is healed. Humility alone restores what honor and law cannot.
One thing I haven't noted is the humor. It is very dry, very quiet, but it runs through the entire work, and is a great contributor to the fact that very few characters in the saga are flat. All the major characters are seen from many different angles, and with the kind of realism that is only possible with a sense of humor. And I would suggest, in fact, that the realism of character in the saga often exceeds the realism of many modern novels and historical works for precisely this reason: the anonymous author has the humorous interest (and, occasionally, quiet exasperation) for the people he is talking about that people usually have for close friends and members of their family -- which novelists only rarely for their characters at all, and historians only occasionally for the subjects of their study.
Favorite Passage:
Next day both sides went to the Law Rock, and both of them, Christians and heathens, named witnesses and renounced their community of laws. The Law Rock was in such uproar as a result that no one could make himself heard. People then dispersed, and everyone thought the situation looked very ugly.
The Christians chose Hall of Sida to be their Law-Speaker; but Hall went to see Thorgeir the Priest of Ljosawater, and gave him three marks of silver to proclaim what the law should be. It was taking a risk, for Thorgeir was a heathen.
For a whole day, Thorgeir lay with a cloak over his head. Noone spoke to him. Next day, people gathered at the Law Rock.
Thorgeir asked to be heard, and said, "It seems to me that an impossible situation arises if we do not all have one and the same law. If the laws are divided the peace will be divided, and we cannot tolerate that. Now, therefore, I want to ask heathens and Christians whether they will accept the law which I am going to proclaim." (p. 225)
Recommendation: An excellent and gripping history, somewhat fictionalized, about a communal tragedy that never loses sight of real, well-rounded characters. Highly recommended.
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Peek and Peer
Solitaire
by Amy Lowell
When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.
It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,
And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples,
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.
It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
How light and laughing my mind is,
When all the good folk have put out their bed-room candles,
And the city is still!
Like most of Lowell's poetry, and most of Imagist poetry generally, it overstrains, but this one does what Imagist poems often do best: precisely marking out a mood with striking images.
Mereotopology and Lists
Here's a list:
Dog
Cat
Cow
And another list:
Wolf
Dog
Fox
One way we could compare these is by taking 'Dog' as a shared part. The lists overlap at dog. We could call this a mereological approach to lists.
A different way is that we could say, "No, 'Dog' is not a shared part, because they are different lists, not some kind of branching list with 'Dog' at the crossways. But the lists are connected at 'Dog'." We could call this a topological approach to lists.
This bifurcation occurs in lists of all kinds. Two similar pictures, for instance, could be compared in mereological terms (they share features) or in topological terms (their features are corresponding, whether you wish to regard them as actually shared or not). (If it sounds odd to call pictures 'lists', think of a computer screen, which consists of rows of pixels. A picture of this sort would be a list of pixel-patterns according to row.) In practical terms the mereological and the topological approaches are equivalent: when similarity is involved, you can always treat it mereologically as a sort of overlap or part-sharing or topologically as a sort of connection or correspondence. Connection is usually treated as weaker than overlap, which it is logically, since overlapping things always connect, but not vice versa. But in the context of lists, they are closely connected to the same thing, the fact that different lists can have the same items, and therefore are (nonsynonomous) ways of talking about the same thing. The mereological approach just (as a matter of structure) emphasizes the sameness, while the topological approach (again as a matter of structure) de-emphasizes it, and these lists are simple enough that it doesn't matter much which you do.
But there are kinds of lists in which one would want to be able to do both. Take this list.
We have lists within lists, and we want to be able to talk mereologically (the [Collie, Great Dane] list is part of the [Dog, Cat, Pets Jack Owns] list) and topologically (the [Collie, Great Dane] list is connected to the [Collie, Goldfish, Egyptian Mao] list).
The mereotopology of lists has broader implications than just lists in our ordinary sense, because modal logics can all be treated as the logics governing different kinds of relations among different kinds of lists. We can distinguish source lists and target lists (not necessarily mutually exclusive); and modal logic would be an account of what you can determine about target lists from source lists. Suppose that [p] is Box-p (It is necessary that p, It is required that p, It is always true that p, etc.) and <p> is Diamond-p (It is possible that p, It is is permissible that p, It is sometimes true that p, etc.). Then our source list says [p], we can conclude that if there are any target lists, they have p as an item. Likewise, if our source list says <p>, then we can conclude that there is some target list that has p as an item. Given this, however, we can say that, for any source list, [p] indicates that any list connected to the source list (in the relevant way) overlaps with the source list at p, and <p> indicates that some list overlaps with the source list at p and therefore is connected to the source list (in the relevant way).
Dog
Cat
Cow
And another list:
Wolf
Dog
Fox
One way we could compare these is by taking 'Dog' as a shared part. The lists overlap at dog. We could call this a mereological approach to lists.
A different way is that we could say, "No, 'Dog' is not a shared part, because they are different lists, not some kind of branching list with 'Dog' at the crossways. But the lists are connected at 'Dog'." We could call this a topological approach to lists.
This bifurcation occurs in lists of all kinds. Two similar pictures, for instance, could be compared in mereological terms (they share features) or in topological terms (their features are corresponding, whether you wish to regard them as actually shared or not). (If it sounds odd to call pictures 'lists', think of a computer screen, which consists of rows of pixels. A picture of this sort would be a list of pixel-patterns according to row.) In practical terms the mereological and the topological approaches are equivalent: when similarity is involved, you can always treat it mereologically as a sort of overlap or part-sharing or topologically as a sort of connection or correspondence. Connection is usually treated as weaker than overlap, which it is logically, since overlapping things always connect, but not vice versa. But in the context of lists, they are closely connected to the same thing, the fact that different lists can have the same items, and therefore are (nonsynonomous) ways of talking about the same thing. The mereological approach just (as a matter of structure) emphasizes the sameness, while the topological approach (again as a matter of structure) de-emphasizes it, and these lists are simple enough that it doesn't matter much which you do.
But there are kinds of lists in which one would want to be able to do both. Take this list.
- Dog
- Collie
- Great Dane
- Cat
- Egyptian Mao
- Ragdoll
- Pets Jack Owns
- Collie
- Goldfish
- Egyptian Mao
We have lists within lists, and we want to be able to talk mereologically (the [Collie, Great Dane] list is part of the [Dog, Cat, Pets Jack Owns] list) and topologically (the [Collie, Great Dane] list is connected to the [Collie, Goldfish, Egyptian Mao] list).
The mereotopology of lists has broader implications than just lists in our ordinary sense, because modal logics can all be treated as the logics governing different kinds of relations among different kinds of lists. We can distinguish source lists and target lists (not necessarily mutually exclusive); and modal logic would be an account of what you can determine about target lists from source lists. Suppose that [p] is Box-p (It is necessary that p, It is required that p, It is always true that p, etc.) and <p> is Diamond-p (It is possible that p, It is is permissible that p, It is sometimes true that p, etc.). Then our source list says [p], we can conclude that if there are any target lists, they have p as an item. Likewise, if our source list says <p>, then we can conclude that there is some target list that has p as an item. Given this, however, we can say that, for any source list, [p] indicates that any list connected to the source list (in the relevant way) overlaps with the source list at p, and <p> indicates that some list overlaps with the source list at p and therefore is connected to the source list (in the relevant way).
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Grading, Grading, Grading, Grading
It's the end of term, which means I have Ethics exams to grade, as well as both history of philosophy and cumulative quizzes to grade for my Intro course, and, as if that were not enough, extra credit logic modules and feminist philosophy assignments, and late major projects on top of that, so for obvious reasons things will be slow the next few days, although there will probably be a few things already in the pipeline coming out here and there.
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