"Language is about the world— we use it to communicate
about things. So we must ask what this 'aboutness' is:
what is it and how does it work? That is, how does language
manage to hook up with reality?"

— Colin McGinn in Philosophy of Language :
The Classics Explained , MIT Press, Jan. 16, 2015, 
as quoted by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
in The New York Review of Books , Oct. 8, 2015

See also a Harvard Crimson  review of another book by McGinn.

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell
and count myself a king of infinite space,
were it not that I have bad dreams." — Hamlet

The New York Review of Books , in a review
of two books on video games today, quotes an author
who says that the Vikings believed the sky to be 
“the blue skull of a giant.”

See as well posts tagged The Nutshell.

The current issue (dated Oct. 8, 2015) of
The New York Review of Books  has two
(at least) items related to philosophy —

• "Was Plato ‘Churlish’?", a letter on Joyce Carol Oates's
  recent NYRB essay, and a response by Oates
   
• "What Philosophers Really Know," a review by
  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein of a new book
  by Colin McGinn, Philosophy of Language:
  The Classics Explained

See also Backstory, a Log24 post of Nov. 22, 2010:

"He said, 'I wrote a piece of code
 that they just can’t seem to do without.'
 He was a symbolic logician.
 That was his career…."

John Berryman in The New York Review of Books :

FEBRUARY 1, 1963 • VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1

"Now he has become, abrupt, an industry.
Professional-Friends-Of-Robert-Frost all over
open their mouths
while the quirky medium of so many truths
is quiet. Let’s all be quiet. Let’s listen:
while he begins to talk with Horace."

From "Elegy to the Void," by Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books , issue dated Nov. 24, 2011—

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote in The White Album . Blue Nights  is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale. The book has, instead, an incantatory quality: it is a beautiful, soaring, polyphonic eulogy, a beseeching prayer that is sung even as one knows the answer to one’s plea, and that answer is: No.

Blue Nights  is a sequel of sorts to The Year of Magical Thinking , Didion's story of the year following the death on December 30th, 2003, of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.

Related material:

For some context, see

1. Cosmic Banditos in this journal,
2. the Fall 1997 newsletter of the Institute for Advanced Study,
3. and Oppenheimer's Aria.

For a different link to that aria, see a journal entry dated December 28, 2003.
(Click link, scroll down.)

In memory of A. Whitney Ellsworth, first publisher of
The New York Review of Books , who died at 75
on Saturday—

The Review  has sometimes been cited in this journal.

See also posts from the date of Ellsworth's death—

• Tracking Shot
  
• Plato's Pheedo
  
• Gate of Ivory
  
• Here Be Dragons, and
• Ad Meld
  

University Diaries praised today the late Robert Nozick's pedagogical showmanship.

His scholarship was less praiseworthy. His 2001 book Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World  failed, quite incredibly, to mention Hermann Weyl's classic summary of  the connection between invariance and objectivity.  See a discussion of Nozick in The New York Review of Books  of December 19, 2002—

"… one should mention, first and foremost, the mathematician Hermann Weyl who was almost obsessed by this connection. In his beautiful little book Symmetry  he tersely says, 'Objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms….'"

See also this journal on Dec. 3, 2002, and Feb. 20, 2007.

For some context, see a search on the word stem "objectiv-" in this journal.

This morning's online New York Times  obituaries—

For the story of the woman at the head of the class,
see Sarah Boxer in The New York Review of Books .

See also Boxer on the Feast of the Assumption, 2009.

"…as Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stated in his Fall 2006 address to the Harvard freshman class, being able to tell if a man is 'talking rot' is the ultimate goal of a liberal arts education."

— Yelena S. Mironova ’12 in The Harvard Crimson  yesterday

Is Mironova talking rot? Apparently not, since Knowles did, it seems, use that phrase in such an address. (See an alleged transcript of his remarks by someone at Facebook identifying herself as Van Le, Harvard '10)

Was Knowles talking rot? Perhaps, since the alleged transcript of his remarks indicates he attributed the phrase to a 1914 lecture by one J. A. Smith, a philosopher at Oxford,  but did not give a source for his quotation.

A Google web search for more accurate information yields no exact source. There are two notable hearsay sources—

The weblog Fairing's Parish  on August 16, 2009, gives a version attributed to Smith in More Christmas Crackers  by John Julius Norwich. (The hardcover first edition of this book was published by Viking on Oct. 14, 1991, according to Amazon.co.uk.)

An earlier book in the Christmas Crackers  series was cited as a Smith source by Michael M. Thomas at Forbes.com on Oct. 24, 2008—

"I happened upon Professor Smith long years ago, in the 1980 edition of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker  [sic ]…."

The weblog Laudator Temporis Acti  of Michael Gilleland on August 29, 2004, says…

The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29….

Some further bibliographic notes on the Jahanbegloo book—

Ramin Jahanbegloo, Isaiah Berlin en toutes libertés: entretiens avec Isaiah Berlin  (Paris, 1991: Éditions du Félin); repr. in its original English form as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin  (London, 1992: Peter Halban; New York, 1992: Scribner’s; London, 1993: Phoenix; 2nd ed., London, 2007: Halban); excerpted in Jewish Quarterly  38 No 3 (Autumn 1991), 15–26, Jewish Chronicle,  7 February 1992, Literary Supplement, ii, Guardian,  7 March 1992, 23, and (as ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’) New York Review of Books,  28 May 1992, 46–54; trans. Chinese (both scripts), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish (complete and in part, by different translators)

— http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/index.html

A Google books  search yields some starting points for a paper chase that might, given library resources like Harvard's, finally nail down the rot quote.

Try smith oxford "talking rot".

The best citation I can find online is not very good. See The Oxford Book of Oxford  (first edition 1978, new edition 2002), edited by Jan (formerly James) Morris, who gives as her source "J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, opening a lecture course in 1914 (quoted by Harold Macmillan in The Times, 1965)." This does not indicate whether Macmillan was quoting Smith from memory or from a written or printed record. Only the latter would clear Macmillan (and all subsequent purveyors of the alleged Smith quote who did not attribute it to Macmillan) from the suspicion of talking rot.

Anne Applebaum in the current New York Review of Books on Arthur Koestler—

"At the moment, he still seems like yesterday's man, unfashionable and obsolete."

Rather like God. See this journal yesterday– Darkness at Noon.

See also David Levine's portrait of Koestler (Dec. 30, 2009)–

— and an objective correlative to yesterday's post —

Click to enlarge.

Peter Woit’s latest weblog entry links to a discussion of Plato’s cave and the modular group, which in turn suggests a second look at an entry linked to, indirectly, at the end of Saturday’s Log24 entry: Natasha’s Dance.  This leads to the following:

“To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.”

— Freeman Dyson, “Science & Religion: No Ends in Sight,” The New York Review of Books, issue dated five years ago today– March 28, 2002.

If Dyson’s “recognition” is correct, why should mind and intelligence not be woven into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Lottery?

The practiced reader of Log24 will have little difficulty in constructing a story based on these numbers.  Briefly, the story is… 2/26 and 8/26.  The way the story was written may “surpass our comprehension,” but the story itself need not.

Those more interested in the writing than the story may consult Edward Rothstein’s piece in the March 26 New York Times, “Texts That Run Rings Around Everyday Linear Logic.”  There they will find a brief discussion of, appropriately, the Bible’s Book of Numbers.

I mean, seriously…

“The Comedians is about three men, Smith, Jones and Brown….“

“Again I was aware of the three names, interchangeable like comic masks in a farce.”

— Graham Greene, The Comedians, Penguin paperback, 1991, p. 23

Pico Iyer on Graham Greene in the current New York Review of Books:

“To play out the full logic….”

Dirty Trick

Some quotations in memory of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who died on June 13, 2004.

From the Hampshire obituary in The Guardian:

From a log24 entry on the day before Hampshire’s death:

Whether Hampshire is now in Hell, the reader may surmise.  Some evidence in Hampshire’s  favor:

His review of On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry, in The New York Review of Books of November 18, 1999.  Note particularly his remarks on Fred Astaire, and the links to Astaire and the Four Last Things in an earlier entry of June 12, which was, as noted above, the day before Hampshire’s death.

As for the day of death itself, consider the  following  remark with which Hampshire concludes his review of Scarry’s  book:

“But one must occasionally fly the flag, and the flag, incorrigibly, is beauty.”

In this connection, see the entry of the Sunday Hampshire died, Spider Web, as well as entries on the harrowing of hell — Holy Saturday, 2004 — and on beauty —  Art Wars for Trotsky’s Birthday and A Mass for Lucero (written, as it happens, on June 13, 2002).

Inscape

Picture said to be of
a Japanese Skylark,
Hibari or Alauda japonica.
Photo: 05/2002, Nagano, Japan.

The Hairy Palm Academy

The previous two entries were prompted by a picture in the Washington Post of Spain’s Interior Minister, a member of the secular arm of the Legion of Christ.

Both entries mentioned a school run by the Legion of Christ, the Royal Palm Academy.  As the following excerpt from my March 20 entry indicates, a different sort of palm might also be honored by the Legion — the hairy palm.

“Los Legionarios de Cristo…  es una organización fundada en 1941 en Méjico por el padre Marcel [Marcial] Maciel (rehabilitado por el Vaticano en 1958 tras ser acusado de ayudarse en sus visiones con ampollas de morfina; también fue acusado de pederastia, le gustaba masturbar a jovencitos y que ellos le masturbaran a él).”

— PPnuncamas.org

Related readings from The New York Review of Books, issue dated April 8, 2004:

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners, by Garry Wills, on the Legion of Christ and on Mel Gibson flogging his God,

and a related article, a review of

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

It seems the founder of the Legion of Christ, like many other Catholic priests, may have regarded masturbation as a group sport rather than solitary recreation.

For further details, see an ABC News 20/20 story dated April 26, 2002:

Priestly Sin, Cover-Up

When approached by ABC News’s Brian Ross in Rome with questions of allegations against Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped Ross’s hand. — ABCNEWS.com

Room 1010

Continuing the hotel theme of the previous entry….

John Gregory Dunne has a letter in the New York Review of Books of December 20 (St. Emil's Day in the previous entry), 1990.  In this letter, he reveals that he and his wife had at one time worked on a Grand Hotel screenplay based in Las Vegas.

For related material in memory of Dunne, see In Lieu of Rosebud, which contains entries for 10/10-10/12, 2002.
 

Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

Saint Leonard’s Day

From a review of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Norton lectures at Harvard:

The truly emblematic twentieth-century composer is Mahler, whose attempts to relinquish tonality are reluctant and incomplete, and whose nostalgia for past practice is overt and tragic. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, his “last will and testament,” shows “that ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical prophet.” That is the “real reason” Mahler’s music suffered posthumous neglect–it was, Bernstein says, “telling something too dreadful to hear.” The Ninth Symphony embodies three kinds of death–Mahler’s own, which he knew was imminent; the death of tonality, “which for him meant the death of music itself”; and “the death of society, of our Faustian culture.” And yet this music, like all great art, paradoxically reanimates us.

— Joseph Horowitz, New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993

Today’s birthday: ageless Charlton Heston.

Happy Birthday, Moses!

Elaine Pagels,
authority on the Gnostic gospels,
p. 12, New York Review of Books,
issue dated Oct. 23, 2003

Seek and Ye Shall Find:

On the Mystical Properties
of the Number 162

On this date in history:

May 22, 1942:  Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski is born in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., to Wanda Kaczynski and her husband Theodore R. Kaczynski, a sausage maker. His mother brings him up reading Scientific American.

From the June 2003 Scientific American:

“Seek and ye shall find.” – Michael Shermer

Here is a connection to runes:

Mayer, R.M., “Runenstudien,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 21 (1896): pp. 162 – 184.

Here is a connection to Athenian bastions from a UN article on Communist educational theorist Dimitri Glinos:

“Educational problems cannot be scientifically solved by theory and reason alone….” (D. Glinos (1882-1943), Dead but not Buried, Athens, Athina, 1925, p. 162)

“Schools are…. not the first but the last bastion to be taken by… reform….”

“…the University of Athens, a bastion of conservatism and counter-reform….”

I offer the above with tongue in cheek as a demonstration that mystical numerology may have a certain heuristic value overlooked by fanatics of the religion of Scientism such as Shermer.

For a more serious discussion of runes at the Acropolis, see the photo on page 16 of the May 15, 2003, New York Review of Books, illustrating the article “Athens in Wartime,” by Brady Kiesling.

Heaven’s Gate

“Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall.”

— Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, quoted by Douglas Robinson at the site Linguistics and Language

Mesopotamian mathematics:

“Location: present-day Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates

Cities: Babylon, founded 2300 BC, 70 miles south of present Baghdad, on the Euphrates….

Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”

Perhaps the real heaven’s gate is at

Pottawatomie College.

Instant karma update:

 At 5:09 PM I read the following in the New York Review of Books, dated May 1, 2003, which arrived today.

From a review of Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman:

“As a general analysis of the various enemies of liberalism, and what ties them together, it is superb.  All — Nazis, Islamists, Bolsheviks, Fascists, and so on — are linked by Berman to the ‘ur-myth’ of the fall of Babylon.”

Speaking of Ur, Berman likes to quote a non-Biblical Abraham, named Lincoln.  The first, Biblical, Abraham was a damned homicidal lunatic, and the later American Abraham also delighted in blood sacrifice.  But that’s just my opinion.  For a different view, see the Chautauqua Abrahamic Program.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Saul Steinberg in The New York Review of Books issue dated August 15, 2002, page 32:

“The idea of reflections came to me in reading an observation by Pascal, cited in a book by W. H. Auden, who wrote an unusual kind of autobiography by collecting all the quotations he had annotated in the course of his life, which is a good way of displaying oneself, as a reflection of these quotations.  Among them this observation by Pascal, which could have been made only by a mathematician….”

Pascal’s observation is that humans, animals, and plants have bilateral symmetry, but in nature at large there is only symmetry about a horizontal axis… reflections in water, nature’s mirror.

This seems related to the puzzling question of why a mirror reverses left and right, but not up and down.

The Steinberg quote is from the book Reflections and Shadows, reviewed here.

Bibliographic data on Auden’s commonplace book:

AUTHOR      Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh),              1907-1973. TITLE       A Certain World; a Commonplace Book   
            [selected by] W. H. Auden.
PUBLISHER   New York, Viking Press [1970]
SUBJECT     Commonplace-books.

A couple of websites on commonplace books:

Quotation Collections and

Weblets as Commonplace Books.

A classic:

The Practical Cogitator – The Thinker’s Anthology, 
by Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and Ferris Greenslet,
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, Massachusetts
c 1962 Third Edition – Revised and Enlarged