The Philosopher's Cat

Below I copied today's post to www.cat-lovers-almanac.blogspot.com.  Mostly I forget to use this forum to expand on the philosophical element often in my cat posts. One interesting thing about Harington is he puts the loss of learning from the 16th century to the present, in perspective. Also, Harington seems to occupy a place as one of the originators of an emphasis on the individual as important per se. From the post below you will recall that he included personal details about himself,  in his translation of Orlando. And had to defend himself for this.  The recent post about Augustus Toplady is another example of where we could/should expand on the philosophical. That guy was astonishing. And his debating Wesley about free will. I will get back to that but what Toplady saw, was that BOTH free will and determinism were present for a person. Hard to discuss that. And you can see (not in my post) how John Wesley totally missed the point. He (Wesley) takes the cheap road of accusing

And published tomorrow in CLA this pretty skimpy, unoriginal take on Teilhard de Chardin---what IS interesting is the focus on complexity--- that in fact is a great secret..... The dog, the cat, or the bird train their young in countless ways to hunt, to fly, to build a nest. ... Far from being an artificial, accidental, or accessory phenomenon, in relation to living creatures, education is nothing less than an essential and natural form of biological additivity. ...[W] e see heredity pass through education beyond the individual to enter into its collective phase and become social. These are the words of Pierre Teihard de Chardin (May 1, 1881, and died on April 10, 1955)   in  The Future of Man,  (written 1941, published 1959). This was after his death, since the church did not allow him to publish much during his lifetime.  And though by the time of publication DNA had been discovered, that would have been beside the point to our priest.  Neither DNA nor evolution theory really

Another crosspost from CLA, as are all the below---   Cat Lovers Almanac  . One reason is I did not want to burden posts like below with philosophical stuff--- like that the analysis touches on what might be the basic question in the history of philosophy: the relation of words to ---- whatever. So, here's the post---- Francisco Goya has life span dates (March 30, 1746 to April 16, 1828) which are interestingly similar to those of William Blake (November 28, 1757 to August 12,  1827). I say interestingly since they are both the type of genius whose originality can still astound. There are of course other parallels, --  Shakespeare and Cervantes comes to mind; the effect can be that of something you think can be learned by the conjunctures, though conclusions never seem to eventuate. Goya was famous and mostly, paid; Blake not so much. That Blake's cats are fewer than Goya's is merely of local interest. The cats below, Goya's, are models of the unsentimental. Here are

[This note on Fromm I left at CLA without pointing out that his ideas are more typical than not of the modern assumptions about human nature as something that can be constructed, that human nature is plastic. That at least was one mistake his authority Freud did not make. His ideas are especially lacking in that those sad years of German success, were formative for several great thinkers, like Karl Jaspers, but that is not a group in which we could place Fromm] Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 to March 18, 1980) is labeled a sociologist and a psychoanalyst in the history of Freudian thought. According to one  web site  on this history, Fromm's significance is stated this way: Today, Erich Fromm is widely regarded as one of the most important psychoanalysts of the 20th century. While Freud had an early influence on him, Fromm later became part of a group known as the neo-Freudians which included ... Carl Jung. Fromm was critical of many of Freud's ideas including the Oedipus comple

The title of this article below -- Confessions of a Vicarious Person -- caught me, but the phrase is not really  meant alas, to characterize human intelligence. Here because I still like the title. cit--- The Bookman, Volumes 15-16-1903 q Possibly some people are born vicarious. Certainly, some other people have vicariousness thrust upon them. In proof take these experiences of a person whose ruling principle it is to mind her own business. The first of them came to pass in my salad days, when the prophetic shadow of a literary career earned for me a certain pitying tolerance faintly touched with envy, and—to be wholly frank—admiration. Back in my province, white blackbirds were jfienty compared with folk who wrote things. Judge, then, the sensation caused by a summer visitor to one of the first families, who, it was given out, had a novel nearly ready for the press. There was a delicious vagueness as to publishers and date of issue, but doubt was impossible, to even the

Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 to August 1, 1990) was a Jewish German scholar who managed to get to England by 1935. He had studied with Karl Jaspers, but later switched from philosophy to sociology. In 1939 the work which later established his reputation, was published in German, (but not, apparently in English til 1969). This was The Civilizing Process , Vol.I.  The History of Manners , (1969), and  The Civilizing Process,  Vol.II.  State Formation and Civilization,   (1982). Norbert was concerned to trace and understand the change in people between the medieval period, and current times. He seems to have understood it as a critical change in manners: that is, to use his examples, how men learned to use a handkerchief rather than their own sleeve to blow their nose, or, another example, which Elias may (I am not sure) have been the one to bring back to popular consciousness, the torture of cats and its falling out of fashion. This went from a popular pastime to a repugnant thought for

The great thing about Todhunter is that his arguments, against lab demonstrations, actually make a lot of sense and throw light on the Victorian intellectual framework --- his argument is that only the first time you do an experiment, on something you do not have an answer for-- only then, with that joy of the new, is there real learning, and really, he's got a good point. We do not know, how many of his readers or listeners understood his point. If the question is learning something, you have to have that new, it has to happen to the person themselve, and not just be something you imitate. q-CLA Isaac Todhunter (November 23, 1820 to March 1, 1884) was a Victorian mathematician and historian of mathematics, at Cambridge. He wrote many math textbooks, with titles like  A History of the Mathematical Theories of Attraction and the Figure of the Earth from the Time of Newton to That of Laplace  (1873). Some lesser known facts about Todhunter, recounted in  an old book .(which incl

The meaning of metaxis is illustrated below, in the text of a poem, -- a poem not forgotten because few people ever saw it. Metaxis is the 'in between' --- strictly speaking it means you do not conclude in your verbal (binary, rational) mind, about something. This leaves actual thinking with a growing edge, sensitive to reality itself. Thoughts can have a comma, rather than a period, at their end, and this is metaxis. The following is not a great example, but I think it qualifies. We quote our own article in CLA: T. J. Powys had his poetry published in a volume titled  Poems , (1891). Some of the poems were written in the mid 1850s. He was a lawyer and like so many 19th century intellects, capable of complex thought in a manner mainly lost in our ideological times. There is very little documentation available on the web for Powys but I have determined that he is (probably) not connected with the later Welsh family of literary geniuses. 'Powys' may be a pseudonym. A re

Several posts on Beckmann are at www.cat-lovers-almanac.blogspot.com --- you have to search for them. Below is a copy of the latest. Max Beckmann (February 12, 1884 to December 27, 1950) saw his painting as a means of exploring reality. His philosophical sophistication and dedication to truth give him a prominence in the world of artists. He had tried to stay in Germany even after losing his job when the German Nazis took over, But when the infamous degenerate art  (Entartete Kunst ) show opened in Munich on June 26, 1937, he went into exile in Amsterdam. One  source  says: Among the 730 controversial works gathered there by the Nazi curators were ten paintings by Beckmann, including his 1917 self-portrait. There were more works by Beckmann in the show than by any other living artist. This statement  of Beckmann's points to how he connected painting and struggling to grasp the reality of which he was a part:   Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and