The Philosopher's Cat

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 .(...

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 infinit...