Excerpt from Zhuangzi

—"Zhuangzi was accompanying a funeral when he passed by Huizi's grave. 


Turning to his attendants, he said, 'There was once a plasterer who, if he got a speck of mud on the tip of his nose no thicker than a fly's wing, would get his friend Carpenter Shi to slice it off for him.

Carpenter Shi, whirling his hatchet with a noise like the wind, would accept the assignment and proceed to slice, removing every bit of mud without injury to the nose, while the plasterer just stood there completely unperturbed.

Lord Yuan of Song, hearing of this feat, summoned Carpenter Shi and said, 'Could you try performing it for me?' But Carpenter Shi replied, 'It's true that I was once able to slice like that—but the material I worked on has been dead these many years.'

Since you have died, Master Hui, I have had no material to work on. There's no one I can talk to any more.'"

[The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, translated by Burton Watson, Section 24]

Notes from October 26, 2009

—Nicholas Rescher's list of possible reasons as to why philosophy doesn't (seem) to make any progress:

(1) methodological differences lead to different results
(2) psychological differences among thinkers
(3) structural problems
      (a) originality is awarded
      (b) obscurity is awarded
(4) cultural differences among thinkers
(5) philosophy is a pseudo-discipline. Its questions aren't sensible or legitimate

Notes from March 24, 2010

"White on White," Kasimir Malevich, 1918

—Notes on "On the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge," George Bealer

What are Intuitions?

(a) An intuition is an intellectual "seeming," not a sensory or introspective "seeming."

(b) Philosophical intuitions are a priori intuitions, not physical intuitions.

(c) They are not beliefs. I can have an intuition that something is right (a mathematical proof, for example) and simultaneously believe it is wrong. Also, belief is highly plastic; intuitions aren't.

(d) Not all intuitions are linguistic intuitions, i.e. intuitions about words and their applications.

(e) Not all intuitions are analytic, i.e. arriving from the combination of logic and the definition of terms.

(f) Intuitions can be mistaken. Locally, a single intuition can be wrong. Holistically, a person's systematization can be wrong.

Notes from September 29, 2010

—(4) Bees hate the taste of quinine.

Notes from May 21, 2010

—Panofsky on the medieval worldview: "the gratuitous clarification of function through form."

Notes from August 18, 2014

—A homeless woman dragging herself forward with a walker. A shabby dachshund slinks along behind her, as if embarrassed to be seen with her. 

Pliny on the tribe of Psylli

"There is a...tribe in Africa called the Psylli after King Psyllus, whose tomb is in the region of Greater Syrtes, as Agatharchides records. They produce in their bodies a poison deadly to snakes, and its odour puts snakes to sleep. Their custom was to expose children at birth to extremely fierce snakes and to use these snakes to test the faithfulness of their wives since snakes do not flee people born of adulterous blood."

[Natural History, Pliny the Elder, Book 7, section 14; translated by John F. Healy]

"Mystery and Magic of Mathematics: Martin Gardner and Friends"

Augustine on Study

"Grant me, then, space for my meditations upon the hidden things of Thy law, nor close Thy law against me as I knock. Not for nothing hast Thou willed that the deep secrets of all those pages should be written, not for nothing have those woods their stags, which retire to them and are restored, walk in them and are fed, lie down in them and ruminate."

[Confessions, Book 11, section 2, translated by Frank Sheed]

Two questions about Romanticism

Student: You mentioned that the psychoanalytic movement looked back on Romanticism. Could you expand on that?

Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.

Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?

Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.

Notes from January 18, 2012

—Vico's axiom 43: "Every ancient pagan nation had as its founder its own Hercules." It seems clear that George Washington is our Hercules. 

—Washington : God the Father :: Lincoln : Christ the Son

The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue

Madame Restell's notorious Fifth Avenue home

"Madame Restell...could neither be forced out of business not dislodged from her large brownstone home on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street.

She was aware of her power in the community and did not hesitate to intimate it. She declared that she had secret information concerning many eminent New Yorkers; that if she wished she could open rich and fragrant closets, and expose skeletons whose existence nobody suspected.

In the city directory, and in the newspapers, Madame Restell announced herself as a professor of midwifery. She advertised her offices on Chambers and Greenwich streets, her 'infallible French female pills,' her thirty years of practice, and she guaranteed 'a cure at one interview.' But she scarcely required this publicity. She was notorious as the most expensive abortionist in the city.

As the tide of fashion ascended Fifth Avenue and drew near the street that proceeded it, Madame Restell was repeatedly offered fabulous sums for her property. She refused to sell...

The brownstone wash of wealth flowed up Fifth Avenue, and Madame Restell remained in her home, despised, feared, objectionably scandalous. Men remembered that twenty years earlier she had been brought to trial as result of the death, in her former home downtown, of a girl who had been placed there for treatment. Though the evidence had been sufficient to convict her, she was acquitted. It was said that she had purchased her freedom at the cost of one hundred thousand dollars.

Recalling that ancient triumph, the godly concluded that she was now too rich to be dislodged and too powerful to be eliminated from practice. They saw her on pleasant afternoons, a hard-visaged, black-haired woman, fashionably dressed, descend the stoop of her home, entire a glittering carriage attended by two men in livery, and set off for the her daily drive in Central Park. Madame Killer, she was called, the wickedest woman in town. At night, coaches frequently stopped at the side off her home, and muffled female figures would hurriedly enter the house. Sometimes, at three or four in the morning, a late reveler might see a hearse waiting at that door.

One day in 1878, a respectable whiskered young man came to consult Madame Restell in the office which she maintained in the basement of her home. She had had some correspondence from him, and knew his story. He was desperately poor; his wife was pregnant; the birth of another child would bring them to ruin. Madame Restell gladly gave him her professional advice and provided him with medicine and instruments for his wife.

She was somewhat surprised when, ungratefully, he arrested her, identifying himself as Anthony Comstock, a crusader against vice. She sent for her carriage, and accompanied him to the Tombs. On the way, she offered him forty thousand dollars to drop his charges. He refused, but Madame Restell secured her release on bail. She returned to her Fifth Avenue home. There, early in the morning a few days later, one of her seven servants found Madame Restell's body on the floor of her bathroom, in a pool of blood. During the night, she had cut her throat..."

[from Incredible New York by Lloyd Morris]

"The Diatomist" by Matthew Killip

"The New House" by Edward Thomas

Edward Hopper. "House by the Railroad." 1925

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house
and I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

Notes from April 12, 2013

—Three philosophers: the spider, the ant, and the bee

(a) The ant collects
(b) The spider spins
(c) The bee transforms

Notes from Nov. 6, 2010

—Three theories about God and causation:

(a) Conservationist — God conserves objects' existence but they cause things on their own

(b) Concurrentist — God causes things to exist and He concurs with their causation, i.e. there is no causation that He does not accept and His acceptance is a necessary condition

(c) Occasionalist — objects owe both their existence and causation to God

Stan Brakhage's "Stellar"

Journal from Wed., Oct. 9th, 2013

—An angry-looking man wearing a tweed jacket has a blue splint on two fingers. He sits on a stoop and smokes a cigarette despite the awkwardness of the bandage.

Potential Bigfoot Houses?

News story here. Of course it happens as soon as I leave New Mexico.

Kenneth Anger's "Rabbit's Moon"

This is the 1979 version. The music is A Raincoat's "It Came in the Night."