Misc

• Apologue – A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, highlights the irrationality of mankind. George Orwell, Animal Farm; Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book & the fables of Aesop are examples

• Fitzgerald, F. Scott   The Great Gatsby  NY: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.” (40-1, at Gatsby’s party)

• Dewey, John     Democracy and Education  NY: Macmillan, 1916   http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/dewey/toc.html

a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up… Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.

• synesthesia, meaning “joined sensation”, shares a root with anesthesia, meaning “no sensation.”  denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes. The neurological mixing of the senses. A synaesthete may, for example, hear colors, see sounds, and taste tactile sensations. Although this may happen in a person who has autism, it is also a common effect of some hallucinogenic drugs.

Cytowic, Richard E.   The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Reasoning, Emotion, & Consciousness. NY: Putnam. 1993
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright & Morgan Russell. Their abstract “synchromies”, based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art.

• Duffy, Carol Ann (1955- ) British poet & playwright. Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan Univ; appointed Britain’s poet laureate in May 2009 – the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay person to hold the position.

“He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy, but I am God…. We heard him through the window, heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.” (Luke 2:41-52) Based on Max Ernst, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses

• Holloway, Richard  How to Read the Bible, Granta Books, 2006

refers to he calls the “hermetic circularity” upon which claims for the Bible’s authority rests. The Bible is almost universally regarded as the inspired source of God’s revelation to humanity. Should anyone dare query on what authority this claim is made, the response is that the Bible says so. That this is a circular & therefore invalid argument is not a recent objection. It was made by none other than Matthew  Tyndale in 1730, with these words: It’s an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude these doctrines to be true because contained in that book.

• Harris, Adrian   “Notions of Embodied Knowledge”

Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff & Johnson claim that “What our bodies are like & how they function in the world…structure the very concepts we can use to think.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962

• Wittgenstein 

In the long aphorism xi of the second book of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes a distinction between “seeing” & “seeing as”.  To “see as” is something one learns to do.  It is based on a technique that one masters.  One might look at a map, say, without recognizing it for what it is.  But with a bit of training one learns to see the map differently and to use it as a guide around the city.  Before one does that, one has to learn to see as, that is to see the scriggly lines as streets