Quotation of the day

Or, in which I discover the visually pleasing qualities of a human navel... 


"History, that is, a rehearsal of the events of human tragedy. [...] Words cannot do sufficient justice to the importance of this. [...] For the study of human history makes men gentle, humble, and careful, so the ignorance of it keeps him crude toward himself and others, proud, and hasty towards his own and the state's undoing."

From Johann Valentin Andreae's Chrisianopolis (1616)

quotation of the day: on paradigms

"... only with great difficulty could [Kuhn] have left the concept of 'paradigm' more open to misinterpretation than he did.  One sympathetic critic has shown that Kuhn uses the tem in no fewer than 21 different ways." - Cedarbaum, "Paradigms"


Every time I hear the word 'paradigm,' I remember my old PI, incensed that the lab's work wasn't getting into the best journals, when everyone should be able to see that it was paradigm shifting, or that it would start a new paradigm, paradigm, paradigm.  I suspected paradigm was his favorite word. 

quotations from Trevor-Roper

In the section refuting the notion that Calvinism was responsible for the Enlightenment, we get a lot of choice tidbits about Calvinists from a man who certainly knew how to wield a pen. On the Calvinist torch-bearers of the 17th c:

Their masters may have been grim, but there is a certain heroic quality about their grimness, a literary power about their writing, an intellectual force in their minds. The successors are also grim, but they are grim and mean. Perkins and ‘‘Smectymnuus’’ in England, Rivetus and Voëtius in Holland, Baillie and Rutherford in Scotland, Desmarets and Jurieu in France, Francis Turrettini in Switzerland, Cotton Mather in America—what a gallery of intolerant bigots, narrow-minded martinets, timid conservative defenders of repellent dogmas, instant assailants of every new or liberal idea, inquisitors and witch-burners!

On Calvinism in France:

But after 1629, when the pride and autonomy of the Huguenots were broken, the independent laymen gradually disappear from among them, and French Protestantism, like Scottish Protestantism, is dominated by a clergy which becomes, with time, increasingly narrow and rigid: crabbed prudes and Puritans, haters of literature and the arts, stuck in postures of defence. 

On radicalism (or not):

In general we are too prone to suppose that the Independency of the Puritan Republic was intellectually a radical movement. Once again this results from a confusion of political with intellectual terms. Because the Independents, the Cromwellians, were prepared to cut off the king’s head, while the Presbyterians, the followers of Denzil Holles, wished to keep it on, it is easy to suppose that the former were more ‘‘radical’’ than the latter.

quotation of the day

“I also met at Gorice a Count Cotonimi, who was known in learned circles as the author of some Latin treatises on diplomacy.  Nobody read his books, but everyone agreed that he was a very learned man.” - Casanova, Memoirs, VI

Reading Latour "Matters of Fact, Matters of Concern"

And the best quotation of the night is the following:

‎The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs-- to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock.

I'm no philosopher, but I do appreciate a profession that requires drinking a lot of coffee (or throwing rocks at relativists, also a good use for a rock).


Another notable tidbit:

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? ...You are always right! ... Isn't this fabulous!  Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique!  'Enter here, poor folks.  After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will always be right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïveté, that supreme sin, any longer.

I do like the sound of always being right.  I don't like the reading turgid prose part though.... Can't I always be right, and leave the purple prose to the professionals?