Drop the Mic and Teach Kids to Spell

"At this time in his life—around 1919, when he turned thirty—Wittgenstein wanted badly to transform himself. Convinced he was a moral failure, he took extreme steps to change his circumstances, divesting himself of his enormous family fortune (which he dispersed among his siblings, making sure he could never legally access it again); leaving the palatial family home he’d grown up in (it was literally called the “Palais Wittgenstein”); and looking for the kind of hard and honest work he hoped would distract him from his despair and allow him to do something of value. In choosing teaching he was influenced by a romantic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d gotten from reading Tolstoy. His family was perplexed by his decisions. His sister Hermine told him that applying his genius to teaching children was like using a “precision instrument” to open crates. She reports his response:

You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.

In 1920, after a year of training, Wittgenstein took up a post at an elementary school in Trattenbach. It was a tiny farming and factory village in the mountains south of Vienna; Wittgenstein accepted the job there after rejecting one in a town he decided was too cosmopolitan. (It had a park with a fountain in it.)" (source)

Simon Schama - The Abolition of the Slave Trade 200 Years On

Newton and Alchemy

Christianity, Crusades, Islam

"On September 11, 2001, there were only a few professional historians of the Crusades in America. I was the one who was not retired. As a result, my phone began ringing and didn’t stop for years. In the hundreds of interviews I have given since that terrible day, the most common question has been, “How did the Crusades lead to the terrorist attacks against the West today?” I always answered: “They did not. The Crusades were a medieval phenomenon with no connection to modern Islamist terrorism.”" (source)

Fra Filippo Lippi - The Annunciation

Groping in the Dark With....Burckhardt's Reflections

"The rivalry between history and poetry has been finally settled by Schopenhauer. Poetry achieves more for the knowledge of human nature; even Aristotle said 'poetry is more philosophical and profound than history,' and that is true, because the faculty which gives birth to poetry is intrinsically of a higher order than that of the greatest historians. Further, the end to which it is created is much sublimer than that of history."


                                                 Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History

Burckhardt gave us, whether we wanted it or not, our first lasting interpretation of the Italian Renaissance as a single historical epoch. Lots of kids have taken issue with that interpretation, especially with respect to the question of modernity and the equality of class and gender. Very little of what we would recognize as modernity is rooted in the Renaissance. The state was a medieval invention; anything resembling secularism would come later or would not come at all. Mathematico-empiricism is Baroque. In the realm of intellectual culture we generally agree that the Italian Renaissance gifted to the future knowledge of Greek classics, improved philological and historiographical methodologies, and a handful of witty political subversives. That's about all.

So, knowing this, I wondered why precisely current opinion differs so drastically from that of the nineteenth-century Swiss historian. The above passage, taken from a lecture on world history, offers part of an answer, a part I had not considered. We need to look to Schopenhauer's understanding of the relationship between history and poetry.* The German philosopher claimed that speech "represents a perfectly distinct class of ideas, whose subjective correlative is reason." There is no imagination in speech. Speech is reason speaking to reason. Poetry, as written speech, like philosophy, "reveals the events of our inner life, in so far as they concern the will," which "alone is the thing-in-itself." It accesses what is unchanging in mankind, revealing "the same, identical, unchangeable essence, acting in the same way today as it did yesterday and always."

History is merely the "mere coordination of what is known" with respect to particular facts, a category that is innumerable and infinite. From these facts one cannot access the universal. Against the Hegelians, Schopenhauer calls their "pseudo-philosophy" pernicious and--at root--a "crude and shallow realism," and "a shallow optimism." Hegelianism seeks a "comfortable, substantial, and fat State with a well-regulated constitution, good justice and police, useful arts and industries." But none of it reveals the inner life. Only poetry and philosophy and speech are capable of this revelation.

Burckhardt's approach to history was not as simplistic as Schopenhauer's (the Swiss historian trained at the University of Berlin under Ranke), but one does detect a similarity or influence between the two authors. Burckhardt often treated the writings of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other Italian authors as the documents of important, uncomplicated witnesses to a profound change in the human spirit.

*Because I am lazy and ignorant, I simply followed the footnotes in the text. They led me to The World as Will and Representation Vol. 1, Section 51 and Vol. 2, Section 38. You can find these passages through Google if you're interested. 

La Sorciere

 

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps - Jill Kraye and John Marenbon

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has reached its 200th episode. To celebrate this event, the host, Peter Adamson, a specialist in medieval Arabic philosophy, takes some time to discuss the category of 'medieval philosophy' with John Marenbon and Jill Kraye. The former is a specialist in early Latin medieval philosophy and the latter is a specialist in late medieval (or 'Renaissance') Latin philosophy. 

Marenbon advocates for a Long Middle Ages stretching from Plotinus to the mid-17C. He doesn't explain precisely why this would be, but we can assume that he's envisioning a period in which Platonic metaphysics makes up the core of elite intellectual culture. Beauty = Truth = Good = God as the centre of all thinking up until Leibniz.

Kraye is sympathetic to this notion but seems to want to claim that the Middle Ages represent a moment in which Aristotelian logic and natural philosophy came to surround and modify that core of Platonism. This would place the Middle Ages of intellectual culture between early-12C and mid-17C. The Renaissance would then name a phase in the intellectual culture of the Middle Ages in which the style and form of philosophical discussion mattered to intellectuals just as much as content did. Furthermore, the Renaissance would name a period in which philosophies other than Aristotelianism, such as Epicureanism or Pyrronic Skepticism, gained in popularity without replacing the Platonic core of most forms of thinking.

Jill is an historian interested in philosophy and John is a philosopher interested in history. They both want to contextualize the thought of their objects of study, but only John wants to think with those objects. Here in this podcast and also in a lecture given elsewhere, Marenbon suggests that we first isolate a philosophical problem that concerns us today, something that to us seems like philosophy. With that problem in hand we return to the past to see how it was dealt with then. But, in the process of doing so, we contextualize the old arguments and old solutions in order to provide contrast for the new, or to inspire new approaches to present problems.* Marenbon respects difference while prizing similarity. Jill, on the other hand, like most historians, wants to paint--to the best of her ability--a true and faithful portrait of her subject as it changes over time. Hers is the instinct of an antiquarian and a biographer and a pedant. Such an approach no doubt keeps us honest, and reveals to us the peculiarity of past minds, but it does little to sketch out how to make use of the past.

There is too much of Jill in me, and not enough of John.

*this strikes me as a benign version of Quentin Skinner's methodology. For more on him, check out this two part interview.

Antisemitism in the Ancient Mediterranean?

A series of short presentations delivered at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center regarding early Christianity and Anti-Judaism. Featuring Benjamin Dunning, Jorg Frey, Dale B. Martin, and Hindy Najman.