Magni Formica Laboris

1. Myth of Universality - there is, as far as we can tell, no universal language. Maybe at some point of the distant past there was, but today it's almost impossible. e.g. - Republic of Georgia, mama means father and deda means mother . The ultimate nail in the coffin of the myth of universality. 2. Myth of simplicity - No language is harder or easier for its own speech community to learn. A six-year-old in any culture has the same relative ability to master their language as any other. 3. Myth of teleology - language does not move towards a goal, nor evolve, nor change at a steady rate. 4. Myth of gradualism - language changes in fits and starts. See the Great Vowel Shift .

Heath tells us that "the Caliph al-Mansur (754-775) sent a mission to the Byzantine Emperor as the result of which he obtained from him a copy of Euclid among other Greek books, and again that the Caliph al-Ma'mun (813-833) obtained manuscripts of Euclid, among others, from the Byzantines." Most of the Greek learning that was preserved in the Library at Alexandria must have ended up in Rome before the Christians and Arabs gradually destroyed it. It is reasonable to think that copies of pagan books then made their way from Rome, the capital of the old, western Roman Empire, to Constantinople, the capital of the new, eastern Roman Empire, before Rome was sacked in the 5th Century. Constantinople did not fall until 1203, leaving plenty of time for Greek science to migrate into the Islamic empire. The first Arabic translation that we know of was made by Al-Hajjaj j. b. Yusuf b. Matar (Al-Hajjaj) in the 8th Century. A manuscript copy of this version still ex...

Despite their heavy-bodied appearance, groundhogs are accomplished swimmers and excellent tree climbers when escaping predators or when they want to survey their surroundings. [ 6 ] They prefer to retreat to their burrows when threatened; if the burrow is invaded, the groundhog tenaciously defends itself with its two large incisors and front claws. Groundhogs are generally agonistic and territorial among their own species, and may skirmish to establish dominance. General Beauregard Lee is a groundhog that resides at the Yellow River Game Ranch in Lilburn, Georgia just outside of Atlanta . He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Georgia - "DWP, Doctor of Weather Prognostication" and Georgia State University - "Doctor of Southern Groundology." He has been predicting early springs or late winters for fourteen years and the Game Ranch claims a 94% accuracy rate. However, he did have one major miss: in 1993 he predicted an early Spring ...

There's no use in a strong impulse [in poetry] if it is nearly all lost in bungling transmission and technique. This obnoxious word that I’m always brandishing about [technique] means nothing but a transmission of the impulse intact.--Pound, 1914

No longer in Lethean foliage caught Begin the preparation for your death And from the fortieth winter by that thought Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought, And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. - From Among School Children , verse 6

Is he some sort of a midwife, or more like a Silenus statue? The import of this question was emphasized by Prior in The Socratic Problem, from the Blackwell Companion to Plato The midwife analogy from the Theaetetus : "The common reproach against me is that I am always asking questions of other people but never express my own views about anything, because there is no wisdom in me, and that is true enough... With those who associate with me it is different. At first some may give the impression of being ignorant and stupid; but as time goes on and our association continues, all whom God permits are seen to make progress - a progress which is amazing both to other people and to themselves. And yet it is clear that this is not due to anything they have learned from me." (excerpts 150c4-d7) The Silenus analogy from the Symposium (told by Alcibiades): "To begin with, he's crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze. Also, he lik...

1. "It is arguable, however, that law's functions in our culture are more closely related to its coercive aspect than Hart seems to have assumed. Contemporary use of ‘game theory’ in the law tends to show that the rationale of a great variety of legal arrangements can be best explained by the function of law in solving problems of opportunism, like the so called Prisoner's Dilemma situations. In these cases, the law's main role is, indeed, one of providing coercive measures. Be this as it may, we should probably refrain from endorsing Austin's or Kelsen's position that providing sanctions is law's only function in society. Solving recurrent and multiple coordination problems, setting standards for desirable behavior, proclaiming symbolic expressions of communal values, resolving disputes about facts, and such, are important functions which the law serves in our society, and those have very little to do with law's coercive aspect and its sanction-providi...

see 6.493A-C "The image of the Beast conveys a great deal of what Plato wanted to say about democracy. Fundamental is the thought that in a political system of direct popular rule, where key decisions are taken not by an individual or a body with restricted membership, but by the assembled populace itself, the people become the source of all values in the society. As we might put it, democracy is in this regard a totalitarian system. More specifically, the power of public opinion generates a radically corrupt system of values. This is because it is the passions and appetites of the populace which in the end dictate the contents of what passes for wisdom. If they like something, that counts as good (i.e. as what we should truly want), in the teaching of the sophists as for everyone else; if they dislike it, the opposite. Necessity--that is (presumably), political expediency--is what gets dignified by the language of moral approbation: 'just', 'fine'. What has...

"Concerning the gods I am unable to know either that they are or that they are not, or what their appearance is like. For many are the things that hinder knowledge: the obscurity of the matter and the shortness of human life." (Eusebius, Preparation of the Gospel 14.3.7 = 80B4) Buddhism and Jainism are agnostic religions. Protagoras, Democritus, Hume, Emmanuel Kant, William James, Herbert Spencer, Albert Einstein were agnostic. from an atheism website: http://atheisme.free.fr/Atheisme/Agnosticism.htm

He treated the classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period, and he knew many things that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. - From One Hundred Years of Solitude