Magni Formica Laboris

Twelve of the letters from Dr. Francisco Hernandez to King Philip II, and a petition: May 15, 1571. OK, I’m here in Mexico. Things are going well so far. May 15, 1571. Like my last letter said, the geographers and painters are doing well by me, but can I ask that you remove some of the legal limitations placed on me in this land, as they will impede my progress. Thanks. November/December 1571. So far over 800 completely new plants have been catalogued. You will be famous, like Alexander (and like Aristotle). I stay up each night thinking of new ways to serve you. By the way, could you extend my stay here, and pay me more? April 30, 1572. There is so much medicine here. I’m almost done with my third book (I’m writing in both Latin and Spanish). I’m having problems with the viceroy; if you can talk to him I might be able to finish in 2 years, otherwise it will be 20. I’m planning to travel further now (oh, could you send more money for that?). Also, I haven’t really been practicing...

Johnson died on August 16, 1938, at the age of 27, near Greenwood, Mississippi, of unknown causes. Several differing accounts have described the events preceding his death. Johnson had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood. According to one theory, Johnson was murdered by the jealous husband of a woman with whom he had flirted. In an account by the blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson, Johnson had been flirting with a married woman at a dance, who gave him a bottle of whiskey poisoned by her husband. When Johnson took the bottle, Williamson knocked it out of his hand, admonishing him to never drink from a bottle that he had not personally seen opened. Johnson replied, "Don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand." Soon after, he was offered another (poisoned) bottle and accepted it. Johnson is reported to have begun feeling ill the evening after and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the...

Writing Assignment for 28 September, 2016 Summary of two articles September 28, 2016 The reading for this week consisted of two articles: Pamela Long’s “Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars ” [ 2 ] and Jim Bennett’s “Presidential Address: Knowing and doing in the sixteenth century” [ 1 ] . Long’s article is both well written and well organized. Her thesis is that political and military pressures of fifteenth century Italy and southern Germany led to increased patronage and authorship of the mechanical arts, in what she sees as an alliance between techne and praxis . Practitioners of military engineering, architecture, and sculpture wrote about their art and linked it back to ancient traditions, which subsequently gave these texts and their practitioners an elevated status. There are two related points to her thesis: one which she implies, and one which she clearly states herself. The first is that ...

Writing Assignment for 21 September, 2016 On Medical Analogies in Book 2 of Aristotle's Physics September 21, 2016 In this brief paper, I will examine a set of medical analogies made by Aristotle in Book 2 of his Physics . Taken together, these analogies help to define Aristotle’s concept of nature, and connect it to his other concepts about the workings of the world. An important statement is from the eighth chapter, in which he defends his claim that there are purposes, or final causes, in nature: It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art ( techn e ) does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature. The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that. (Aristotle, Physics 199b26-30) This is just...

Writing Assignment for 12 October, 2016 On Galileo's Method in the Dialogue Galileo’s goal in the Fourth Day of the Dialogo [1], through the voice of Salviati, is to show how the earth’s mobility is required to adequately explain the phenomenon of tidal variation. One of his interlocutors, Simplicio, both denies the motion of the Earth and feels that the tides are already adequately explained. By the Fourth Day, Galileo feels he has already given ample evidence that the Earth moves, so much so that he makes it his chief assumption in explaining the tides. The Earth’s motion, however, is not all that Galileo requires. His account of what he calls the “primary and universal cause” of the tides depends upon an analogy with a moving barge, and from this analogy enters the requirement that the Earth’s motion causes an “uneven motion” on its surface that can explain the tides [1, pp. 444, 461]. Galileo’...

It is the cabbage which surpasses all other vegetables. It may be eaten either cooked or raw; if you eat it raw, dip it into vinegar. It promotes digestion marvelously and is an excellent laxative, and the urine is wholesome for everything. If you wish to drink deep at a banquet and to enjoy your dinner, eat as much raw cabbage as you wish, seasoned with vinegar, before dinner, and likewise after dinner eat some half a dozen leaves; it will make you feel as if you had not dined, and you can drink as much as you please. De Agricultura, 156

The great virtue of literature (of art in general) is that it does not truck with abstract data, such as the dates of battles or elections, the numbers of this or that, or the rules or laws of this or that. One could argue that such “data” are rarely real for us, in any experiential sense, and that the business of art is precisely to translate data and information into living circumstance, to turn fact into fiction. It may seem that such a procedure moves away from reality, but the opposite is true. Facts start to live when we see them as part of experience, even fictive experience. - Arnold Weinstein, in his guidebook to Classics of American Literature

By Jennifer Franklin

I was reading this article which contained the following interesting historical tidbit about the different words that survived in modern English: Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs  begin / commence  and  want / desire . Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: We kill a  cow or a  pig  (English) to yield  beef  or  pork  (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one's place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today. This is a great example of the consistency theory of knowledge (see Lehrer text).

I just finished Of Mice and Men . Next is The Pearl, followed by Grapes of Wrath. Then I'll try to get through East of Eden. “Boileau said that Kings, Gods, and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor. . . . And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now.” —Steinbeck in a 1939 radio interview

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly , so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

These are all from this  which I read over three days last week. Nearly one-fourth of all white Southerners owned slaves, and upon their backs the economic basis of America—and much of the Atlantic world—was erected. Do not underestimate the role European powers played in the slave trade . In 1650, Virginia mandated that “all persons except Negroes” were to carry arms. In 1664, Maryland mandated that any Englishwoman who married a slave must live as a slave of her husband’s master. In 1705, the Virginia assembly passed a law allowing for the dismemberment of unruly slaves—but forbidding masters from whipping “a Christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace.” In that same law, the colony mandated that “all horses, cattle, and hogs, now belonging, or that hereafter shall belong to any slave” be seized and sold off by the local church, the profits used to support “the poor of the said parish.”  Virginia. Maryland. More reason to finish The Inte...

Looking forward to reading his new book. David Brooks was not so pleased with it . I think one commenter (Timmy) was onto something when s/he said that Coates's book could not "penetrate David's heavily fortified worldview": For Brooks, it all comes down to “individual choices.” It is what permits Brooks to willfully ignore Coates’ revelations of the structural problems of violence, poverty, and prejudice that plague the nation.  I don't necessarily agree with Timmy on this as I think Brooks's points are worth more consideration than that, but I was interested to think that so many of today's polemics are subsumed under the problem of free will. From what I've read of Brooks, he certainly is concerned more than most about "individual choices", which is a line of argument I'm used to hearing conservatives make. Is he then held to a firm belief in free will, whereas those concerned more with the effects of "structural" forces...

THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you.We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up...

From the end of Lecture 4 from his series on Nietzsche: I will bring up a few things from the Genealogy again, but by the time we have reached this moment of The Death of God, we already have a strange change in the discourse of Nietzsche’s text. Because now the challenge will be for me to present what I have only so far indicated. And it’s indicated in the parable. What new games, new festivals, can human beings – insofar there is any life that remains – what can be invented, now? To make up for what has already been destroyed. And that’s the challenge we’ll have in the next classes; is to see first what does Nietzsche offer us by way of any new myths like that, and more importantly, what myths could we construct ourselves; what games, what holy festivals, what interesting books, fascinating arguments, and new ways to live? Other than the pathetic tragic, stupid, banal array of ordinary, everyday, bourgeois stinking life. Surely we can do better than that. Surely. So that’s the pr...

From Song of Myself With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

A mobile army of metaphors,  metonyms , and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral [or Extra-moral] Sense

Although Pennsylvania had begun an  abolition  of slavery in 1780, it permitted slaveholders from other states to hold slaves in the state for up to six months. After that time, slaves would gain their freedom. Members of Congress were exempt from Pennsylvania's  Gradual Abolition Act , but not officers of the executive and judicial branches. Washington and other slaveholders  rotated their slaves out of the state  to prevent the slaves from establishing the 6-month residency needed to qualify for  manumission . His slave  Oney Judge  escaped from captivity in Philadelphia, and he gradually replaced most of his slaves in Philadelphia with  indentured servants   who were German immigrants. "This being the case, the Attorney General conceived, that after six months residence, your slaves would be upon no better footing than his. But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretense whatever, be car...

The husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife's adultery. The wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence. (source: French Civil Code, Book I. Title VI. Chapter I. "Of the Causes of Divorce". http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/code/book1/c_title06.html)