The Consolation of Philosophy, Introduction by V.E. Watts part 1

     It appears this introduction was written in the year of my birth, 1967. Watts mentions the obvious importance of the goddess 'Fortuna' in the Consolation and the rest of the middle ages. I know in The Inferno, Virgil talks about 'fortune' as some kind of sub-diety that has control over the fortunes of mortals. We change places with one another in 'rapid permutation'(The Pinsky Translation).  Too often, Virgil says, Fortune is blamed when she should be thanked. Throughout the middle ages and Renaissance Fortune recurs, specifically the since debased 'Wheel of Fortune'. There's a famous line in Hamlet when he's talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where they claim to be in the 'mid' section of fortune, you know, a typical renaissance bawdy reference.
     Boethius had an ambitious plan to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but you know, he was executed before he could finish the Plato part -- easy come easy go. Joking aside, it was through Boethius that Aristotle survived in the West. Also, the big debates between the nominalists and realists in the middle ages come from Boethius' commentary on Porphyry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals
He also set the agenda for what became the forms of medieval education, giving us the term 'quadrivium'.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Responses and some links for my readings of James Baldwin Post 1

My recent reading of James Baldwin has turned into a full-on binge. In order simply to keep up with myself, I'm going to be putting links and thoughts in this blog. The first link below is the YouTube video of the debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, which is a must-see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tek9h3a5wQ Next are two videos of James Baldwin on Dick Cavett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWwOi17WHpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzH5IDnLaBA The next video is an examination of James Baldwin's  No Name in the Street  with Darryl Pinckney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW6KwSE4958
Read more

Waiting For Godot and the Myth of Sisyphus part 1

     I bought the Harold Bloom 'Modern Critical Interpretations' edition for 'Waiting for Godot' and read several of the essays.  All of the essays mention Albert Camus's short essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus', so I figured I would start by looking over this essay and quoting what some of the interpreter's say; this is an essay I first read in high school and it was a poignant experience to read it again as I remember the effect the essay had on me all those years ago.      One of the first things I noticed when I got my old copy of the essay was an underlining I had made in the essay;  I would have done this some time around 1982: "But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed the water and sun, warm stones, and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness."(pg. 88-89) When I recall the bouts with depression, the sense of futility, along with the melodramas of my adolescence, this line, with its emphasis on si
Read more

Derek Parfit -- The Final Entry

After a long, tedious, explanation of what is wrong with various versions of "Subjective Theories", without really dealing with what I would call the 'real problem', nihilism, he talks about Kant. I have to say that I find actually reading the text unbearable.  So, I'm going back to the summary to see if he gives me an argument I can sink my teeth into. So, after skimming through much more tedium I  violated all canons of what is good and decent by going right to the "conclusions" section! Sigh, and here is what I was treated to: "everyone ought always to do whatever would make things go best."(pg. 74)   Let's read that again: "everyone ought always to do whatever would make things go best."(pg. 74)  I need a 600 page book for this? Here's another gem: "When there is only one set of principles that everyone could rationally will to be universal laws, these are the only principles, we can argue, that no one could re
Read more