Archive for February, 2026
Saturday, February 28th, 2026
Plato’s simile in Republic 508-9 can be summarised as follows:
The Form of the Good
The Sun
Intelligible world
Visible world
Source of Truth or Reality(508e)
Yields (508e)
1. Truth or reality to intelligibilia
2. Power of knowing to mind
Thus (508e)
1. Not knowing but cause of knowing
2. Known by the knowing it causes
Source of light (508a)
Yields
1. Visibility ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Saturday, February 28th, 2026
Plato’s analogy in Republic 509d-511e can be summarised as follows.
Line segments
A
B
C
D
Realm
Intelligible (νοητος) (509d)
Visible (ορατος) (509d)
Objects
Forms (511c) – considered in their relationship to the Good.
The First Principle of things. (511a, b)
The unassumed.
Forms – NOT considered in their relationship to the Good
Assumptions, mathematical postulates. (510c-511b)
Living beings, plants, artificial things. (510a, e)
Models, drawings ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2026
The explosion in exoplanet discoveries has revealed that the Solar System is very far from a typical stellar system, and a need has arisen for a categorization of planetary types that includes far more than the kinds of planets found orbiting the Sun. To form these classification appeal has been ...
Posted in Space | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2026
According to the poetic corpus itself, poems such as Beowulf were typically performed in front of the lord in his feasting hall by a scop, roughly equivalent to the ON skald. There are those who doubt the reality outside literature of this class of persons, but the evidence of all ...
Posted in Art, History, Texts | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2026
In discussion, a friend proposed that the use of the via negativa might be defended even if it lacks logical or rational justification by supposing that there is an ‘aura’ that is associated with certain words and which remains when they have been definitionally negated in pursuit of some ‘deeper’ ...
Posted in Language, Religion | No Comments »
Thursday, February 26th, 2026
We do not generally think that it is acceptable to discuss a thing only in terms of what that thing is not, or in terms of what qualities may not be used to characterize it. Nor do we typically think it reasonable to declare that comprehension of some important concept ...
Posted in Religion | No Comments »
Thursday, February 26th, 2026
Hilary Putnam claimed as a consequence of the causal-descriptive semantic theory, that if you were a brain in a vat then you could never think that you were a brain in a vat, let alone say it, because the terms would fail to be properly causally connected to the things ...
Posted in Language, Religion | No Comments »
Saturday, February 21st, 2026
A post on the Althouse blog discussing the Vogue cover of ‘Dr’ Jill Biden compared it to the figure of Catherine in a painting by Raphael.
She commented that
Catherine's hands do not hang limply at her sides. They are expressive of ecstasy and placed in locations that would seem truly odd ...
Posted in Art | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 18th, 2026
There is a fundamental sociological interest in the infrastructure or social conditions that facilitate the distribution of information in a society. Unfortunately, treatments of the ‘Flow of Information’ in the context of sociological or organizational theory typically refer to the ‘information channels’ that play that role with minimal if any ...
Posted in Sociology | No Comments »
Friday, February 13th, 2026
An important aspect of communication relates to the transfer of information, but the treatment of information as a sociological phenomenon cannot be limited to its associations with communication alone: of equal importance are questions of creation, access, accumulation, transformation, function, social effect, etc. To address such issues, we will need ...
Posted in Sociology | No Comments »