This morning's Lull Report …

… courtesy of Dave Lull:



… Time to switch Hume: Edward Feser: A world of pure imagination.

… Hume essentially collapses both intellect and sensation into imagination. Start with intellect. Hume, like Berkeley, reduces concepts to mental images together with general names. Ever since Wittgenstein’s critique of classical empiricism, it seems generally to have been acknowledged among analytic philosophers that this account of concepts is hopeless, but any Scholastic could have told them the same. And this mistake of Hume’s underlies his accounts of causation, substance, and other basic metaphysical notions. The suggestion that we have no clear concept of causal connection, substance, etc. only seems plausible if we think of having a concept of these things as a matter of being able to form some kind of mental image of them. Once that assumption is abandoned, the force of the arguments dissipates. And the knowledge of arithmetic and geometry available even to a child suffices to show just how stupid the assumption is. To have the concept of a triangle is not a matter of having any sort of mental image, since what we can imagine is only ever this or that particular sort of triangle rather than triangularity in the abstract. Nor is it to have an image of the word “triangle,” since that word is only contingently connected with what it refers to. (To have the concept triangle is to have the very same thing Euclid had, even though he did not know the English word “triangle.”) Similarly, knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 is not a matter of forming images of the shapes “2,” “+,” etc., since those symbols too are only contingently related to the strictly unimaginable realities they name.

… FYI — The Contemporary Literature & Faith Debate: Weblinks.



… Not really: Is the literary world elitist?

The reader who found a writer’s use of “crepuscular” to be elitist wasn’t just annoyed at stumbling across a word he didn’t recognize and being made to take the trouble of looking it up. As Catton herself points out, when you’re reading online, the definitions of words are extremely easy to get. It seems doubtful the reader was, as Catton seems to think, put off by the “inconvenience” of this. Rather, I surmise, he was angry because the Paris Review piece made him feel ignorant.

But that's the reader's problem, not literature's. The doors to literature are open to any who choose to enter. True, the literary world has its share of snobs, but again, that's not literature's fault. By the way, gray squirrels are crepuscular, and they are hardly elitist.

… Psst:  A Peek Into Robert Frost's Mail.

… It seems that Hemingway wasn't always Hemingwayesque: HEMINGWAY TAKES THE HEMINGWAY TEST.

… More on the economics of publishing: Comparing self-publishing to being published is tricky and most of the data you need to do it right is not available.



… Now the academy may well be elitist, givens the sense of superiority so many of inhabitants display: ‘Behind Metaphor, More Metaphor’.

Ultimately Professor Lakoff’s view, if I have him aright, is deeply pessimistic. If it is true that it is pointless for liberals to argue from the evidence, it must also be pointless for conservatives to do likewise. Prejudice is all, reason nothing. There can be no resolution of dispute or disagreement except by dishonest manipulation at best and force at worst.