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Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written. |
✖ Via “Partial Magic in the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, reproduced in Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings, tr. by James East Irby, New Directions Publishing, 2007, p. 196 This could be read as an epigraph to Bertrand Russell’s type theory. |
• Jun 11, 2010 link notes tagged:
art
book
novel
fiction
author
spectator
reader
theater
representation
reflexivity
self-consciousness
type
token
class
logic
Russell
Borges
map
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Willard Van Orman Quine wrote his doctoral thesis on a 1927 Remington typewriter, which he used ever since. However, he “had an operation on it” to change a few keys to accommodate special symbols. “I found I could do without the second period, the second comma – and the question mark.” “You don’t miss the question mark?” “Well, you see, I deal in certainties. |
✖ Via A Brief History of The Paradox: philosophy and the labyrinths of the mind by Roy A. Sorensen, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 349. About Willard Van Orman Quine: “Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as “Van”) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continuously affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, 1956–78. A recent poll conducted among philosophers named Quine as one of the five most important philosophers of the past two centuries.” (wikipedia) |
• May 24, 2010 link notes reblogged from fuckyeahphilosophy [via] tagged:
communication
logic
grammar
Quine
paradox
certainty
uncertainty
anxiety
anguish
order
chaos
