“to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.” --Jane Austen

A gift that I received today

Somehow I don't think that I will be opening this email from a stranger.

The personality of man stands and falls with his capacity to grasp truth. --Robert Spaemann

"Mowing" by Robert Frost

Quick, before it vanishes

New additions to the shelf of gifts from kind former students

It is of course possible to regard reliance on poetic devices such as classical disjecta membra, repetitive phrasing, declarative statements about ordinary experience, abstract claims lightly tinged with surrealism, monologue-style insights that purport to be artifacts of introspection, and, on occasion, colored type as being wildly original or experimental. But doing so requires ignorance of the history of modern poetry. These are established conventions that have been deployed and developed since the dawn of modernism. They can still be used in interesting ways, but they are traditional. The assumption that poetry’s value lies in experimental novelty is itself quaint. Some of these techniques are over a hundred years old and have been used by poets holding a range of political views. Whatever the merits or defects of a given poetic corpus might be, they are not usefully assessed with uncritical deference to the notion that a poem is of interest simply because it deploys the conventions of experimentalism.

"Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas

Some days have more awkwardness to them than others. As you may guess from my writing this, today is one of those days.

Nothing particularly notable about this scene except that it is a beautiful day

Aristotle argues that the capacity to argue about the just and the advantageous distinguishes humans from other animals. To say that there is nothing special about us is not an argument but an unsupported observation, and it only makes sense inside the distinctive human practice of argumentation. Other animals do not originate the claim that they are or are not special relative to humans. Prompted text that echoes the claim is not the same activity. More broadly, words that circulate because argument exists do not themselves amount to argument, any more than popular opinion that depends on argumentation is itself argumentation. If logos is merely an evolved function and therefore implementable, that has not been shown. One might project its implementation on the basis of a guess, a belief, or a vision, but the imitation of logos is not evidence of the capacity for it.

Some Thoughts on the Essay in the NYT today on writing and thinking in the academy: I am not sure whom he is refuting. He writes: “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.” What is that “only” doing there? I do not know a single professor at my research university who thinks that students learn to think "only" by writing, including colleagues who teach in the writing program. Many of them believe that writing serves to prompt thinking and to refine it. Some view writing as a necessary evil or a chore and posit that the writing happens after the thinking. He does not consider the relationship between research and writing or even the possibility that few papers are primarily vehicles for "thinking" per se. One purpose of a research university is to produce research. If research is not published, the only people who learn from it are those in the room when the findings are reported, or those who later watch a recording. In the sciences, one cannot communicate data wholly by speaking. Undergraduates who belong to labs work on papers with their groups. And math requires notation. Writing is one way of giving thinking a public face that persists after the speaker has fallen silent. This is not to discount the priority of speaking in the learning process. The venerable tradition of privileging orality is still with us. There is a reason why many honors exams, qualifying exams, and dissertation defenses are still oral. And beyond the academy, our increasingly post-literate culture does not foster skills in writing or reading. For his part, Socrates famously favored speaking as the medium of philosophizing and treated poetry as a comparatively popular art. But Plato depicts him as having built the tension between writing and speaking into the inquiry itself. Hence Socrates and his interlocutors search for justice in big letters and small letters—in the city and in the soul. You can't get big letters and small letters without writing. His very metaphor is grounded in writing. A more accurate title for the NYT piece would have been: “I Don’t Know How Writing Works in Academic Contexts Other Than My Own.”

Ostensibly my delivered package but could be anything