Up from Silence, Reading what I barely understand, barely understood generously. Martin Krieger

I've not posted much here, since I have not been reading books per se. Lots of detective novels, mostly forgettable but pleasureable. But mostly reading stuff for my research projects. I am doing a revision of my Doing Mathematics, and so I have been trying to understand stuff from the last 15 years. Most of this is well beyond the edge of my understanding. But I see that Edward Frenkel (Berkeley, Mathematics) has many parallels to what concerns me, the famous Andre Weil letter to his sister Simone providing an account of the connection of geometry/analysis with arithmetic and function theory* being on his mind, as well as mine.

Frenkel is working, really working, within the Langlands Program. I just know lots about various practical solutions to the Ising model in two-dimensions--a very nice model of nearest neighbors influencing each other within a general environment characterized by a temperature that causes the individuals to ignore their neighbors' interactions with them---at low temperatures, the ignoring is much weaker and neighbors really do influence each other, dramatically.

My other reading is preparing for my course on defense policy. Much of the literature here is ideological and not meant to be balanced. (Even) The professors have their idees fixes, since in part they may have public roles in which they have a particular point of view where subtlety would  be taken as weakness.

What's funny for me about the math and physics I have been reading is how far it is from the way I was taught 40-50 years ago. Quantum field theory has become more complex to deal with what nature sends our way, or invent ways that nature might work (eg supersymmetry), while at the same time we have a very robust model, the standard model of nature, that we could not imagine when I finished graduate school in the late 60s. Better put, we could imagine how systematic and organized the story could be, although it is just like electromagnetism, where "just like" is of course is saying that we see in the current theory an echo of Maxwell's account.

MK

* Recall from high school that

geometry:  sin (x + pi)=sin x and that undulating curve that is the sine function
function theory: sin (2x)=2 (sin x) (cosine x) 
and number theory: that sin x = x + x^3/3! + x^5/5! and so forth, so that the sin function packages, so to speak, the factorials of the odd numbers.

Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Life by Fabrizio Armerini

Those interested in ethics and public policy have to grapple with the problem of when life begins or ends.  A good deal of the Christian doctrine comes from the thought of Thomas Aquinas.  I am a newbie to reading about all of it because I skipped over a lot of the reading in my western civ class on Aquinas, thinking him a bore.  As a result, I wasn't terribly well prepared to read this book,  from Harvard University Press. This is a translation by Mark Henniger, who is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown.

This is a  technical bit of philosophy, and a person who really wants to understand it should have paid more attention to Aristotle on the soul than I ever did. Thus, I am struggling. The argument goes something like this: the life begins at conception, but what is present is a vegetative soul; the progression from vegitative to sensitive soul would take longer; this sensitive or animal soul consumes the vegetative soul in becoming itself.  Then, of course, the soul becomes rationalized, in shorter order (natch) for men than women.

The key point is just how deeply these ideas influence our understanding of abortion.  On the one hand, even among those who treat abortion as a very grave wrong, it is usually treated as something less than straight homicide (not always).  That appears to be straight out of Thomist philosophy. Amerini's contribution here is to contest the claim that had Aquinas had our contemporary understanding of genetics, Acquinas would have modified his position in favor of seeing the moment of union as the time life begins, not conception.  Amerini is not convinced that the science would have changed Acquinas' mind on much.

  Inevitably the parts of Thomism that most fascinate contemporary readers concern the first question: about when life begins. Nonetheless, I found myself more interested in the second question: Acquinas on when life ends, largely because I knew nothing.  Here you have the three major points: First, that all parts of a person end, in a unified manner. That is, when the body shuts down, the soul itself has no further need of it. Second, that there is a practical unity to life such that there is a singular end to it, and third, that death is the same for all that lives.

I'm in no way convinced I have that right. I am going to have to reread and learn more.

Gardening books read over the summer

I love to garden, and I'm a sucker for garden books.  If there is any possible way you can have a dithery Miss Marple-ish lady solving mysteries while pottering around in her rose garden, I'm totally buying and reading that book.  But I also read just general gardening books. Three that I have read this summer are listed here. All of them are excellent.

Two Gardeners: Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence--A Friendship in Letters

The collected letters of two gardeners, one an editor at the New Yorker and the other one of the original writers about southern US gardens. Both women are delightful.  One is lured into buying even more hellebores  for one's north-house beds. 

One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place by Susan Hanson and Jane Roy Brown

A sumptuous, beautifully researched book about Eudora Welty's magnificent garden.  Buy the hardcopy of this one, as the photographs are so worth having. 

Tell about Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters, 1940-1949 

The most wonderful book of the lot, which is saying something, because they are all wonderful.  I fervently wish I could write letter to Eudora Welty about my garden. 

I had a deadline for a book chapter that I simply ignored in favor of reading this book. 

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

I have to admit to being a Bart Ehrman fan before writing any more. As celebrity academics go, I find that he uses his celebrity both self-interestedly (selling books) but also altruistically: he wants to keep people focused on  what the historical record of early Christianity is rather than letting myth an popular faith rule the world unchallenged.  One gets the impression listening to him that, like the very best of scholars, he's a giant nerd who loves nothing so much as discussing ideas.  Another positive: he publishes both scholarly books and popular books back and forth. Most who reach his status give up the former and concentrate on the latter. But Ehrman will send one book to Oxford University Press and the next to HarperOne. That I find very impressive, indeed. 

I have read just about all of his books, and this new one strikes me as less well done than the others, only because the organization at the front of the book lacks his usual brevity.   There is a very nice section that explains what historians are looking for--multiple, independent, disinterested  sources, and how with ancient history, we must often settle for interested sources and the like.  But the first part of the book is slow, with far too much repetition of the same sources and the same arguments.  The historical case that Jesus existed is fairly straightforward: we have more independent sources about Jesus than we have on a bunch of other people, including Socrates. I think what weighs down the first part of the book may not be Ehrman's fault. He is trying to give a fair description of the arguments that Jesus did not exist, and those are arguments tend to be labored and founded on a great deal of speculation, and there's no way to present them without going into rather a lot of detail.  It may also be that of the various things Ehrman writes about, I'm most familiar with the historical Jesus and so none of his discussion is all that new.

In any case, the book is worth being patient with until you get to the last sections, which I found much more interesting than the first, and for this marvelous bit:

Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and our own purposes. 

 Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world.  He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise.  He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life.  He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy.  He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of  social security, food stamps, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy) or the welfare state.  

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girlls by Anton DiSclafani is one of those books that is making the rounds of summer reading lists. I had trouble getting into this one: I spent the first few chapters getting progressively grouchier: of course this is a young woman who has been sent from home, and there is supposedly a big mystery about the bad thing she did, and of course this will be trouble with a boy given the Depression-era time period, and these are annoying rich southern people...snore, right?

But while it's trouble with a boy, it's a lot more than that.

The writing kept me going at first; the author is an exceptional prose stylist, and the first person perspective here actually works.  Eventually, I did begin to care about his subject, a wealthy young lady who just want want what she wants, whether it's horses or boys, and who honestly does not understand why wanting is wrong.  She has plenty of edge.  There are additional layers to the mystery that involve within-family class distinctions, as well as class systems among the wealthy girls, played out against the regional hierarchies within the south. Given the Wagnerian drama wrapped up in the latter, one really can't blame any of these young women for preferring horses to people.

Finally, I don't often come across writing about horses and human-horse interaction that even gets remotely close to what riding is like for people who really like--and understand--horses. This book does, and it's worth it to to get inside the head of a young woman who really does love the act of riding.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

So every so often I read a book that is so creepy that I don't really know why I read it in the first place. This was one of those. Arthur Machen was, according to Wikipedia, which knows All Things, a mystic as well as a writer, and this is a well-known novella of his published in 1890. The scene begins, as so much Victorian fiction does, with a scientist who is all arrogance and know-it-all-ness. He has raised a young woman on whom he performs an experiment designed to 'open the mind to all things.'  The scene in which he describes his 'right' to do this is appalling to a  modern reader. I wonder if it was to Victorian?  Either way, she comes out of her reverie both physically and mentally damaged. The rest of the story centers on the panic and pain that this experiment unleashed in to the world.

I can't write any more without some serious spoilers, so I'll stop, but let's just say it's all freaky and worth reading if you like things that make you lose sleep because a) wondering what the heck happened in this story and b) still being scared out of your bejeezus even though you never quite figure out (a).

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, edited by Thomas Pangle

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic  Dialogues has some hyperbole about its in the title.  I don't really think these dialogues have been forgotten, per se. They have been contested, and the point of introductory essay by Thomas Pangle. In it, he describes all the form criticism that has gone to trying to figure out if these minor dialogues really are Plato's.  He makes the sensible conclusion that ancient compilers included them in Plato's corpus, and that probably should be good enough for us.  The other bit of over-reach in the title concerns the idea that these somehow are the root of political philosophy. That's not the over-arching theme of the book; only one of the essays--the one by Christopher Bruell on The Lovers, really tries to make the connection between political philosophy as a practice and the Socratic dialogue here.  But, it's Socrates, and he's root enough for political philosophy for me.  The Table of Contents is always useful:


HIPPARCHUS translated by Steven Forde
The Political Philospher in Democratic Society: the Socratic View by Allan Bloom

MINOS translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Minos by Leo Strauss

LOVERS translated by James Leake
On the original meaning of Political Philosophy: An interpretation of Plato's Lovers by Christopher Bruell

CLEITOPHON translated by Clifford Orwin
On the Cleitophon by Clifford Orwin

THEAGES translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Theages by Thomas L. Pangle

LACHES translated by James H Nichols Jr
Introduction to the Laches by James H Nichols Jr

ALCIBIADES, translated by Carnes Lord
On the Alcibiades I by Steven Forde

LESSER HIPPIAS translated by James Leake
Introduction to the Lesser Hippias by James Leake

GREATER HIPPIAS translated by David R Sweet
Introduction to the Greater Hippias by David R Sweet

ION translated by Allan Bloom
An Interpretation of Platos Ion by Allan Bloom

I'm not a very well-disciplined reader of Plato; Aristotle is a huge struggle for me and I always carefully plod through, but I generally find Plato to be playful and often very funny in the way that he depicts all these characters in the dialogue, and while you are probably meant to browse and pick and choose in a book like this, I honestly couldn't tell you what to skip. I read straight through.  I found a great deal of interesting things in the Cleitophon and Clifford Orwin's discussion of it, as well as the commentaries from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In fact, I found Bloom's essays so useful I'm rather tempted to read his polemic The Closing of the American Mind to see if it's more than just a standard polemic about the cannon and the various threats to it.