Being a philosopher appears to be a dangerous job. Good thing you chose to make a career in machine tools. Much safer.

I know absolutely nothing about Medieval or any other brand of philosophy. Retirement resolution: buy a set of the old black-spined Penguin Classics (used–no more money for Mr. Bezos) and read through them.

Thanks for the video. The washboard player/singer does indeed resemble Trenet, but without the mannerisms. Trenet was what James Ellroy would call a Strange-o. Probably on the spectrum. Anyway, that one made me look up more videos with Adrien Chevalier, including this set beginning with a nice rendition of “I’ve Found A New Baby”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1xyGfnpviA

DNW,

You give me too much credit. I know Boethius by name, but that’s it.”

Put to death by Theodoric, you will recall. Odd, that. I can think of three top “second tier” quasi philosophers who we still esteem today, who were put or forced to death in (more or less) Rome. Cicero (who tried to do actual philosophy), Seneca, and Boethius. There are probably several others as well.

Anyway, the consolations of philosophy aside it is the question of “Universals” taken up again in a late post Aristotelian age which has forgotten the doctrine of “abstraction”; now struggling anew to come to terms with the nature of class terminology, or “that which is predicable on the many” which is of critical continuing interest to us today.

Do universals exist or subsist? Are they in the thing or of the mind only? Are they corporeal or incorporeal? Etc …

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/#OrigSpecMediProbUniv

Hubert on June 16, 2021 at 9:44 am said:

DNW,

You give me too much credit. I know Boethius by name, but that’s it.

Before Bobby Darin’s version of La Mer, there was Charles Trenet’s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fztkUuunI7g

He also did Boum, the big pre-war hit of 1939:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLBFeoikELo

That’s interesting. I had probably seen that Trenet video at some time or another but had forgotten. He looks like the innocent wide-eyed kid pictured on the old Farina hot cereal boxes, grown to adulthood.

Which reminds me of a visual image memory from some links I traded to Aesop Fan, in a comment thread some time ago.

You don’t have to watch the video, but take a glance at the French fellow on the washboard and tell me that there is no rough similarity, to your guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OddALnXIhkE

The fiddle player there, is the highly impressive Adrien Chevalier, and the guitarist is Vinnie Raniola who for years has been Jazz guitarist Frank Vignola’s rhythm guitar accompanist.

Raniola has branched out on his own, as can be seen in the D’Angelico advertisements on YouTube …i.e., “Vinny Raniolo, Vinny Valentino, Adrian Chevalier – “After You Gone” D’Angelico’s Throwbacks”

That was the video that nearly sold Aesop Fan on an archtop. LOL

[ Of interest to guitar players only; as it has lousy sound quality: Frank Vignola, and Vinnie Raniola with onetime childhood prodigy Julian Lage; who, in an impromptu virtuoso display, lights up a prehistoric Gibson L5, which might as well be a plywood cigar box in lesser hands.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ7aYeU5V-w .

You give me too much credit. I know Boethius by name, but that’s it.

Before Bobby Darin’s version of La Mer, there was Charles Trenet’s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fztkUuunI7g

He also did Boum, the big pre-war hit of 1939:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLBFeoikELo

Let’s hear her give a disquisition on the Marxist understanding of the evolution of social systems, on the labor theory of value, or on some like question.

Gilson is new to me. Thanks.

“In 1913, while employed in teaching at the University of Lille, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris on “Liberty in Descartes and Theology”. His career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, as he was drafted into the French Army as a sergeant. He served on the front and took part in the battle of Verdun as second lieutenant. He was captured in February 1916 and spent two years in captivity. During this time he devoted himself to new areas of study, including the Russian language and St. Bonaventure. He was later awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery in action.” – Wikipedia

That’s my kind of guy, and fit company for the trio.

“Gilson considered the philosophy of his own era to be deteriorating into a science which would signal humanity’s abdication of the right to judge and rule nature, humanity made a mere part of nature, which in turn would give the green light for the most reckless of social adventures to play havoc with human lives and institutions.”

Got that part right.

FTR, Sharansky’s writings are the only ones I’ve read, but I certainly admire the others from afar. And FWIW, I voted for Perot/Stockdale in 1992.

When I first lived in HK in the early 90s, experienced a weird kind of inversion of that effect. The Social Construct and Cultural Agglomeration mistakenly labeled the Han Chinese Race by Vicious Nazis named Zaphod amongst others has a propensity toward early onset myopia.

Imagine my surprise seeing two intellectual gentlemen collecting the trash outside my office building. They were both wearing spectacles and being figuratively fresh off the boat, I couldn’t help instinctively promoting them a bunch of rungs up the cognitive ladder and then doing a double take.

Today only the very poor don’t get LASIKed, so it’s not much of a thing anymore – except for noticing more schoolkids wearing specs than would ever see in the West.

Frederick, I also appreciate your notation about the limitations of the evolutionary perspective – it’s something that I hadn’t thought about much, the fact that evolution and selection along those lines are contingent on environment. I guess it becomes fairly easy to forget that context. Following on from your point, I would say that those of us who would (like to) raise children based on some set of older, more classical values may be proceeding on the half-subconscious premise that the worm will turn down the road: that the social or socio-physical environment will at some point flip back into a state in which those values again prove their worth. It may be this that gives some of the folks in this category their motivation to go against the current grain.