Monthly Archives: April 2016

Alain de Botton

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should. Tame it though we may try, sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch. Sex remains in absurd, and perhaps irreconcilable, conflict with some of our highest commitments and values.

Alain de Botton, How to Think More about Sex, New York, 2013, pp. 5-6

Oliver Kamm

The title of this book encapsulates my reasoning. It’s taken from the English edition of Asterix the Gaul. The indomitable Gaul has just bashed some Roman legionaries. One of the Romans says, dazedly: ‘Vae victo, vae victis.’ Another observes: ‘We decline.’ The caption above this scene of destruction reads: ‘Accidence will happen.’

You have to believe me that this is funny. The first legionary’s Latin phrase means: ‘Woe to the one who has been vanquished, woe to those who have been vanquished.’ The scene is a riff on grammar. It was made up by Anthea Bell, the English translator of the Asterix books. She is my mother and I have stolen her joke. I’ll render it leaden by explaining why it appeals to me. Victo is the dative singular and victis is the dative plural. The legionary is literally declining, in the grammatical sense. The aspect of grammar that deals with declension and conjugation is called accidence.

Oliver Kamm, Accidence Will Happen: the Non-pedantic Guide to English Usage, London, 2015, p. x-xi

Gregory Clark

In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond suggested that geography, botany, and zoology were destiny. Europe and Asia pressed ahead economically, and remained ahead to the present day, because of accidents of geography. They had the kinds of animals that could be domesticated, and the orientation of the Eurasian land mass allowed domesticated plants and animals to spread easily between societies. But there is a gaping lacuna in his argument. In a modern world in which the path to riches lies through industrialization, why are bad-tempered zebras and hippos the barrier to economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa? Why didn’t the Industrial Revolution free Africa, New Guinea, and South America from their old geographic disadvantages, rather than accentuate their backwardness? And why did the takeover of Australia by the British propel a part of the world that had not developed settled agriculture by 1800 into the first rank among developed economies?

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: a Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton, 2007. pp. 13-14

Albert Einstein

Ich bin zwar im täglichen Leben ein typischer Einspänner, aber das Bewusstsein, der unsichtbaren Gemeinschaft derjenigen anzugehören, die nach Wahrheit, Schönheit und Gerechtigkeit streben, hat das Gefühl der Vereinsamung nicht aufkommen lassen.

Albert Einstein, ‘Mein Glaubensbekenntnis’, 1932

Robin Hanson

[A]s a blog author, while I realize that blog posts can be part of a balanced intellectual diet, I worry that I tempt readers to fill their intellectual diet with too much of the fashionably new, relative to the old and intellectually nutritious. Until you reach the state of the art, and are ready to be at the very forefront of advancing human knowledge, most of what you should read to get to that forefront isn’t today’s news, or even today’s blogger musings. Read classic books and articles, textbooks, review articles. Then maybe read focused publications (including perhaps some blog posts) on your chosen focus topic(s).

Robin Hanson, Read a Classic, Overcoming Bias, June 28, 2010

Nicholas Rescher

Since his philosophical writing adopted selflessness and self-abnegation, whereas Schopenhauer himself led the life of a self-centered curmudgeon in affluent comfort, the charge of hypocrisy and inconsistency was made against him.

Schopenhauer replied that it sufficed for a philosopher to examine the human condition and determine the best form of life for man: that he should also provide an example of it in his own proceedings was asking far too much.

Schopenhauer vividly illustrates the irony of the human condition where all too often the intellect acknowledges the advantage of going where the will is unwilling to follow. And since this tension between intellect and will was the keystone of his philosophy, Schopenhauer’s proceedings did perhaps manage after all to provide that example of living by one’s doctrine.

Nicholas Rescher, A Journey Through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes, Pittsburgh, 2015, p. 167

Timothy Gallwey

The problems which most perplex tennis players are not those deal- ing with the proper way to swing a racket. Books and professionals giving this information abound. Nor do most players complain excessively about physical limitations. The most common com- plaint of sportsmen ringing down the corridors of the ages is, “It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s that I don’t do what I know!”

Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis, New York, 1974, p. 13