Book XIX of the Iliad is all talk. This annoys Achilles, but is important for Agamemnon and Odysseus, and they should know better—Odysseus even says so.
Achilles gets ready to fight while Patroclus lies dead
(or, one of two well-fed street-dogs goes through the motions of defense)
Şalcıkır Parkı, Tarabya
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Sunday morning, March 26, 2023
Each of us has two biological parents. In my case, those parents are not my real parents, namely the ones who raised me. Nonetheless, according to the theory that everybody seems to accept, including myself, each of us has grown up from a zygote, which was formed by the union of two gametes. Moreover, one of those gametes was an egg cell; the other, a sperm cell. The gametes came from gonads: an ovary and testis, respectively. Ovaries are possessed by females of our species; testes, by males. Being female or male is called sex.
We are also distinguished, when children, as being boys or girls. Boys grow up to be men; girls, women.
It is usually assumed that men are male and women are female. Some of us may insist that this is always so, by definition of the words in question. In that case, I will argue,
When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in the UK on June 26, 1997, the author was almost thirty-two. I myself had been that age since March. The seventh Harry Potter book came out ten years later. Though I do not remember when I heard that the series had become a sensation, I know I wondered if one day I would see for myself what made the books so popular.
Now I have read the first two books in the series, in part because their author has become popular as a figure of hatred for people who adored her books as children.
To this post, I am adding this introduction in July 2021. I have returned to some of the ideas of the post, and I see that I left them in a jumble. They may still be that, but I am trying to straighten up a bit.
Beyond this introduction, the post has three parts. Part III takes up more than half of the whole post and consists of my notes on
In Anderson’s article I see – as I note below – ideas that are familiar, thanks to my previous reading of philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig. Henry David Thoreau may not exactly be one of those philosophers, but he is somehow why I came to write this post in the first place.
Here is a table of contents for the whole post:
This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of
I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.
A lot of old PSA’s about drugs are on YouTube and the Web Archive, and sometimes they are linked to by articles that ridicule them. There is one that I have not been able to find, perhaps from around 1970, in which parents confront their teenager with the drug paraphernalia that they have found in his room. The boy storms out of the house, saying, “You don’t understand!”
There’s a lot that I don’t understand. I must not, since it seems childish, but is coming from adults. Some of these adults stormed the US Capitol the other day; others encourage them; still others are professors of philosophy.
“Human egg and sperm cells.”
Asimov’s New Guide to Science (1984), page 600
Mathematics “has no generally accepted definition,” according to Wikipedia today. Two references are given for the assertion. I suggest that what really has no generally accepted definition is the subject of mathematics: the object of study, what mathematics is about. Mathematics itself can be defined by its method. As Wikipedia currently says also,
it has become customary to view mathematical research as establishing truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions.
I would put it more simply. Mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction.
That is my definition. It has only the word “science” in common with a dictionary definition:
Content warning: suicide.
The following sentence is bold in the last paragraph of an essay: “the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real.” I don’t know what the writer means by this. As far as I can tell, as a biological concept used for explaining reproduction, sex has two kinds or parts or sides or aspects, and the essay tacitly affirms this; at the same time, obviously persons called transgender exist.
☾ ♂ ☿ ♃ ♀ ♄ ☉
The title of the essay is a command: “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia.” I can support that. I don’t even need the qualifier “phony.” If transphobia is the kind of morbid fear suggested by the suffix “-phobia,” then science ought to help dispel this, not promote it.
One might also just say, Stop using phony science.
A certain thesis is reasonable to me, and yet it would seem to anger persons whom I wish to respect. I am trying to understand why it does.
The hypothesis of the homunculus in the sperm
by Nicolaas Hartsoeker, 1695
Perhaps the manner of expression of the thesis is the problem. Thus one person tweets:
A human being was once a man. A female of the species was a wife; a male, a were. The word “were” was used in werewolf, but also were-eld, which became our “world.” Our word "woman" comes from wife-man.
That is roughly the history, which I shall review later in a bit more detail. It would be a fallacy to think the history told us how we must use the words “woman” and “man” today. The history does suggest what may happen again: in a world dominated by men, a word like “person,” intended for any human being, may come to have its own meaning dominated by men. Yet again, this is no reason not to try to make our language better.
Polytropy 