Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

“When at last he emerged, tarred and feathered by sleep, the phone escaped his grasp like a sliver of soap…”

Despite the familiar questions, there are few topics more baffling than that of accounting for probability. A fundamental question is whether we talk about probability because it is an objective con- stituent of the world or only because we are ignorant of what is go- ing to happen. In other words, is the future intrinsically uncertain, or is uncertainty merely the product of our human limitations?

Russell and the early W. believed that everyday language obscures its underlying logical structure. "The King of France is bald" is a proposition whose logical structure is not immediately apparent on the surface. Language is a covering, like clothing to the body. A baggy jumper may disguise the shape inside. W. II did not take this view: he believed that language is in perfect working order— it hides nothing.

In 1936, Popper was present as a guest at a meeting of the Aristotelian Society where Russell was the speaker. He intervened, but the audience took his remarks as a joke, greeting them with laughter and clapping. 40 years later he wrote, ‘I wonder whether there was anybody there who suspected that not only did I seriously hold these views, but that, in due course, they would widely be regarded as commonplace.’

“Wittgenstein accused Carnap of plagiarism — a crime that he was always scenting and that he believed was actually com- pounded in this case by Carnap's acknowledgment in the book of the debt he owed Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein responded, "I don't mind a small boy's stealing my apples, but I do mind his saying that I gave them to him”

“For an imperial capital that at its zenith ruled over Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Italians, Galicians, Slovenes, Serbs and Croats —and Austrians— Vienna was a surprisingly tight-knit city.”

?

Ukrainians. They’re Ukrainians. Ruthenians, if you must, but Galicians is not an ethnicity.

(Yes, I understand that Habsburg Galicia includes Poles, but those are mentioned by name)

“‘If a person tells me he has been to the worst of places I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know that he is a fraud.’”

“…there need be no rivalry between beauty and goodness if an artwork is good when and because it is beautiful. If art succeeds artistically insofar as it is populated by complex characters, and it succeeds ethically insofar as it resists the lure of caricature, then aesthetic success is moral success.”

“Perhaps to Perry and Emba, who do not seem to put much stock in pleasure, a lifetime of renunciation does not sound so grueling. But it occurs to me, who prefers to eat when I am hungry, to ask: Why not effect the sort of political change that would in turn improve our tastes, thereby rendering self-regulation needless? In other words, why not fight for the possibility of ethical pleasure?”

„David French does [Emba] the favor of clarifying in an approving missive about her book in his Atlantic newsletter. “Sex without love is a danger to human hearts,” he cautions—as if sex with love, or love itself, posed no danger.”

"...It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy, which can be dismissed as the petty province of small-minded technocrats. What is rigor but a liberal affectation, a needle pricking at the exalted balloon of Big Ideas?”

"Deneen, whose book appeared on Obama’s annual reading list in 2018, is canny enough to understand that he cannot follow his premises to their authoritarian conclusions without ceding all claim to legitimacy. It is no mystery that he continues to trade in sensibility and evocation—a whiff of woodsmoke here, a flash of picket fencing there—and not in details about policy..."

“[Deneen] is representative in his resistance to tracing the concrete contours of the world he would prefer to the supposed disenchantments of liberalism,perhaps because clarity would invite critique (or ridicule). It is all well and good to bluster about the beauty of marriage, but in practice, the only way to ensure that people who do not want to get married do so despite their antipathy is to mandate the practice"

“The thirteenth-century canoness Juliana of Cornillon told nurses and family members who entreated her to eat that she was saving herself for “better and more beautiful food.” Aren’t we all? But until we ascend to the celestial restaurant, I recommend bingeing to bursting. If it is never enough, try to love that about it. Try to savor the slivers of salvation hidden in all that hideous hunger.”

“[Susan Sontag] is vehement that Persona is not an erotic movie, about which I think she could not be more mistaken. What does eroticism consist in if not the impossible urge to smash through the skin and reach all the way to the beloved’s bloody core?”