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Online education as the silver bullet
A recent story on Utah Public Radio reports that the Utah System of Higher Education is projecting an increase of 50,000 additional college students in Utah over the next ten years. That’s huge. And the immediately attractive response – “More online education!” – is not the way to go. Let me be straight: for the… Continue reading
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Oh, look, there’s my navel
I spent yesterday and some of today trolling through old Huenemanniac blogposts, sorting them into new categories and wondering whether there may be a way to assemble them into a vanity-bound collection of musings – perhaps “The Huenemanniad.” The most forceful realization I had while strolling down memory lane is that I have indeed had… Continue reading
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David Hume – the “Assassin’s Assessor”
Edinburgh’s “Poker Club” began meeting in 1762. Each week, fifty or so gentlemen would congregate in a tavern for a long afternoon followed by dinner and argue events of the day ranging from politics to morals and culture – matters like national characters, standards of taste, what makes for a good theatrical tragedy, whether all… Continue reading
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Automata of our own making
[Currently reading Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: the Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard UP, 2011).] Human beings groove on creating things in which they can see themselves. Mirrors, of course – but also cave paintings, sculptures, plays, poems, music, and robots. Each creation brings on an out-of-body experience, as we can see… Continue reading
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On the mistaken view that there is something especially sciency about the so-called scientific method
I heard it again on the radio today as I was driving around. The story was about a new science curriculum to be introduced in public schools. The problem with the existing curriculum is that kids are getting the idea that being a scientist means reading lots of textbooks and memorizing stuff. “They are thinking… Continue reading
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London, 1641
“Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” – Daniel 12:4 London was an exciting place to be in 1641. The political uncertainty was both thrilling and terrifying: many Puritans, convinced that their suspected crypto-catholic king, Charles I, was in league with the Anti-Christ, were pushing back against his high-handed policies. Their… Continue reading
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The early modern craze for titles
As the Republic of Letters expanded in the late 17th/early 18th centuries, gentlemen began to assume titles which were, let’s say, a bit generous. Johann Burkhardt Menke’s Charlatanerie des savans (1715) brings such persons up short – Since the beginning of the Restoration of the Sciences, has not this fury for Titles, & if I dare to… Continue reading
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Idle musings on historical periods
My academic specialty is known among philosophers as “early modern” philosophy, and by that is typically meant a string of canonical figures extending from Descartes to Kant. Before Descartes, philosophy is all medieval (the story goes); after Kant, it is an assortment of heady idealism, existentialism, utilitarianism, and nascent naturalism. (Philosophers mostly disregard the Renaissance… Continue reading
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Comenius’s primer for learning Latin
I recently came across a 1685 English translation of Comenius’s “World of Pictures,” which was a primer aimed at helping children to learn Latin. (Comenius’s original was for German children, but this book was translated by Charles Hoole.) The idea was to give this book to kids and just let them enjoy the pictures and… Continue reading
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Invented languages on Utah Public Radio
I recently had the joy of discussing perfect and invented language on Utah Public Radio with USU Folklorist Lynne McNeill, who, as it turns out, speaks some Klingon. If you are interested Continue reading
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The Fermi Paradox, Mass Effect, and Transhumanism
The Fermi Paradox The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is… Continue reading
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“As One” – a chamber opera
Last night we had the wonderful experience of seeing “As One,” a chamber opera about a transgendered person’s voyage of self-discovery. As a chamber opera, the instrumental music was provided by a string quartet (our resident Fry Street Quartet), the single singing role was shared by a mezzo-soprano and a baritone, and the drama was… Continue reading
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For the love of words
James Turner, Philology (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014). These days we think of “the Humanities” as a natural kind. There are the natural sciences, the social sciences, the creative arts, and the humanities (and then the grab bag of more vocationally-focused areas of expertise, like business, engineering, agriculture, etc). Indeed, university campuses make these seemingly natural… Continue reading
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William James, “The Social Value of the College-Bed” (1907)
The sifting of human creations! —nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of anything and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part.… Continue reading
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Comenius, The Way of Light: “to plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth”
John Amos Comenius, The Way of Light, translated by E. T. Campagnac (The University Press of Liverpool, printed by Hodder & Stoughton (London), 1938). In Via Lucis, vestigata et vestiganda [“The Way of Light,” written in 1641 but not published until 1668], John Amos Comenius proposed to a group of scholars on its way toward becoming the… Continue reading
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Encyclopédie
Philipp Blom, Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, The Book That Changed the Course of History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). A bookseller named André-François Le Breton hired an Englishman named John Mills to translate Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia from English into French in the early 1740s. It turns out that Mills’ fluency in French was rather limited… Continue reading
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Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart
Jan Amos Komensky, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). Originally published in 1623, but again published in 1663 with additions. Comenius writes in the person of a pilgrim who has decided to survey all the walks of life before… Continue reading
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How You Play the Game
The Minecraft book is available now (see right column). It was loads of fun to write, and it was even more fun exploring the game with my son. The whole process of working with Kindle Singles was fun, too. The editor I worked with was very helpful, insightful, and thorough. Continue reading
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Descartes’s new operating system: the “iThink”
There is no text more commonly read in philosophy courses than Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. This is astonishing, given that the work was written well over three centuries ago. To some extent, to be sure, it is so commonly assigned simply because it is so commonly assigned; that is, it is hard to imagine… Continue reading
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