That is the new title of my revised paper (formerly titled “Homer’s Hellenic Humanism“); it’s posted in full below the fold:
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In Defense of Thersites
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Tagged achilles, classics, greek-mythology, homer, the-iliad, thersites
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Wikipedia Wednesday: Meiji Restoration
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration
The Meiji era (“enlightened rule”) was officially declared by Japan’s 122nd emperor, Meiji, on this day (23 October) in 1868. It was during Meiji’s reign, which lasted until 30 July 1912, that Japan was transformed from a poor and secluded feudal society into a prosperous industrialized nation.
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Twitter Tuesday: Homer and A.I. Workshop
I just signed up to attend this virtual workshop on “Homer and Artificial Intelligence”!
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Citing Jorge Luis Borges
That is the title of this intriguing paper by Wes Henricksen, a law professor at Barry University in my neck of the woods: Orlando, Florida. His paper (see also here), which was just published in the British Journal of American Legal Studies, not only cites my work on “Gödel’s Loophole“; it contains a comprehensive listing of all references to Jorge Luis Borges in the scholarly legal literature. Below is the full abstract of Professor Henrickson’s beautiful new paper:
The works and ideas of Jorge Luis Borges have had a major impact on literature, movies, art, philosophy, and pop culture. His influence in these areas has been documented and studied. To date, however, there has been no significant effort to catalog or discuss the impact Borges has had on legal scholarship. The impact is significant. Hundreds of law journal articles, essays, and book reviews reference Borges and his work. For instance, authors have used Borges stories as a lens through which to analyze legal doctrines and developments. Others have quoted Borges to help convey particular ideas or principles. This paper aims to identify all references to Borges and his work in the legal scholarly literature, and to analyze the ways authors rely on Borges to determine the nature and extent of Borges’s influence on legal scholarship. My aim is primarily to evaluate the scholarly treatment as a whole, rather than focus on individual cases. As such, I have attempted to compile a comprehensive list of Borges references in the legal scholarship to date. If I have omitted any scholarly works that should be included, please let me know and I will happily add them.
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Junkyard art
Via Kottke: “Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.”
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My interpretation of the hawk/nightingale fable
In my previous post, I presented two standard interpretations of the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod’s 8th-century B.C. poem Works and Days. Today, I will offer my own novel interpretation of this fable. Specifically, what if the fable is an allegory about eternal conflict between making a living and producing lasting art, a conflict that describes the arc of Hesiod’s own life and work, the daily toil that kept him from perfecting and devoting himself to his poetic craft. For starters, Works and Days begins with a hymnic invocation to the Muses calling on them to sing of their father Zeus (lines 1-11), so perhaps the nightingale represents these “Pierian Muses.” (line 1) But what does the hawk represent? According to the introduction to my old edition of Works and Days (pp. 14-15), Hesiod was a promising poet in his youth, but he had to go back to farming after he had some “legal troubles” with his brother, and then “the daily grind [of farming for a living] almost obscured his talents forever …” So, maybe the hawk represents the sands of time. We have only a limited amount of time to make our mark on the world. We don’t know when our time will come–when the hawk of death will swoop us away–but in the meantime we can either make a living or we can strive to create great art like Homer or Hesiod in order to be remembered after we leave the scene. Like the nightingale clutched in the talons of the hawk, we cannot escape our mortality; our time to shine is fleeting …
Two interpretations of the hawk-nightingale fable
I introduced the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in my previous post. Today, I will ask, What is the moral of Hesiod’s beautiful bird fable? Alas, there is no holy grail, no single meaning or interpretation that everyone agrees on. The problem here is not just the multiplicity of possible meanings; rather, it is that even the best or most plausible interpretations of Hesiod’s fable operate at different levels of generality.
By way of example, one possible “micro” interpretation of the fable casts Hesiod as the nightingale and his brother Perses as the hawk. In the third verse of Works and Days (lines 37-44), for example, Hesiod refers to some legal troubles he had with his brother Perses, to whom the poem is dedicated. Although they had agreed to split their disputed property in half (line 39), Hesiod implies that Perses was able to “grab[] the larger part” (line 40) by bribing the “lords” who heard their case (lines 41-42), so on this view, the fable is an allegory of the corrupt legal system where judges put their private interests over justice (Hubbard 1995, pp. 161-162), while Hesiod’s act of composing his poem is like the nightingale’s song or “minstrel’s lovely voice” (line 210), while Perses act of grabbing the larger part of the family estate is like the hawk clutching its prey.
The “macro” interpretation, by contrast, is that the fable is an iron age allegory to illustrate the fate of the fifth race of man, the race of iron. (lines 176-202) After all, the fable immediately follows Hesiod’s description of this fifth age and race, and Hesiod tells us that “Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men.” (line 184) On this fatalistic view of the fable, Zeus is the hawk and man is the nightingale. Yet another possible “macro” interpretation is that the fable is an allegory for divine justice: the hawk is “far-seeing Zeus” (line 176), while the metaphorical nightingale stands for corrupt public officials “who judge dishonestly and swallow bribes” (line 220). (Cf. Nelson 1997, p. 235, footnote omitted: “There is another possibility. As M. Skafte Jensen and others have suggested, Hesiod may mean us to see the helpless party not as himself in the clutch of the kings, but as the kings in the clutch of Zeus.”)
So, how should we decide among these competing “micro” and “macro” interpretations of Hesiod’s hawk-nightingale fable? I will share my preferred interpretation in my next post …
Wikipedia Wednesday: the hawk and the nightingale
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hawk_and_the_Nightingale
A fable is a short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral, and one of the earliest recorded fables in the Western literary canon, if not the first, is the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod’s 8th-century B.C. poem Works and Days (lines 203-215). Below is the original version of Hesiod’s fable:
And now, for lords who understand, I’ll tell
A fable: once a hawk, high in the clouds,
Clutched in his claws a speckled nightingale.
She, pierced by those hooked claws, cried, ‘Pity me!’
But he made scornful answer: ‘Silly thing.
Why do you cry? Your master holds you fast,
You’ll go where I decide, although you have
A minstrel’s lovely voice, and if I choose, I’ll have you for a meal, or let you go.
Only a fool will match himself against a stronger party, for he’ll only lose,
And be disgraced as well as beaten.’ Thus
Spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.
Hesiod, Works and Days
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Suspend the Nobel prize in economics
The Swedes have brushed aside the great Thomas Sowell yet again …
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prior probability 