USUPhilosophy

There’s an interesting post on the Journal of the History of Ideas blog about Jerome’s own chronology of the world, and how it reflected the uncertainty of his times. And the Oxford University Press offers a review of one of their recent books about the life of Jerome – excerpt:

But is there a way to combine Dürer’s idealised picture of Jerome with the one outlined by Kelly? Andrew Cain’s monograph, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity, has taught us how to read Jerome’s often immodest and immoderate statements. They are in fact part of a deliberate strategy to advertise his abilities as a writer and his authority as an ascetic scholar as widely as possible. Cain shows that, for Jerome, it was an essential necessity to attract patrons and sponsors if he wanted to continue his monastic life. He had little wealth of his own and even the vast resources of his friend Paula dried up in the process of supporting Jerome and maintaining the Bethlehem monastery they had founded together. Jerome’s outrageous provocations can be seen as part of a wider effort to draw attention to himself and his projects. It appears that there were just enough people at the time with an interest–political or otherwise–in feeding this particular type of troll.

Dr Nancy McHugh will be presenting a lecture titled “Food Fear” on Thursday March 26, 12:00-1:30 in LIB 101.

In “Food Fear”, Prof. Nancy McHugh analyzes the ways that we go about making knowledge and ignorance about food and its relationship to health.  She argues that these practices have led to the newer food movement of “clean eating,” which in turn has generated an early 21st century eating disorder, orthorexia, or righteous eating.

Dr Nancy McHugh is Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg University in Ohio.  The recipient of an NSF grant for her research, McHugh is the author of multiple articles on feminist philosophy and the philosophy of science.  Her most recent book will appear later this year from SUNY Press – The Limits of Knowledge.

Very interesting interview here with Terry Pinkard, an expert in German Idealism. Fichte, it seems, took himself very seriously –

According to Ziolkowski, when Fichte was the Rector of the Berlin university, he would sign off on edicts by saying “It is not I as an individual who says and wills this, but the Idea, which speaks and acts through me.” (If you were the head of your department, wouldn’t it be nice to sign all the departmental directives with Fichte’s phrase? It’s catchy, you have to admit.)

I have been researching the history of encyclopedias. Producing an encyclopedia involves a number of obstacles, one of which is the decision of what to include: you want the encyclopedia to cover everything, but obviously it can’t, so you have to choose what is important enough to merit inclusion. (The Encyclopedia Brittanica, for instance, has an entry for DARWIN, CHARLES, but it doesn’t include Darwin’s shoe size or what he ate for breakfast on his 42nd birthday, etc.) But now, with Wikipedia, there is no shortage of space, and there can be articles on pretty much everything, though editors still make calls about what merits inclusion and what doesn’t. (There isn’t an article on me, for example {sniff}.) Still, there are plenty of articles on smaller or more trivial matters that one wouldn’t expect to find in a traditional encyclopedia. So, for example, check out this lengthy article on SHOE SIZE.

I’ll bet that you can find other surprising entries – so here’s my plea for some crowd-sourcing: What is the most trivial entry you can find on Wikipedia? Just leave it as a comment to this post.

For instance, while no one can doubt the genius of Copernicus and his heliocentric model of the solar system in heralding the age of modern astronomy, it is not commonly known that he relied on work carried out by Arab astronomers many centuries earlier. Many of his diagrams and calculations were taken from manuscripts of the 14th-century Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir. Why is he never mentioned in our textbooks? Likewise, we are taught that English physician William Harvey was the first to correctly describe blood circulation in 1616. He was not. The first to give the correct description was the 13th-century Andalucian physician Ibn al-Nafees.

Full (2008!) article here.