Peter Smith's Blog, page 46

The Meaning of Travel (again)

I wrote this a year ago: who would have guessed that twelve months on, the prospect of travel seems almost as remote as it did then … If you didn’t read Emily Thomas’s book when it came out, you missed a treat!

In mid December, the Uffizi can be almost empty of visitors. One year, we were sitting very quietly for some time in what was then the room with the great Botticelli paintings. A few other visitors came and went. But then there was a sudden flurry of noise; and from one corner of the room entered a group of young Chinese, each with their headset, with a guide talking into a microphone. The group processed without pausing to the opposite corner and left as quickly as they had arrived. The scene was saddening and comical — what was the point? But then the thought strikes: are our Florentine visits in recent years really much better? They are still fleeting, a week at most; our knowledge and understanding of what we are seeing is still shallow; yes, we know the restaurants and cafés the locals like; but we are skimming along the surface. What is the meaning of our travel here? (Or is it mere tourism?)

Emily Thomas’s new book The Meaning of Travel perhaps didn’t full answer my question. But it is a real delight. It is relatively short, and very nicely produced by OUP — in a small format too, so it will appropriately fit in a jacket pocket on your travels, if only as you stride across the common to your favourite coffee bar to read it. But perhaps that too can be like travel in a miniature way? In my case, the coffee bar at the end of my walk is run by Italians, the chatter is in Italian, the radio is Italian, the coffee and dolci are Italian, most of the other customers are non-English. Part of the pleasure, then, is relishing the slight otherness (albeit very safe and tame!). And as Emily Thomas suggests, “the difference between everyday journeys and travel journeys lies in how much otherness the traveller experiences”. The businessman who hops on a plane, spends two days cloistered in meetings held in English, stays with colleagues in a familiar international hotel chain, and is pampered again in business class as he flies home hasn’t really travelled, we feel.

The book is written with a light touch. There are a dozen engaging essays; on maps, for example; on how traveller’s tales challenged thoughts about innate ideas; on why mountains changed from forsaken places full of dangers to be avoided (Donne’s “warts and pock-holes on the face of th’earth”) to become places of spendour where you could encounter the sublime; on the idea of wilderness and our relation to nature (or Nature). Some of the usual philosophical suspects appear in familiar stories (Bacon, experimenting to the last, stuffs a chicken with snow, and catches a fatal chill; Descartes, never really settling in one place, travels to wintry Stockholm and dies of flu or perhaps pneumonia). But there are many less familiar philosophers here, on real or imagined journeys (I was intrigued by Margaret Cavendish’s bizarre-sounding Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World). And sprinkled through the book are snippets from the author’s obviously lovingly assembled scrapbook of quotations and illustrations (travel adverts and posters for example), and some notes on her own travels. It all makes for a fun and thought-provoking read.

In the last section, “Returning Home: Top 10 Vintage Tips”, there’s a quotation from Descartes, in which he remarks of his reading that “conversing with those of past centuries is much the same as travelling”. That’s a thought which could have made for another intriguing  essay on the relation between our travelling from place to place and our ‘travelling’ (as best we can) from time to time. And indeed are these not often bound together? When we (at least, the “we” who are likely to be this book’s readers!) go to Venice, it isn’t exactly Venice now that we want to see, but a Venice before mass tourism, before tacky gift shops and the like — so we explore down side canals, getting quite away from the modern clamour (which indeed is still surprisingly easy to do), or escape the crowds by wandering through the city late in the evening. An essay on this theme, the attractions of travelling to sites steeped in history to try to capture that sense of times past,  would have been good to have too.

Early on in the book, Emily Thomas distinguishes travelling not only from making a humdrum journey perhaps for work or study abroad (or a less humdrum journey as a refugee, perhaps) but also from going on a pilgrimage. Which got me wondering whether here too is a theme for another essay. For isn’t travelling, say, to Florence (braving Ryanair, and — if you can’t go in December! — braving crowds and unpleasant heat too) a pilgrimage of sorts for some of us? We are visiting Santa Maria Novella, Santa Maria del Carmine, Santa Croce, …, because they are still numinous places, the frescoes and paintings still expressive of feelings which have a deeper pull and give us pause. Or, when he writes of it long after, when the world he travelled through on foot has vanished, doesn’t Patrick Leigh Fermor’s walk from the Hook of Holland to Hungary and beyond take on in the telling something of the character of a pilgrimage through Old Europe? I’m not sure:  I would have liked to have heard still more, perhaps, about the varieties of travellings and their different meanings.

A writer Emily Thomas could perhaps have engaged with to add some further depth and  nuance is Jonathan Raban (who oddly gets only the most fleeting mention for a comment about Byron). For Raban was not only one of the very best of all English prose writers in the last couple of decades of the last century, but the most reflective — philosophical, if you will — of travellers and travel writers. His late, great, Passage to Juneau (1999) should have appealed to the author of The Meaning of Travel, not only given some Raban’s themes (the discovery of otherness and of oneself in the process), but also given its location: some of Emily Thomas’s own book is structured loosely round her journeys through Alaska. But I’m thinking too of Raban’s earlier masterpiece, Old Glory from 1981, notionally recounting his travelling down the Mississippi in a small boat. I say “notionally” as this complex work is lightly disguised as a straight travel book, a literal recounting of a journey taken. But, as I’ve written here before, the one-time English literature lecturer warns us clearly enough. One of the epigraphs of the book is from T. S. Eliot (writing indeed of the  Mississippi), starting “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god …” The other epigraph is from Jean François Millet: “One man may paint a picture from a careful drawing made on the spot, and another may paint the same scene from memory, from a brief but strong impression; and the last may succeed better in giving the character, the physiognomy of the place, though all the details may be inexact.” So we are set up for this to be a mythic tale, and for the “Jonathan Raban” who features as the narrator and in his adventures to be a very inexact rendition of the author and his own journey. And a mythic tale is what we get, a romance-quest — another kind of journey! — with ordeal by water, with auguries and signs, battles fought, a princess won (but also lost, for this is a flawed epic, and the journey ends in emptiness). Woven together with this are encounters with American myths of frontiers and journeys.

Raban’s is a many-layered book, particularly artful in the artlessness of its transparent prose. We are reminded that the lesser tales we tell ourselves about our own smaller travellings (at the time and after), while a lot less artful, are no doubt also shot through with their elements of fiction, as we weave our stories to fit some patterns we are perhaps only half-aware of. Which takes us back to The Meaning of Travel, which indeed has interesting things to say about the blurred lines between purely fictional travel narratives at one end of the spectrum and (say) some of Darwin’s writings at the other. It is such varied narratives which give our travels their varied meanings for us. Emily Thomas in her so-readable book helps us think about some of those narratives. I enjoyed it greatly. Treat yourself!

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David Makinson: A historical question about mathematicians and logic

David Makinson raises a very interesting issue, originally in a comment on my recent post on Jonathan Barnes’s book. It seems a pity to leave his question buried there, where it is likely to be overlooked, so I’m making it a guest post! He writes:

We know that many philosophers, theologians and polymaths (such as Aristotle) have written on formal logic, and some of their writings have survived, whether in whole or in fragments, quoted or distorted. Question: Were there any figures who were primarily mathematicians — from Greek antiquity through the Roman, mediaeval and renaissance periods but before, say, Leibniz — who investigated and wrote on the logic that they were actually using in their own work?

The question is particularly acute for Euclid and his school, since they were devoting immense attention to perfecting deductions from basic principles, but it arises for all those who carried out mathematical reasoning.

From my memory of reading in histories of logic, none are mentioned! Even so late a figure as Descartes, who wrote important guides to methodology and heuristics, does not seem to have ventured into formal logic, so far as I know. If, indeed, there is a big gap in the historical literature, how far is it really a gap in what was actually written, or merely in accidents of which texts have survived the tyranny of time, or even in the attention that has been accorded by historians of logic?

An interesting question indeed.

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More music for lockdown 4: the Doric Quartet play Mozart and Beethoven

There is another wonderful series of concerts being streamed from Wigmore Hall. I particularly enjoyed this from the very fine Doric Quartet, playing Mozart’s Quartet K590, the ‘Prussian’, and Beethoven’s first Razumovsky Quartet.

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Another new paper by Kripke: The Collapse of the Hilbert Program

In case you missed it — as I did until Romina Padro pointed me to it — Saul Kripke published another new paper on arXiv last month, The Collapse of the Hilbert Program: A Variation on the Gödelian Theme.

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Procrastinating with Logicbites …

I’ve just been checking the February figures for downloads from Logic Matters and for sales of the print-on-demand versions of the Big Red Logic Books.

The sales — modest! — of the physical books fluctuate quite a bit. But last month’s best seller was Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears. Interestingly, the sales have gone up since I also made that book freely available as a PDF download. Make of that what you will!The most popular download of the three books (and second most popular download overall) was IFL2 , which was downloaded just over a 1000 times. Who knows how it is being received? It is one of the better intro logic books out there, and it certainly beats most of the competition on price! I’ve newly added a page on the front of the PDF version warmly encouraging comments/feedback from readers. We’ll see.But more popular still was Logic: A Study Guide which was downloaded just over 2000 times. This rate is pretty consistent over the months. Lots of people must be being pointing students to it — but I haven’t much idea who is doing the pointing and where and why. But it does mean I need to continue working on the as-yet-unrevised chapters.The third most popular download — and this really is puzzling, though again is pretty consistent — is what used to be the Appendix to the old Teach Yourself Logic Guide, which brings together notes on some seventeen of the Big Books on Mathematical Logic (I haven’t updated this for some time).The next most popular PDF was the second part of the Study Guide (the as-yet-unrevised chapters), closely followed by the Gentle Introduction to categories, downloaded 550 times. As I’ve said before, this really is getting embarrassing; I must take my increasingly stiff and inflexible brain back to the gym and do some category fitness training, so I can revise/finish off that document in a way I don’t feel too ashamed by!So far, the Logicbites I’ve just been recently writing — the introductory chats to chapters of IFL2 — have hardly been downloaded at all. It is very early days, however, and I’ll have to see in due course whether there is much interest. The plan is for three series of IFL Logicbites, one on the propositional logic chapters (not including the chapters on natural deduction), one on quantification theory (again not including ND), and one on natural deduction. I should finish the first series this week. I’ll then pause to decide whether it is worth writing up more.

Actually, I have rather enjoyed doing the (not-very-challenging!) homework involved in writing those early Logicbites, looking at how others have handled various introductory  themes in elementary logic, and thinking a bit too about how things might be improved in a perhaps-to-be-written IFL3. OK, that’s been procrastinating when I should really have been getting back to revising the Logic Guide and the Gentle Introduction. But it is productively structured procrastination.

One sidetrack I’ve been (re)exploring after a long time, also partly prompted by Jonathan Barnes’s Logical Matters, is Aristotle’s logic — I mean the real thing, not the travesty that you get in logic books like Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic (which of course nowhere discusses what Aristotle cared about, the systematization of his meta logical investigations). It would be good to weave a few such Aristotelian threads into IFL3.

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New paper by Kripke (on mathematical incompleteness results in PA)

There is a new paper by Saul Kripke on “Mathematical Incompleteness Results in First-Order Peano Arithmetic: A Revisionist View of the Early History”, available here on arXiv. Thanks to David Auerbach for the heads-up.

This blog gets a mention. I went wrong on the history in the first edition of IGT. Not, I fear, that I do a lot better in the second edition …

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Logical Matters

How did I miss that the second volume of Jonathan Barnes’s papers on ancient philosophy goes by the title Logical Matters? A must read, surely, for Logic Matters!

Better late than never, following a thread that started some days ago when reading Susanne Bobzien’s piece on Frege and the Stoics, I found myself led to a couple of long pieces by Barnes, not easy to get hold of. So now — really rather extravagantly, but lockdown rather reduces the opportunities for other extravagances — his 800 page book of collected essays has arrived on my desk. I’ve already read a couple of hundred pages with real pleasure and considerable enlightenment. It isn’t in fact taking me far from themes I’ve been worrying about, thinking again around and about my intro logic book with a distant third edition in mind.  After all, the ancients — Aristotle, the Stoics (such as we have them), the ancient commentators — were concerned with logical basics. They were wrestling with ideas of consequence, of form, of predication and so on; and thinking through their struggles can’t but help throw some sidelight on modern preoccupations when we (re)turn to basics. For example, I found Barnes’s hundred page paper on ‘Logical form and logical matter’, much of it keeping company with the ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, genuinely instructive.

Collections of papers like this don’t seem to get reviewed. Do they just fall as dead weights onto the shelves of libraries with generous funding? This one doesn’t even seem to have been made available by OUP in its online “Oxford Scholarship” service. That’s more than a pity. Barnes’s logical papers have been very scattered so need to be brought together like this to be more available; his voice is engaging, many of his topics of considerable interest, his discussions seem insightful (though I’m no classic!); the work collected here surely adds up in a very impressive way. And as I said, it is far from being just of interest to those working specifically on ancient philosophy. Do look it out!

(It is just rather depressing to reflect that this is only one of four similarly sized volumes of collected papers. To be added to an equally impressive sequence of earlier books …)

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More music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić

It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.

Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.

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Music for lockdown 3: two concerts from Ivana Gavrić

It’s been often remarked, how odd our experience of time is in lockdown. The days are long; the weeks disappear so quickly. It seems just a few days since I watched a hugely enjoyable concert by the painist Ivana Gavrić playing Grieg, with great warmth and humanity, in the intimate setting of a lovely drawing room. I was about to put up a link where you could subscribe to the archived recording … and it has sadly gone.

Sorry about that. However, all is not lost! For a start, you can still of course get her captivating 2013 Grieg CD (“Everything glows with affection” said the Gramophone). And even better, there are still two more concerts to come in her current online series. You can get details here (where you can buy tickets for the live stream: the concert then becomes available for a while on City Music’s archive). I’m particularly looking forward to the second of these, when Ivana Gavrić will be playing early Schubert and Janacek — I so admire her earlier recording of the Janacek, which made me fall in love with the music, and her only recording of Schubert so far is really very fine too. Two forthcoming concerts to relish, then.

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More logicbites

There are now 10 logicbites, very much intended for students. They introduce Chapters 1 to 10 of IFL, varying from one page to five, often quoting from other people’s textbooks (and sometimes criticizing them!).

I’ve found it surprisingly fun to go back, in most cases after many years, looking at how others have handled introductory topics. My book is very far from perfect, and needs a third edition (yes, really); but I can see why I was originally moved to write it, back in the day!

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