Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"...perhaps at first...some one good and excellent man...the chief rule...devolved into his hands." - or pehaps some one evil and tyrannical man. It would take an awful lot of anthropological evidence to convince me one way or they other.

"As if when men quitting the state of nature entered intosociety, they agreed all of them but one should be under the restraint of Laws" - this is an interesting argument that shows that tyranny is something that grows out of society rather than out of nature.

"...not only to preserve his property, that is his life, liberty and estate..." - it often seems that Locke is only interested in the preservation of property, but his conception of property is much wider than we would nowadays assume. A slave's liberty is the property of another man, so a man's liberty is a form of property.

"But in beasts of prey the conjunction lasts longer...the dam not being to subsist herself and nourish her numerous offspring..." - Obviously there arevno lions in Somerset. But false generalisations to one side. Locke repeatedly jumps from 'is' to 'ought' I see now who Hume had in mind when he said that jump is not logically possible.

"God having made Man such a creature...to drive him into society, as well as fitted him with Understanding and Language to continue and enjoy it" - Marcus Aurelius was clear that man's social nature was a precursor to his linquistic and rational nature. Locke here is following the Genesis story where man is made rational before he is made social. It must be one of the most fundamental errors in Liberalism.

"...yet it is commonly in the Father's power to bestow [his estate] with a more sparing or liberal Hand, according as the behaviour of this or that Child hath comported with his Will and Humour." - a more realistic way of establishing parental honour.

"...as [God] (interestingly 'he', not 'He': Locke has capitalised absolutely everything else) hath laid on them an obligation to Nourish, preserve and bring up their Offspring; So he has laid on the Children a perpetual obligation of honouring their Parents..." - I'd rather trust to a well funded pension scheme.

"...where there is no law, there is no Freedom. For Liberty is to be free from Restraint and Violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law. " - a good starting point for arguments about the 2nd Amendment?

"...the world is peopled with descendents, who are all born infants, weak and helpless, without Knowledge or Understanding." - for Locke, Growth and Age are enough acheive them. Like Mill, I think education also plays a part, but I worry that enfranchising education opens the door to tyranny.

"...to place the power of parents over their children wholly in the father as if the mother had no share in it." - not a preface to an argument enfranchising women, but to one arguing parenthood is not a good corollary for monarchy, because there are two parents but only one monarch.

There is no discussion of agriculture in The Republic, and so far no discussion of cities in Locke's Second Treatise. The interest in agriculture comes from the Bible, Greek thinking so far as I know overlooks it. An interesting example of 'reculer pour mieux sauter'.

"This Partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, Men have only made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact only by putting a value on Gold and Silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money." - i.e. money creates inequality by converting agricultural an surplus which would otherwise if not consumed by all, into a store of value which can be owned by one.

"...the exceeding of the bounds of [Man's] just Property not lying in the largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it." - by anything Locke means the conveniences of life. Its interesting how this thought develops: because God gave Nature in common to man, to take more than you alone can consume is wrong. But because there is no scarcity, efficiency is prized over equality.

"Yet there are still great tracts of land to be found" - absent from Locke's thinking is any concept of scarcity.

"For I ask whether in the wild woods and uncultivated waste of America left to Nature without any improvement, Tillage or Husbandry a thousand acres yield the needy and wretched inhabitants as many inconveniences of life as ten acres of equally fertile land do in Devonshire, where they are well culivated" - oxygen is not seem as a convenience of life.

"God, who given the world in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and covenience" - conceptually, 'God' could be replaced by Nature here. In Marcus Aurelius we get this flipping between God and Nature, after 1500 years of Christianity we get a firm distinction between creator and creation. This is why Evolution is such a threat to Christianity.

Drudgery vs Slavery - if the master doesn't have the right to kill his servant then it can't be regarded as truly slavery. Locke is writing at the same time that the Slave Codes were being drawn up. Murder of a slave was seen a crime, though most often treated as accidental consequence of over zealous punishment, which wasn't. Lockes sounds like an 19th century apologist comparing slaves with the European urban poor.

"This makes it lawful for a Man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him...because using Force, where he has no Right..." - Locke seems to mean robber rather than thief: and seems to believe that any unlawful use of force, justifies the death penalty. Has there ever been a State as severe as that?

xxiii "The kernal of his thesis about tyranny is classical: ...he insisted that tyranny is not a type of regime, but a pathological distortion of any regime, defined by pursuit of sectional interest over the salus populi, the public good" - how did he shift from God's model for man to the public good?

xvi "The point of a free state is not to liberate us to follow our whims and desires, but to provide us with a secure area within which to strive to perfect ourselves within the mould of God's making." - I sure the Ayatollahs would agree, as they security men bundle hijabless women into the backs of unmarked vehicles, but would Locke?

xiv "Political philosophy, Locke holds, belongs to theology, but not via scripture."

prognathous (115) having a projecting lower jaw; susurrus (198) rustling or whispering

"Guglielmo the inventor of radio, believed that sound waves never completely die away that they persist, masked by the day to day noise of the world" - I'm always looking for pseudoscientific ideas to support the existence of 'ghosts'. This is a great one.

There are important individual differences which depend on how good one's 'phonological rehersal ability' is...accomplished multilinguals have superior memory abilities with respect to the 'phonological loop' - which consists of a phonological store (an inner ear) and an articulatory loop (an inner voice). We use the phonological loop when we subvocalise, e.g. repeating a telephone number to better remember it.

"Research has shown that making use of formulaic expressions and memorising lengthy chucks of text (and making substititions is far more efficient than learning new linguistic strings from individual words" - sorry, Chomsky.

What 'knowing' a word actually means - it's spelling, pronunciation, morphological forms, meaning(s) in different contexts, it's synonyms and antonyms, correct usage, collocations, and register. - we never really actually learn a word, we just learn more and mopre about a word, a lot of what we learn remains unconscious.

"Transfer Appropriate Processing - we tend to recall words in the form we encountered them . This is particulary the case for French and English where the spelling-phoneme correspondence is low" - should be less of a problem for learners of Hungarian.

"There is nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby's enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour" - I was taught Kant's Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals by David Wiggins. Ten minutes into any of his lectures, Wiggins was staring intently into one the corners of the ceiling. The joke was that he was 'looking at the angel'. Only now do I discover the truth.

"As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl" - I spend time in class defending Huck Finn, but I'm shocked by Carraway's casual racism. There then follows three pages on the 'Jewish' nose.

"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistable prejudice in your favour" - so that's what de Caprio was aiming for.