Chris Via > Recent Status Updates

Rounding the final bend with this illustrious single-volume panopticon of western philosophy, I think I will take these final pages with me on my upcoming long flight to Germany.

It's bittersweet finishing out this tome. On the one hand, I'm ready to move on to some other books, but on the other this first book of my self-prescribed history remediation has proved a veritable experience. I'm looking forward to going back through all of my highlighting and notes from the journey.

During my journey to Boston yesterday, my backpack got flagged by TSA and taken aside for more invasive inspection. The agent said that there was an object whose density triggered an alert. As she dug into my backpack, she said, "Oh, it's probably all these books." Then she pulled out only a single volume, with a whoa.

"Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing I'll"

"Goethe so enchanted himself and everyone he ever encountered that no character he created could possibly live up to its creator" (200).

I appreciate how, at the start of each new epoch, Davies takes a moment to discuss what makes definitions and time frames of each epoch difficult work on the historian. He also gives a brief overview of all the contentious areas within academia, and ends with his resultant view. And he does this without falling into the presentism and narrow-focused schools that poison academia.

"Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves" (39).

Finished up the section on Catholic philosophy and preparing to get into modern times. Russell's scholarly acumen is as rich as one could ask for a one-volume sweep of so sprawling a project.

Per usual, Dirda makes you want to read everything!

Quite an accomplishment: I made it just past the first set of plates, landing in the beginning of the Renaissance. So far, this has been a spectacular success of maintaining quality in the face of immense scope.

Russell boils down Anselm's ontological proof eloquently: "The real question is: Is there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside our thought?" (417).

John the Scot, to Russell, is the most remarkable man of the ninth century. "He contended that reason and revelation are both sources of truth, and therefore cannot conflict; but if they ever SEEM to conflict reason is to be preferred" (403).

"Our use of the phrase the 'Dark Ages' to cover the period from 600 to 1000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe" (399). Other civilisations were thriving.

"A great deal of what is most ferocious in the medieval Church is traceable to his [Augustine's] gloomy sense of universal guilt" (365).

Russell gives high merit to Augustine. "'What then is time?' he asks. 'If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not'" (354). "Subjectivism led him to anticipate not only Kant's theory of time, but Descartes's cogito" (355).

"Pantheism holds that God and the world are not distinct.... This view is developed most fully in Spinoza, but is one to which almost all mystics are attracted" (353).

"Few men have surpassed these three in influence on the course of history" (335). Saint Ambrose (ecclesiastical politician); Saint Augustine (theologian); Saint Jerome (scholar; translator).

"...[Cervantes] is the only possible peer of Dante and Shakespeare in the Western Canon" (119).

"...what in me is dark / Illumine...."

Davies opened up the fire hose a bit during the section on the nomadic tribes of the Northern European plains--Celts, Slavs, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Balts, Lombards, Britons, Saxons,
Angles, et al. This is going to take some time and supplemental reading to absorb. There seem to be two main groups of peoples outside the Roman Empire: Germanic and Slavic.

Enter we now the three-day chase of the eponymous whale!