June 2025
waggle
1 June 2025, around 15.05.
Beata est ergo uita conueniens naturae suae
Happy, therefore, is the life in agreement with its own nature.
In the kitchen, the dog wags her tail gently, hoping for food or attention or the assurance that she is not alone. I am again trying to track where the time goes in the hopes that my attention will be sufficient snare to trap myself into habits.
The pile of books to read in the morning has become a bit absurd, although not yet reaching monstrous proportions. I think I will, however, have to set aside one of the two translations of the Pañcatantra that I had hoped to work through, not least because it reminds me of a student I encountered on the first day of a Finnish language class some years ago. She was in the class because somewhere in her family tree, someone had been Finnish. She assumed such a proprietorial air towards the entire language that one had little choice but to cede it to her by dropping the class (although it must also be admitted that it was an evening class, and I am never at my best in the evening).
word to the wise
2 June 2025, around 13.10.
In the case of most books, once we have read a few lines and looked at a few of the diagrams, the entire message is perfectly obvious. The rest is added only to fill up the paper.
woh of word oðer of werc
earthy
3 June 2025, around 18.25.
Early in the morning, before the sun is up, I go out and water the odd rectangle of dirt that I have reclaimed as a garden, although the only things that seem to want to grow are peas and buttercups. The dog politely respects the boundaries of the plot, perhaps because it does not smell particularly interesting. I like to check on the peas, to see if they are climbing the frame of twigs I have set out for them. They seem to be, but it’s a slow business, and I am rather impatient. I expect I will lose interest before they blossom.
verdant
4 June 2025, around 11.03.
regularities
5 June 2025, around 18.27.
If in the series of things to be examined we come across something which our intellect is unable to intuit sufficiently well, we must stop at that point, and refrain from the superfluous task of examining the remaining items.
Trouble getting up in the morning, mostly because of a long day yesterday of working and chores and driving and trying to keep the dog happy when she didn’t want to be happy. The sense of being unsettled. Got up anyway, although an hour late (at five fifteen or so), and still went out for a run or a jog or whatever one wishes to call forward motion that is not particularly speedy but is still something more than walk. It was light out, which I do not like (exercise is a deed best done in darkness), and it was odd to see the neighborhood gardens by daylight.
Citation (81)
6 June 2025, around 7.18.
It is only when a culture is breaking down, that is, only when crises, cultural and personal, are present that, generally speaking, an individual is prone to become sufficiently objective to examine the presuppositions, particularly the religious and philosophical presuppositions, on which his culture has been built. It is only at such times that real fundamental questions are likely to be asked by him and that disturbing doubts and fears arise. For that reason it is generally at such times that we catch a real glimpse into the nature of the personal religious experience and its philosophical implications and see it in all its multiform interconnecting aspects and varieties.
From Papyrus to Hypertext
6 June 2025, around 13.57.
Above all, by making it possible to combine writing, image, sound, and video, the new computer technologies are undermining the dominant position of language, stripping it of the aura with which it has been invested since ancient times when it was used to magically address the world, to express a relationship to reality, and to hold the tribe under its charms. (166)
Arranged in forty sections, each of which more or less concentrated on a theme (given in the headings), that are not intended to be read in any particular order (according to the author), but naturally tend to be read in the order in which they are presented in the codex. This seems to be an intentional comment on the medium and the mass-age, as well as encapsulating what makes the book somewhat annoying and less than illuminating. While anxious about the character of text on screen at the page level, as well as the permutations of text’s combinations with other media types (images, video, etc., as though illustrated scrolls or codices were somehow peculiar), it concerns itself too little with those in control of filling those screens (the author, it seems, is not quite dead here – only the publisher).
Originally published in French in 1999, perhaps what was novel about the book at the time had become commonplace by the time it was published in translation in 2009 and has certainly become so by 2025. Within its focus, prescient enough, but in terms of the broader implications there is a sort of willful blindness, a lack of desire to see the forest for the leaves.
In actual fact, there is no need for such a bill of rights [for readers] to be enacted, as it will eventually come about of itself. A text can attract readers and hold their attention only insofar as they feel respected. A reader who is not satisfied by a work will soon abandon it. (127)
smarts
7 June 2025, around 7.39.
For reasons I cannot quite explain to myself, I was reading Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s History of a Town (which they, with some cleverness, call Foolsburg). It is an amusing and somewhat mean-spirited novel; like many political novels, it loses something in being read outside of its time (or outside of the reader stewing in the remnants of that time like an unfortunate marinade). I have nothing much to say about it, and certainly nothing intelligent, but a little passage early in the book did draw my attention:
The inhabitants exulted; not having seen the newly appointed superior yet with their own eyes, they were already telling anecdotes about him, calling him “a good-looker” and a “smarty.” (p. 28)
‘Good-looker’ is an oddity, but it was ‘smarty’ that yanked me out of the crowd of Glupovites awaiting their new mayor. Natural language translation is, naturally, a challenge, and the ignorant should perhaps not find fault with what they do not know or understand (but I will not, here, let that stop me). The unseen mayor is красавчик и умница, so the learned may think what they like about the conveyance of meaning, but I couldn’t help thinking of a another sort of ‘smarty’, which added a different twist to the scene:
feedback
8 June 2025, around 13.04.
The stack of morning books, to be read in ten-page increments, or as time allows.
The burden of personal weakness, heavier than a weighted blanket holding me in bed when I slept in (until nearly seven), was lifted when I recalled that I did not, for the nonce, intend to track the use of my day in fifteen-minute increments. I had done so for a week last February and recently edited a paper that discussed using the activity to teach time management, which led me to try again (the spreadsheet was already set up, so why not?). It is a tactic that should be used sparingly. A little structure, a little feedback of the acute sort – detailed and gimlet-eyed – can be helpful; when taken to extremes, or pursued past the point of utility, it becomes a trap, a cage, a burden. In short, it palls.
The temptation to build structure into the day remains strong, however. So I keep my stack of morning books (as shown) and my stack of evening books and my list of all the little thing that I would like to get done but don’t really care about, and I work through them little by little. Then it is time for a nap, which is especially pleasant on a warm summer day, but looks fairly dismal when tracked on a spreadsheet.
fabulous
9 June 2025, around 8.52.
Extract from fol. 13r of the Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, CC-BY-NC 4.0.
…it is true that I long syth haue redde and herde that the beste clerkes ben not the wysest men.
I’ve had to give up on one of the translations of the Pancatantra that I’ve been attempting to read. What with one thing and another, neither has been particularly enjoyable, so I’m abandoning the longer, chattier translation, although it is based on an actual manuscript text instead of a twentieth-century scholar’s ‘reconstruction’. Ordinarily, I would choose the more ‘authentic’ version, but, well, it is longer, and ‘the lyf so short’ as the man said.
Reading the Pancatantra is part of a longer ‘project’ – I use the scare quotes advisedly, as these reading projects I take on are loosely structured, haphazard, and rarely completed – looking at animal fables, which is probably the only reason I am continuing even with the shorter version. The History of Reynard the Fox first drew my attention to the genre as being suitable for further examination, and I then meandered through the Loeb edition of Babrius and Phaedrus, which was a bit of a slog, but at least the stories were short. Perhaps I should have continued with Caxton’s Aesop or Kalīlah wa-Dimnah, but as the latter was based on the Pancatantra, I thought I had best start with first principles. That might have been the wisest approach for the systematic or orderly reader; I much prefer, however, to graze freely as I wander from shelf to shelf. There is probably a moral in all that, for those with ears to hear and eyes to read.
dubiety
10 June 2025, around 8.09.
We are almost all blind curators, reluctant or otherwise unable to believe that things can change. We mistake the reality in which we are used to living for nature, for an order of things that it would perhaps be desirable but ingenuous to hope to change. We mistake the facade of what’s real for the only possible, definitive reality, without noticing what is constantly, incessantly pressing behind it and continually changing it—at times slowly, almost inadvertently, at other times at a sensational pace.
We don’t hear the worm gnawing the wood, we don’t notice the chrysalis that will become the butterfly, we don’t perceive the clogging of History’s arteries.
The heat of our heart is very great, but we do not feel it because it is usually there. The weight of our body is not small, but it does not discomfort us. We do not even feel the weight of our clothes, because we are accustomed to wearing them. The reason for this is clear enough: for it is certain that we cannot perceive any body by our senses unless it is the cause of some change in our sense organs…
torpor
11 June 2025, around 8.33.
The evening books differ from the morning books in that they are rarely part of a ‘project’ of any kind, except that of sufficiently distracting me from the state of the world so that I can go to sleep. A few half-awake reflections:
- Interior Chinatown. Started as an audiobook on the bus to the beach, because the paperback is set in courier, of all things, which might get points for verisimilitude (really?), but not for legibility. Unfortunately, the dappled flashing of the sun along the highway and the recirculated air led to a migraine, which then lashed on to the sound of the audiobook. The novel is good enough to finish despite these difficulties.
- The Book of Magic. Reads more like an annotated commonplace book than an anthology. One feels that Copenhaver has made his selection of what will illuminate the subject guided by what he finds interesting rather than what anyone else would think of as ‘essential’. Enjoyable, but slow going.
- Letters from Iceland. Perhaps the most peculiar travel book I have ever read. A mishmash of poetry, anthology, and different forms of prose; it says little about Iceland, as such, save in what it does not say. Straining the meaning of the word ‘letter’ to accommodate the oddest verbal contortions. Fun stuff.
- The Book Against Death. Canetti really does seem to be against death qua death – not just his own or those nearest to him. A rarity. Perhaps the most purely moral book I have read recently.
- Donne’s poems. A poem a day keeps the demons at bay.
- Brother in Ice. Started off strong and is particularly good when talking about very cold places. Less interesting when the narrator succumbs to hot-girl syndrome, which is the peculiar state of believing (common in books published by & Other Stories) that being conventionally attractive and emotionally awkward near a two-wheeled vehicle makes one interesting.
- Devotion. The narrator figure in Patti Smith’s essay is what the narrator in Brother in Ice is trying to be. Beautifully straddles the liminality between insider (author) and outsider (reader).
thorny
12 June 2025, around 10.53.
…saevire fortuna ac miscere omnia coepit. Qui labores, pericula, dubias atque asperas res facile toleraverant, iis otium divitiaeque optanda alias, oneri miseriaeque fuere. Igitur primo pecuniae, deinde imperi cupido crevit: ea quasi materies omnium malorum fuere. Namque avaritia fidem, probitatem ceterasque artis bonas subvortit; pro his superbiam, crudelitatem, deos neglegere, omnia venalia habere edocuit. Ambitio multos mortalis falsos fieri subegit, aliud clausum in pectore, aliud in lingua promptum habere, amicitias inimicitiasque non ex re, sed ex commodo aestumare magisque voltum quam ingenium bonum habere. Haec primo paulatim crescere, interdum vindicari; post, ubi contagio quasi pestilentia invasit, civitas immutata, imperium ex iustissumo atque optumo crudele intolerandumque factum.
the hours before midnight
13 June 2025, around 11.08.
To all the dictators who look so bold and fresh
The midnight hours, the soft wind from the sweeping wing
Of madness, and the intolerable tightening of the meshOf history. […]
We leave our age the quite considerable spark
Of private love and goodness which never leaves
An age, however awful, in the utter dark. […]And to the good who know how wide the gulf, how deep
Between Ideal and Real, who being good have felt
The final temptation to withdraw, sit down and weep,We pray the power to take upon themselves the guilt
Of human action, though still as ready to confess
The imperfection of what can and must be built,
The wish and power to act, forgive, and bless.
sic
14 June 2025, around 20.01.
Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about the soul of man.
glancing
15 June 2025, around 11.45.
Si causa peccandi in praesens minus suppetebat, nihilo minus insontis sicuti sontis circumvenire, iugulare: scilicet, ne per otium torpescerent manus aut animus, gratuito potius malus atque crudelis erat.
Perhaps the most enjoyable portion of my morning books is reading in Sallust and the Ancrene Wisse. That is in part because I do not expect myself to read much, a page or two at most. It is also because I do not expect myself to read well or carefully. Usually I do not look up the words I don’t precisely know, and I certainly don’t make an effort to ‘translate’ what I’ve read into anything like English. I get a sense, a feeling for what these authors are saying; sometimes that sense or feeling is less rather than more accurate, but usually it is not – when I have checked – that far off. Today, the parts I read in both books were about bad people; Sallust provided a partial inventory of Catiline’s calumnies, ranging from probable sexual assault to murder, while the author of the Ancrene Wisse relished the sensible signs of the wicked man (well, technically ‘þe lecchur i þe deofles curt’), who invariably has bad breath, dirty clothes, and ‘stinke to godd’. This superficial reading is perhaps a bad habit, but it does prevent my poor brain from becoming torpid per otium.
ascent
16 June 2025, around 8.31.
Bin guter Stimmung, habe wieder gearbeitet. Am besten kann ich jetzt arbeiten während ich Kartoffeln schäle. Melde mich immer freiwillig dazu. Es ist für mich dasselbe was das Linsenschleifen für Spinoza war.
I’m in a good mood, worked again. I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.
curiouser
17 June 2025, around 15.47.
Like alchemy and behaviorism in their time, AI projects an image of good health in spite of its difficulties. However, its feverish activity and strident claims, and the tendency of its practitioners to abandon theory and exploit current techniques, may well be signs of its crisis.
Yet I may be wrong: perhaps what I take for gold and diamonds is really nothing but a bit of copper and glass. I know how much we are liable to err in matters that concern us, and also how much the judgements of our friends should be distrusted when they are in our favour.
To go for a walk is to wander along paths that lead nowhere in particular: it is both a search and a succession of changes.
by appointment
18 June 2025, around 16.02.
Ich kann nur von ihnen sprechen, sie aussprechen kann ich nicht.
I can only speak of them, I cannot express them.
A day for running errands in town, for taking care of the routine exams and appointments and all the things (there were only two things) that feel intolerably burdensome (but are probably a privilege, rather than an inconvenience), like going to the dentist and having the dog’s claws trimmed (because she is a delicate flower with dark claws so one cannot see the quick and one only needs to reach the quick once, to have it bleed all over the floor for what feels like hours but is only minutes, a minute, to be willing to hand over the task to someone else for as long as one can afford to do so), and then returning to the desk to work until one is feeling a bit cross-eyed about it all.
surdus
19 June 2025, around 12.22.
Lastly, considering that the very thoughts we have while awake may also occur while we sleep without any of them being at that time true, I resolved to pretend that all the things that ever entered my mind were no more true than the illusions of my dreams.
chiaroscuro
20 June 2025, around 9.03.
Hinter unseren Gedanken, wahren und falschen, liegt immer wieder ein dunkler Grund, den wir erst später ins Licht ziehen und als einen Gedanken aussprechen können.
Behind our thoughts, true and false, there is always to be found a dark background, which we are only later able to bring into the light and express as a thought.
As the light dims, but before putting the lamp out, I finish my allotment in the current evening books, including two from the library that I would like to finish in the coming week, and I turn them over in my mind in a drowsy sort of stupor. The Donne elegies, lately, have seemed very ill-tempered and silly, which is to be expected from romantic or sexual ambivalence (even if it is just a poetic pose), but everything else has seemed just as it should be, different and variable and very much itself.
Before switching off the light, I touch the idea of checking the news one last time, just on the off chance that something has happened; I touch the idea as one touches a sore tooth – exploratory, anticipatory. I think of the frisson of anger/fear/anxiety or – at best – schadenfreude that I could expect from current events. I hold the notion of the bland unknown against the dissatisfaction of knowing in uneasy contest for a moment, perhaps several moments.
I turn out the light and fall asleep quickly.
paper tigers
21 June 2025, around 10.22.
For the reading of the dilettante in philosophy, though it may be extensive and enthusiastic, always proceeds along easy slopes. As he only reads what he finds interesting, the only arguments he is likely to come into close contact with—or, at any rate, into that extremely close contact which is necessary for the understanding of disputed points in this subject—will be those which approximate to its own position. […] There is, you perceive, nothing very admirable about this type of mind. There is, however, something to be said for it. In the end it probably gets everywhere, though as it always shrinks from precipices, and proceeds along easy slopes, through a hundred gradations of a1, a2, a3, before it gets from A to B—it will always require an unlimited time. As its interest change, it may read many different parts of the same book, at long intervals, until finally as the result of many enthusiasms, it has read the whole. This blind following of interest along long and intricate paths may indirectly approximate to the results which concentration achieves directly.
bunkum
22 June 2025, around 10.30.
The fundamental error is that of placing Perfection in humanity, thus giving rise to that bastard thing Personality, and all the bunkum that follows from it.
Novaya Zemlya—we eventually made it that far. Not beyond the point that should have opened onto the passage to Cathay—not that bunkum, the arena of approval-needy geographers or feverish, greedy tradesmen—no, the point beyond which no friendship can exist, not even the fairy tale of the coyest fondness, the point beyond which it’s just you and the polar night, the point beyond which you only snarl orders and glower coldly at one another. No spices, no tea, porcelain, silk, fragrant nutmeg or cloves, not a single pepper, only the void, the immeasurable void where every man is on his own in the endless polar whiteness.
passim
23 June 2025, around 13.18.
…the continual discover of fresh types of nonsense, unsystematic though their classification and mysterious though their explanation is too often allowed to remain, has done on the whole nothing but good. Yet we, that is, even philosophers, set some limits to the amount of nonsense that we are prepared to admit we talk… 1
Avoiding the news again, with another cup of strong tea, and thinking about Descartes’s stove-heated room and Wittgenstein, in the aery of an artillery lookout, contemplating what one could say about the existence of a stove. Imagine being concerned about the statement ‘there is a stove in the other room’; if it is winter, perhaps, or if one needs to do some cooking, but the stove (or table or lamp or importunate visitor) always seems to be considered outside of context, outside of time – where of course it does not exist, if in fact it could be said to have any existence at all.
I actually find the statement ‘the stove in the other room is still lit’ more problematic as a statement, its truth value more troubling, particularly when I have just locked the door to the apartment.
- Note, however, that it is only a limit on the amount that we or they, that is, even philosophers, are willing to admit that they talk, not the actual amount that they actually do talk, which would perhaps be quantified rather differently, if one cared to quantify such things. Which I don’t.[↩]
thereof
24 June 2025, around 8.58.
Still keeping up with the morning books; only about a hundred pages to go in Ancrene Wisse, and Sallust is still the most enjoyable part of the morning (some frantic ladies praying nervously today), while Descartes is cute but becoming a bit dull (though a partially abridged version of anyone’s optics would probably be dull). Have a stack of three large-ish history books that I want to get to sooner rather than later and chose Wilson’s Heart of Europe because it had the lowest ratings (of the three) on Librarything; it would probably be disappointing for anyone looking for narrative history, because it is broken into thematic chunks (starting with, as Wilson puts it, the eagle’s vantage, though there is really something more of the vulture in the dismemberment of a fallen state), but it seems good of its type (not as good as Israel’s Dutch Republic, but then few doorstoppers are).
Austin is perhaps a bit too clever for comfort and there is a certain slyness to his style that is less appealing than it once was (although still very attractive). Here Jung provides a tonic, because he is all charisma and no style but still manages to get right to the heart of why some deities are so disconcerting (hint: they contain multitudes rather than moralities). An odd assortment, but it helps get things firing for the day, brainwise.
a novel method
25 June 2025, around 8.02.
I would also have added a word of advice about the way to read this book. I should like the reader first of all to go quickly through the whole book like a novel, without straining his attention too much or stopping at the difficulties which may be encountered. The aim should be merely to ascertain in a general way which matters I have dealt with. After this, if he finds that these matters deserve to be examined and he has the curiosity to ascertain their causes, he may read the book a second time in order to observe how my arguments follow. But if he is not always able to see this fully, or if he does not understand all the arguments, he should not give up at once. He should merely mark with a pen the places where he finds the difficulties and continue to read on to the end without a break. If he then takes up the book for the third time, I venture to think he will now find the solutions to most of the difficulties he marked before; and if any still remain, he will discover their solution on a final re-reading.
a trick of the light
26 June 2025, around 18.26.
…ant schaweð ham forð as schadewe—for na lickre ne beoð ha to þe wunne of heouene ne to þe wa of helle þen is schadewe to þet þing þet hit is of schadewe. Ȝe beoð ouer this worldes sea upo þe brugge of heouene. Lokið þet ȝe ne beon nawt þe hors eschif iliche þe schuncheð for a schadewe, ant falleð adun i þe weater of þe hehe brugge. To childene ha beoð þe fleoð a peinture þe þuncheð ham grislier ant grureful to bihalden. Wa ant wunne i þis world, al nis bute peintunge, al nis bute schadewe.
…and represents them as a shadow – for they are no more like the joy of heaven or the pain of hell than a shadow is like that thing of which it is a shadow. You are above the sea of this world on the bridge of heaven. See that you are not like the skittish horse which shies at a shadow, and falls down into the water from the high bridge. Those who run away from a picture which seems to them frightening and horrible to look at are too childish. All the pain and joy in this world is nothing but a picture, nothing but a shadow.
tonic
27 June 2025, around 15.22.
True joy and happiness lie in the simple enjoyment of what is good and not in the kind of false pride that enjoys happiness because others are excluded from it. Anyone who thinks that he is happy because his situation is better than other people’s or because he is happier and more fortunate than they, knows nothing of happiness and joy, and the pleasure he derives from his attitude is either plain silly or spiteful or malicious.
in brief
28 June 2025, around 17.14.
The thing with setting a goal – say, of posting every day when one has gotten out of the habit – is that the structure takes on a life of its own. It makes demands. It imposes itself. Sometimes it becomes an imposition, and one can only stand so many pairs of photographs and quotations in a row before one feels that one is perhaps keeping to the letter and not the spirit of the law.
It’s the same with the reading projects. Encountering a mention of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief in Wittgenstein’s private notebook, I thought of picking up my copy, but then consulted my spreadsheet 1 of the works of Tolstoy arranged more or less chronologically to see when it would crop up. I found that it was still a ways down the list, well below War and Peace, which is still waiting on my getting through a history of the Napoleonic Wars (now that I’ve read a bit about Lithuania and Poland and am working on the Holy Roman Empire). 2 I could read it out of order and then reread it at the appropriate point in the spreadsheet, but although in the spirit of the game, that seems somehow to break the rules.
Hopefully I will still be interested (and remember Wittgenstein’s interest) when I finally get around to taking the book from the shelf.
- My penance for acquiring a small set of the translations by the Maudes (et al.) with money that should probably have been spent on housewares; but books furnish the mind as well as the room, so it was probably the proper choice.[↩]
- It is perhaps silly to worry about history when reading historical novels, as they should not, ideally, be intricate puzzles quizzing the reader’s historical knowledge, and yet…[↩]
a few liberties
29 June 2025, around 14.05.
Jedenfalls bedeutet das Familienleben der Ureltern nicht eitel Freude…
At any rate, the family life of our first parents was not all beer and skittles…
The weather has turned warm again, and the afternoon walk is pleasant but suggestive of the dangers of over exertion. There is some sense, then, in loafing and appreciating the risible.
Adversaria (27)
30 June 2025, around 4.32.
‘Of course one must not tax an archaic god with the requirements of modern ethics’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 9)
‘Although the disruptive students turned out to be very useful pedagogically—and analytically—for their willingness to express what others might only think about fat people, I still wondered: Why did the course make students so mad? Why do fat people make (nonfat) people so mad?’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 22%)
‘This incapacity to tell the difference between the power of words and the force of argument (prevalent, then as now, in Paris) contributed to the sceptical disorientation which existed in Descartes’s time’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 27)
Man’s life is a dream, spiritualist philosophers tell us, and if they were entirely logical they would add: history, too, is a dream. Of course, taken in an absolute sense, both of these comparisons is equally absurd; however, one cannot but admit that there are in history sinkholes, as it were, which make human thought stop not without perplexity. It is as if the stream of life ceases its natural course and forms a whirlpool, which spins, sprays, and gets covered with turbid foam, through which it is impossible to make out either clear typical features or even any specific phenomena. Confused and senseless events follow one another disconnectedly, and people apparently do not pursue any other goals than the safeguarding of the present day. They alternate between trembling and triumph…
‘It is hardly surprising that Descartes’s account is unclear at this point, since he is engaged in an impossible task’ —Bernard Williams (Descartes, p. 284)
‘The food economy, that is, mirrors the larger economy: it is full of contradictions, some of which are literally embodied’ —Julie Guthman (Weighing In, 74%)
‘For it is easy to observe in those we call “pedants” that philosophy makes them less capable of reasoning than they would be if they had never learnt it’ —Descartes (‘Preface’ to the Principles of Philosophy, trans. Cottingham et al., p. 188)