Adversaria (34)
‘Engraved deep in the stone on the wall of my university library, stretching from one side of the building to the other, are the names of illustrious dead white males stretching back more than two millennia. Yes, it is a library. But it’s also a mausoleum with its dead holding court in the underground stacks. It is strange down there amid the antiquated shelving and even older elevators, weak lighting, and silence as heavy as in a catacomb’ —Michael Taussig (Corpse Magic, p. 120)
The linguistic side of silent thinking, thinking without speaking, is of a nature as yet little appreciated. Silent thinking is basically not suppressed talking or inaudibly mumbled words or silent laryngeal agitations as some have supposed. Such an explanation merely appears plausible to the linguistically unsophisticated “common sense” view. “Commonsense” is unaware that talking itself means using a complex cultural organization, just as it is unaware of cultural organizations in general.[…] It is not words mumbled, but rapport between words, which enables them to work together at all to any semantic result. It is this rapport that constitutes the real essence of thought insofar as it is linguistic, and that in the last resort renders the mumbling, laryngeal quiverings, etc., semantically de trop.
‘Diodorus, who has preserved for us this summary sketch of the history of man and society, was, as we know from a careful study of his book, not the most intelligent of men’ —Benjamin Farrington (Greek Science, p. 84)
‘A moral habit could also alleviate the continued need to employ reason prior to action’ —Mordechai Feingold (‘The Humanities’ in The History of the University of Oxford [Vol. 4], p. 316)