More specifically concerning: d’alembert
precepts
23 August 2024, around 18.23.
It is most surprising that men have believed they could make rules take the place of such a talent. It is almost as if they wanted to reduce genius to precepts. —Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab, p. 34)
classifications
8 May 2025, around 8.17.
…the three kinds of ‘republics’ into which we have just distributed the men of letters ordinarily have nothing in common except the lack of esteem in which they hold one another. The poet and the philosopher treat each other as madmen who feed on fancies. Both regard the scholar as a sort of miser who […]
thrift
3 September 2025, around 16.11.
The local thrift store has been a surprisingly fruitful source of reading material this past year. The shop in town has produced d’Alembert and multiple volumes of Quine, while the shop at the mountain has yielded treasures such as a lightly pruned edition of John Dundas Cochrane’s A pedestrian journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, […]