More specifically concerning: pierre bayle
tragedy of the commonplaces
4 September 2025, around 11.07.
It’s the season when academics seek to snatch inspiration from the jaws of administrative despair by posting online the more promising tasks they intend to assign their students, and one that sparked my interest was keeping a physical commonplace book (giving credit while appropriating [the modifications seem too few to call it adapting] an assignment […]
settling
5 September 2025, around 10.16.
…our reason is only suitable for making everything perplexing and for raising doubts about everything. No sooner has it built something than it provides the means for destroying it. Reason is a veritable Penelope, unraveling during the night what she had been weaving during the day. —Pierre Bayle (Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, s.v. Bunel, […]
no dog unturned
8 September 2025, around 14.11.
If a dog differs from a stone, it is not because the dog is composed of a body and a soul, and the stone of a body only. It is solely because the dog is composed of parts so put together that they make a machine, which the arrangement of the parts of a stone […]
planavorel
11 September 2025, around 17.12.
It might have happened. I might have reached the stage of having too many reading projects. I say this because, as I worked through my morning books before starting the work day, nothing seemed like it was part of or in service of anything. While I was mildly amused by some of the books, a […]
middling sort
28 September 2025, around 13.38.
I have been told that several people claim, that I have not understood Spinoza’s theory at all. I have heard this from several quarters, but nobody has been able to tell me what those who make this judgment base it on. Thus, I cannot answer them precisely, or examine if I ought to give in […]
roaring
29 September 2025, around 16.06.
The other day while reading my daily quota of Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, I encountered the entry on Rorarius, and I spent a few minutes rolling that name around, batting it to and fro, and making nonsense of it. The main draw of the entry, I should mention, is the discussion of whether animals […]