(The Football Players by Henri Rousseau) Two people are arguing; one insists that you can score a drop goal in football, the other that you can’t. Eventually it emerges that the first is talking about rugby football, gaelic football and Australian rules; but the other means only association football. So who is right? Once we … Continue reading Can you be offside in chess?
Tag: Wittgenstein
Why is a raven like a writing desk? The power of abstraction.
Abstraction is an interesting notion. The word itself is derived from the Latin preposition ‘ab’ meaning ‘from’ or ‘away from’ combined with the verb ‘trahere’ ‘to pull or draw’ (which also gives us our word ‘tractor’) - thus it means, literally, ‘to pull or drag away from’ so that it conveys the sense of separation, … Continue reading Why is a raven like a writing desk? The power of abstraction.
‘With shabby equipment, always deteriorating…’
We live in an age of infrastructure: we take for granted an underpinning layer of nigh-magical technology, much of it electronic, on which our day-to-day lives rely; occasionally we are visited by anxiety lest it should fail - as the result of a solar storm, perhaps, such as a repeat of the Carrington Event of … Continue reading ‘With shabby equipment, always deteriorating…’
‘we are only doing philosophy’
Esse est percipi - to be is to be perceived. That is Berkeley’s great insight, that the world as we know it exists only for us and beings similarly equipped. It is an observation widely misunderstood because the truth of it is difficult to express, hence the famous exchange between my countryman Boswell (whom I … Continue reading ‘we are only doing philosophy’
Not waving…
Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. I first read Stevie Smith’s poem at school and could make neither head nor tail of it, yet this morning, lying in the dark, the lines above came to me and … Continue reading Not waving…
More on Metaphor: St Patrick and the Queen of Tropes
If we are to rescue metaphor from the charge of disrepute, of being essentially dishonest, saying something is what it is not, then we have to look at it differently. For a start, considering metaphor as a figure of speech is not helpful, for then it it is ranked with a host of others, most … Continue reading More on Metaphor: St Patrick and the Queen of Tropes
The Cartography of Childhood 2: a recanting
'Blog in haste, repent at leisure.' (old proverb, probably attributed to Albert Einstein/Dr Seuss/Abraham Lincoln) When I said ‘the fantasy element in fantasy literature is the embodiment of the child’s expectations of the grown-up world’ I felt I had pinned down an idea that I have been moving towards for some time - years, in … Continue reading The Cartography of Childhood 2: a recanting
COMPLEAT TROWZER 