Quisquilia: Lib. nov.

Zu Unrecht ist der seinerzeit als „einer der größten Philosophen“ (gemäß Pierre Bayle) benannte Nicolas Malebranche ins Vergessen geraten; zählten die Beiträge des Cartesianers doch zu den bedeutsamsten erkenntnistheoretischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften des 17. Jahrhunderts. In regem Austausch stand der französische Theologe mit Zeitgenossen wie Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, war vertraut mit den Neuerungen der newtonschen Mathematik und Physik und hatte entscheidenden Einfluß auf das Denken nachfolgender Philosophen wie z.B. George Berkeleys subjektiven Idealismus oder, wenn auch bei diesem letzteren zum Gutteil verkannt und ex negativo, den Kausalitätsskeptizismus David Humes.

Historia lux veritatis – Veritas historiae lucis

Neben seinen Argumenten zugunsten des Okkasionalismus und theologischen Pantheismus, von der Zeit überholt und oftmals belächelt, sind es gerade auch Malebranches Überlegungen zur Naturphilosophie, die es wert sind, gelesen zu werden. So stellte er nur wenige Jahre nach Isaac Newton, und unabhängig von diesem, in Analogie zum Schall eine Schwingungstheorie des Lichts auf und entwickelte in seiner Optik das cartesianische System von den Partikeln (Globulen) fort. Um dieses Erkenntnisgewinns willen und als kleine Auffrischung der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, wird im folgenden Malebranches Traktat über Licht und Farben bereitgestellt, welcher in der zweiten Auflage der englischsprachigen Ausgabe seiner Recherche de la vérité (Search after Truth, London 1700) erstmalig veröffentlicht wurde.

Text: Malebranche’s Treatise Concerning Light and Colours:
Faksimile (3,5 MB) (PDF-Dokument)
Abschrift (204 kB) (PDF-Dokument)

The beauty of German humour

… accidental, a fine example of German humour, indeed.

Btw, the New York Times archive can be searched and used for free, for the most part. If only the Frankfurter Allgemeine or NZZ offered a similar service.

Stop corporal punishment of children!

The Council of Europe is dedicated to eliminating human rights violations. Abolishing corporal punishment of children is essential to achieving this goal.

Further information at the website of the Council of Europe:
Building a Europe for and with Children
Raise your Hand against Smacking

I’ve been reading a lot lately. I’m flowing on a layer of words.
Nothing makes as much sense to me as the pace of reading a good book, well-written and full of insight. Faces mean little to me, I cannot read them as I can books. Decipher and attribute meaning.
Besides, next to the word nothing remains. So why make good out of people?

Excerpts from the Statement of the Dalai Lama on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising (PDF):

Having occupied Tibet, the Chinese Communist government carried out a series of repressive and violent campaigns that have included “democratic reform”, class struggle, communes, the Cultural Revolution, the imposition of martial law, and more recently the patriotic re-education and the strike hard campaigns. These thrust Tibetans into such depths of suffering and hardship that they literally experienced hell on earth. The immediate result of these campaigns was the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Tibetans. The lineage of the Buddha Dharma was severed. Thousands of religious and cultural centres such as monasteries, nunneries and temples were razed to the ground.
Historical buildings and monuments were demolished. Natural resources have been indiscriminately exploited. Today, Tibet’s fragile environment has been polluted, massive deforestation has been carried out and wildlife, such as wild yaks and Tibetan antelopes, are being driven to extinction.

These 50 years have brought untold suffering and destruction to the land and people of Tibet. Even today, Tibetans in Tibet live in constant fear and the Chinese authorities remain constantly suspicious of them. Today, the religion, culture, language and identity, which successive generations of Tibetans have considered more precious than their lives, are nearing extinction […] Many infrastructural developments such as roads, airports, railways, and so forth, which seem to have brought progress to Tibetan areas, were really done with the political objective of sinicising Tibet at the huge cost of devastating the Tibetan environment and way of life.

[…]

The Chinese insistence that we accept Tibet as having been a part of China since ancient times is not only inaccurate, but also unreasonable. We cannot change the past no matter whether it was good or bad. Distorting history for political purposes is incorrect.

Our aspiration that all Tibetans be brought under a single autonomous administration is in keeping with the very objective of the principle of national regional autonomy. It also fulfils the fundamental requirements of the Tibetan and Chinese peoples.

[…]

From time immemorial, the Tibetan and Chinese peoples have been neighbours. In future too, we will have to live together. Therefore, it is most important for us to co-exist in friendship with each other.

Since the occupation of Tibet, the Communist China has been publishing distorted propaganda about Tibet and its people. Consequently, there are, among the Chinese populace, very few people who have a true understanding about Tibet. It is, in fact, very difficult for them to find the truth. There are also ultra-leftist Chinese leaders who have, since last March, been undertaking a huge propaganda effort with the intention of setting the Tibetan and Chinese peoples apart and creating animosity between them. Sadly, as a result, a negative impression of Tibetans has arisen in the minds of some of our Chinese brothers and sisters. Therefore, as I have repeatedly appealed before, I would like once again to urge our Chinese brothers and sisters not to be swayed by such propaganda, but, instead, to try to discover the facts about Tibet impartially, so as to prevent divisions among us.

???? – Support the Tibetan struggle.

The next day Denise decided to confront her mother directly about the medication she was or was not taking […] All six of us where jammed into the car on our way to Mid-Village Mall and Denise simply waited for a natural break in the conversation, directing her question toward the back of Babette’s head, in a voice drained of inference.
„What do you know about Dylar?“
„Is that the black girl who’s staying with the Stovers?“
„That’s Dakar,“ Steffie said.
„Dakar isn’t her name, it’s where she’s from,“ Denise said. „It’s a country on the ivory coast of Africa.“
„The capital is Lagos,“ Babette said. „I know that because of a surfer movie I saw once where they travel all over the world.“
„The Perfect Wave,“ Heinrich said. „I saw it on TV.“
„But what’s the girl’s name?“ Steffie said.
„I don’t know,“ Babette said, „but the movie wasn’t called The Perfect Wave. The perfect wave is what they were looking for.“
„They go to Hawaii,“ Denise told Steffie, „and wait for these tidal waves to come from Japan. They’re called origamis.“
„And the movie was called The Long Hot Summer,“ her mother said.
„The Long Hot Summer,“ Heinrich said, „happens to be a play by Tennessee Ernie Williams.“
„It doesn’t matter,“ Babette said, „because you can’t copyright titles anyways.“
„If she’s an African,“ Steffie said, „I wonder if she ever rode a camel.“
„Try an Audi Turbo.“
„Try a Toyota Supra.“
„What is it camels store in their humps?“ Babette said. „Food or water? I could never get that straight.“
„There are one-hump camels and two-hump camels,“ Heinrich told her. „So it depends which kind you’re talking about.“
„Are you telling me a two-hump camel stores food in one hump and water in the other?“
„The important thing about camels,“ he said, „is that camel meat is considered a delicacy.“
„I thought that was alligator meat,“ Denise said.
„Who introduced the camel to America?“ Babette said. „They had them out west for a while to carry supplies to coolies who were building the great railroads that met at Ogden, Utah. I remember my history exams.“
„Are you sure you’re not talking about llamas?“ Heinrich said.
„The llama stayed in Peru,“ Denise said. „Peru has the llama, the vicuña and one other animal. Bolivia has tin. Chile has copper and iron.“
„I’ll give anyone in this car five dollars,“ Heinrich said, „if they can name the population of Bolivia.“
„Bolivians,“ my daughter said.
The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. […] The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true. (pp. 80-82)

Besprechung

He watched Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory – words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag. And the tower under construction across the street, webbed and draped against the weather, figures moving fleetly past gaps in the orange sheeting. He saw them clearly now, three or four kids playing on the girders, making the building seem a ruin, an abandonment. (p. 23)

People with supermarket carts. When did these things come out of the stores and into the streets? She saw these things everywhere, pushed, dragged, lived in, fought over, unwheeled, bent, rolling haywire, filled with living trivia, the holistic dregs of everything that is correctly put. She talked to the woman in the plastic bag, offering to get a shopping cart for her.
[…]
It was a different language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot, and Karen had to listen carefully to the way the woman dragged a line of words out of her throat like hankies tied together and then she tried to go back and reconstruct. (p. 180)

Besprechung

Magnus Pyke: The Human Predicament
An Anthology with Questions by Cedric Blackman
Thomas Nelson, London and Edinburgh 1968
beg, bee: 14.10.2008, –

Get your hands on this one! Worthwhile read, divided into six parts, on the meaning of science for the human being in Western late capitalist society. The textbooks offers excerpts on a wide range of subjects from as diverse sources as Tolstoy…. Genuinely worthwhile, the chosen texts are complemented congeniusly, in a most thought-provoking, while entertaining manner, with carefully outlined questions… {more later}

viii, 133 Seiten, Taschenbuch
engl.-sprachig
Philosophie, 20. Jh., Westliche Moderne

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Vintage Books, New York 2004
36. Auflage 2008
beg, bee: 27.08.2008, 11.09.2008

Have you ever wondered about where to find 451c Chapter Road, Willesden, London NW2 5NG? Are you puzzling over Conway’s Soldiers and the stunning, stunningly beautiful and brief proof to it? Or did you know that in Linnaean taxonomy, in accordance with the system of binomial nomenclature, there exist several rivaling names for the yellow fever mosquito? If not, Mark Haddon’s debut novel will introduce you to these and many more small and sizeable questions, mysteries and riddles in our world, and it does so with ease and from a most unexpected, unfamiliar angle. Set aside your inquiry into the diptera for just a moment, and you will instantly feel amazed by this story of fifteen year old Christopher and his investigation into the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog which turns out much more than the “murder mystery novel” he sets out to tell. The first-person perspective of Christopher’s in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time showcases Haddon’s literary technique superbly as it convincingly portrays, without ever explicitly stating the condition in question, the outlook on the world of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. It captures the reader’s attention from the beginning, numbering its chapters by the primes, and catches him by surprise time and again, when Christopher ponders about mathematical formulae approximating his fear of two evils “in inverse proportion to one another” or describing animal population dynamics (as shown by studies of May, Oster and Yorke in the 1970s), and yet is left unsure to attach any meaning to the facial expressions of his fellow human beings, to emoticons or idioms as in everyday life. One has to concede Christopher’s early caveat that “this will not be a funny book”, and yet its richness in bitter-sweet melody, contemplation on the human mind, and empathy make it a most worthwhile, introspective read. (And while it may go unnoticed for Christopher, you will certainly find many a moment in the protagonist’s adventures for a smile and a laugh in this remarkable, perplexing, hilarious and thought-provoking novel.) Mark Haddon’s versatile prose – which only at the outset may appear simple, mundane or dry but is full of humane spirit – opens up the reader’s eyes and mind to a whole new (outlook on the) world we live in and (the scheme of things we) take for granted. “Lots of things are mysteries. But it doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer to them.” Unlike Christopher, however, we don’t expect science to give all the answers. We still wonder: What is love? What is home? “Where is 451c Chapter Road, Willesden, London NW2 5NG?” (Map)

Review and interview: The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon

228 Seiten, Taschenbuch
engl.-sprachig
Roman, Literatur, England

[Archiv: Ursprünglich veröffentlicht am 13.09.2008.]

For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.
(Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, in a statement towards AFP on July 17, 2008)

I said what I thought and I said what I had to say and I reminded them of what they said themselves. This is not me lecturing them to do this and that. I said simply ‘you have said that, may I remind you of what you said yourself.’
(Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, in an interview with dpa on July 23, 2008)

In another act of complacency towards the host of the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) bows out from its guarantees of freedom of press and unrestricted access to the internet for the foreign media covering the event.

Given the IOC’s policy of appeasement (“silent diplomacy” in Rogge’s sugar-coated wording) towards China’s use of force against political activists, journalists, religious minorities and dissidents in general in recent months, this comes hardly as a surprise. It is most evocative of the Committee’s shameful downplaying of Beijing’s role in the Tibet conflict and of it lending support to the Chinese regime’s exploitation of the Torch Relay this year (a “Journey of Harmony” in the PRC’s sugar-coated wording), a propagandistic coup de force unparalleled since the 1936 Berlin Games. And yet, these mishandlings do almost pale with regard to the IOC’s latest, yet again, weaseling tactics, and there is reason for pointing this out:

In the run-up to the Summer Games, Western powers, media and companies have shown time and again an amazingly acquiescent attitude towards China’s deteriorating human rights abuse records. This may be partly motivated by hopes for a change in the regime magically cropping up in the course of preparation and hosting of this year’s Olympics. While there have been critical reports on corruption and gross abuses in the “middle kingdom” (??), for sure, they have been counterbalanced, however, by stressing China’s economic and social prospects in most cheerful colours.

One should think that interpreting marginal developments as policy steps towards a bright democratic future…

There are, however, more issues at stake. While the concept of ?? in Chinese society (“maintaining face” in view of a person’s prestige) is hardly news to the Western world, the recent fashion of the “culturally aware” of putting much emphasis on this in the dialogue with our Chinese partners is responsible for a damning lack of adequate response by many of our representatives to China’s increasing power. In fact, this misunderstood (one-dimensional) “respect” for cultural idiosyncrasies proves highly irresponsible as it undermines both our particular positions and any prospect on universally agreed-on principles.

We need to underline our interests and present them with intact core articles of faith as non-negotiable conditiones sine non quibus. We must not accept the disregard of the PRC’s dictatorial regime for basic human rights, neither with view to the Chinese people itself nor, and particulaly not, as regards Western customs, traditions, societies and citizens, and yet the West seemingly does so again and again by failing to address outstanding problems and promises. A position of strength, even in the eye of China’s rapidly awakening sleeping giant, can only be maintained by maintaining one’s own face. Unfortunately, for the most part, ??, the concept and practice of kowtow, seems to prevail in our dealings with our friends from the East. (A similar pattern, btw, seems to guide our approach to Islam and militant Islamism.)

… should now, even for the ever so often optimistic, prove a tad more difficult.

In a case of strange coincidence, I found another report next to today’s news on the IOC’s failure to protest China’s censoring of foreign correspondents. It is reminiscent of this one and that one, and in fact it initially triggered this blog entry. The IOC’s cop-out in the face of the PRC’s breach of contracts – no, scrap that; news have it that the Committee itself forgot to tell about concluding such a deal and hence it is a case of the IOC shirking responsibility for the very idea of the Olympic Games – is probably not the final word on these Summer Games. More is there to follow, I’m afraid.

Isn’t it about time to reconsider boycotting the Beijing Games 2008? I certainly think so.

PS: Funny, yesterday Google wouldn’t let me find most sources linked to in this article. Telling, innit?

[Archiv: Ursprünglich veröffentlicht am 31.07.2008.]