Alessandro Scafi on the intersections between religion and geography in the context of medieval cartography… .
Religion and geography intersect and interact, particularly in the context of medieval cartography. India was represented on medieval world maps as a country of wisdom and a land of opulence but its depiction has to be seen within the wider context of the Christian vision of history.
… from the Hôtel de France & Choiseul, 239-241 Rue St. Honoré (Place Vendôme)
This was the fourth month of the Republican Calendar, it lasted from the 21st of December to the 19th of January. Nivôse. The month of snow, the impressive ancstor of this emasculate winter, more adapted to the organisation of garden-parties than to the decoration of Christmas trees.
Christmas in France is more fashionable than formerly, it forms part of a curiously persistent anglophile tradition which compelled smart Frenchman to buy their clothes in England, and smart Frenchwomen to refer their fox (terrier), or their bull (dog), or again their pull (over) - all imported from Britain.
As la Gentry, (which I took to mean l’argenterie) was the latest contribution to their curious pseudo-British vocabulary, so it would not surprise me if le stocking were to become literally the last word in near-English, though in point of fact, the sabot in this country takes a place of a stocking in ours.
Children put their sabots, not their stockings, in the chimney piece for le Père Noël to fill. A diminutive hostess once archly informed Jean Cocteau of her intention of doing this. “Elle espère toujours y trouver des jambes,” he muttered. Nivôse, then is a preparation for the Réveillon, the the two Réveillons, Christmas and the New Year. Geese are gorged, truffles are hunted, le plum-pudding (a purely snobbish postwar innovation which nobody really likes) is acclimatised.
The poulterers shop windows look like a Flemish picture, bristling with wild boars, festooned with turkeys, ennobled with stags. There is a touch of heraldry, a sense of décor in the French poulterers which is lacking in his British counterpart. Topical toys, for here there is a fashion even in toys - la poupée existentialiste of indeterminate sex, in slacks and spectacles, is the latest invention, endeavor to appeal, to blaser blessings, anything with the cabalistic in initials C.D. (Christian Dior) from scarves to Canasta sets sells like hotcakes.
Medieval cogs and monsters on the Tower of Pisa
How does language “hook on to the world”? How does perception “hook on to the world”?
If someone is able, for example, to imagine seeing Eisenhower receive the German surrender that ended the war in Europe in 1945, then that person must possess a whole range of abilities, intellectual and practical. In particular, the person must know who Eisenhower was, what the war in Europe was, etc…
Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord. Mind, Body and the World, 47.
. . allegorical composition was to Dante not an artificial, but a natural process. He lived in a world of mystic correspondences. Numbers, stars, stones, beasts, had a mysterious significance: even the events of history were fraught with symbolic meaning. The relation of fact to symbol was not arbitrary nor fortuitous: it was real and predestined. Thus in his poem the outer and the inner narrative seem indissolubly bound. Neither obstructs the other, neither is complete without the other, and, to the intelligent reader, the two are of equal interest.
Charles H. Grandgent,
Preface to the Divina Commedia (1909)
The Italian physician Guido da Vigevano (c. 1280−1349), planning for a new crusade, made illustrations for a paddle boat and war carriages that were propelled by manually turned compound cranks and gear wheels (center of image).
These writers [Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey] have kept alive the suggestion that, even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day. They have kept alive the historicist sense that this century’s “superstition” was the last century’s triumph of reason, as well as the relativist sense that the latest vocabulary, borrowed from the latest scientific achievement, may not express privileged representations of essences, but be just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described.
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 367
Rorty’s anti-epistemological radicalism and and belletristic anti-academicism are refreshing and welcome in a discipline deeply entrenched in a debased and debilitating isolation. Yet, ironically, his project, though pregnant with rich possibilities, remains polemical (principally against other professional academics) and hence barren. It refuses to give birth to the offspring it conceives. Rorty leads philosophy to the complex world of politics and culture, but confines his engagement to transformation in the academy and to apologetics for the modern West.
-Cornell West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 207.
1
