Fra Verus

Next up in my French reading is Molière's Le Tartuffe. This is a no-frills Dover dual-language paper edition, much like my copy of Candide. However, the translation of Tartuffe is a lot less literal than Candide. In fact, some of the translation choices are simply bizarre. This is perplexing because literalness is supposedly part of the Dover dual-language edition philosophy. I do not recommend the translation as anything other than an aide for reading the French. The footnotes, though few, explained everything that I would otherwise have had to look up. For someone just starting out with the French language of today, Molière's French provides a significantly greater challenge than the language of Voltaire. I would not recommend it to another beginner like myself.

Molière himself was an early modern playwright of the mid-17th century, only a few decades after Shakespeare's time. Partly due to the temporal proximity, Molière is often referred to as the French Shakespeare. However, unlike Shakespeare, Molière only dabbled in the genre of comedy. And his comedies are quite different from Shakespeare's due to a much greater influence of the Italian commedia dell'arte on Molière's work. While Shakespeare borrowed elements from commedia once in a while, Molière strongly adheres to the style. His characters are largely the stock characters of commedia with little to distinguish themselves from other characters in other plays adhering to the same archetype. And, true to commedia, the action is largely driven by simplistic and petty emotions most at home in the most lizard-like part of the human brain. It is theatre designed for popular and common appeal. Even the metrical style of Molière relies heavily on rhyming couplets that would appeal even to a child. It seems to me that Molière's comedies have more in common with the old Greek satyr plays than Shakespeare.

The play Tartuffe itself did not appeal to me. Much of the earlier action is a family fighting. On stage, I'm sure all this bustling anger plus a little slapstick would probably elicit a chuckle or two. On paper, however, the characters just seem like jerks. The title character himself is a psychopathic conman out to swindle the head of the household by charming him with his false piety. He does not actually show up until the second half of the play. And until then, half the family thinks he is a living a saint and the other half suspects that he is a fraud. After reading Candide, I was already feeling burnt out on the perennial French trope of the holy hypocrite. Tartuffe did not help at all. In short, every single character in this play lacked depth and thus had little appeal to me.

The ending is perhaps the worst of part of the play. I am not reluctant to spoil because it is absolute garbage. Tartuffe manages to steal some papers incriminating the head of the household. He then uses these papers to get an audience with the king and permission to basically steal the family's house and put the head of the household in prison. When all this is revealed to the family, they are in utter despair. But then, out of nowhere, it is revealed the the king is such a great soul that he can immediately see through the lies of any conman and get at the truth of the matter. From these magical powers, he deduced that Tartuffe is a fraud and family is really a bunch of nice people. Thence Tartuffe is taken to prison just when he thought he won. This is such a blatant example of deus ex machina that it is literally used as one of Wikipedia's examples in the article on deus ex machina. This ending is bad and Molière should feel bad.

Next up on the list will be Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme or The Bourgeois Gentleman. Since it's more Molière and the bulk of its humor derives from outdated class expectations, I am not particularly excited. But maybe Molière will surprise me. And, if nothing else, it will further allow me to empathize with the plight of French secondary school students forced to read Molière.

Squaring off the Greek math section is Nicomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic. Sadly, this work is long out of print. You can scrounge Amazon or Abe Books for a copy. There are some paperback versions floating around that are just the translation without any of the introductory material. They tend to be a lot cheaper. However, they were intended only for internal use at St. John's College and the publisher did not give permission for the resale of those books. I went for original hardcover version. The notes in this edition are truly exceptional. Most of Nicomachus' explanations and proofs are paired with alternate versions, often from other Greek authors, in the footnotes. So if Nicomachus loses you, the footnotes can often put you back on track. The notes also provided references to a number of other very interesting Greek mathematical works that I think I would like to check out the next time around.

Nicomachus starts off from a very defensive position. In essence, he tries to explain why anyone should care about arithmetic at all. His very philosophical about it. And the basis of his argument is that the study of "real things" is essential to understanding reality and the universe. From there, he argues that arithmetic is among the things that are truly real. While we moderns would say that a deer in front of us is more real than an abstract concept like "animal", Nicomachus disagrees. A deer can die. However, the idea of "animal" could potentially outlive the existence of animals. In other words, qualities, quantities, and forms exist uniformly throughout all of time, while mere objects and creatures exist for only a slice of time. Therefore, in the grand scheme of the universe, these more abstract things spend more time being real than the seemingly concrete things. And should not the thing that exists for the entire life of the universe be considered more real than the thing that exists for a relative blink of an eye? It is certainly an interesting way of looking at things.

Nicomachus, shortly thereafter, addresses an issue I raised in a previous post: numbers can fill completely different, e.g. counting versus measuring, without us giving much thought to that fact. Nicomachus expands on that. He explains that arithmetic is the study of numbers, particularly numbers of the countable kind, i.e. integers. While arithmetic enables other types of math, it is conceptually prior to them all. He argues that the children of arithmetic are those types of math which study objects, motion, and ratios. These three types of math Nicomachus says we call geometry, astronomy, and music. While this may seem like mere word play, I think there is something to it. We easily become constrained by notions of what math is. But the whole system sometimes needs radical modification to deal with news problems. The classic example is Newton's physics requiring the development of Calculus. On the other side of the coin, Descartes unified geometry and algebra and effectively destroyed the classical/medieval conception of geometry. Meanwhile, music and its study of ratios has managed to soldier along largely without numbers and without being regarded as properly math. And I think there are seriously conceptual revolutions to be made. I once again point to D'arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form. There you can see how poorly our math copes with measuring a three-dimensional object's change over time. The problem demands some sort of calculus of geometry.

Though Nicomachus probably did not see such a division, after his philosophical expositions comes his purely mathematical ones. He dedicates himself primarily to figuring out the properties of numbers. He starts with evens and odds. He then goes into concepts like "even-times even", which we would call powers of two. Likewise, he goes into all the variants of the even and oddness of a number's divisors. Prime numbers and the sieve of Eratosthenes are explained. The list of classifications of numbers is long and fascinating. I can not really capture its breadth here. Though I am tempted to write a program that can detect all of Nicomachus' proposed classifications. Going beyond the properties of single numbers, Nicomachus also covers the 10 classic proportions in detail, including a bit about their history. Apparently in Pythagoras' day only first three, arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic, had yet been discovered. I once again recommend Matila Ghyka's The Geometry of Art and Life for exploration of those proportions in, well, art and life.

The road forward gets trickier from here. Per a friend's advice, I will be tackling the Latin authors in reverse order from Thomas Aquinas. The reason is that his Latin is quite easy to read and it provides a good follow-up to the Vulgate, both conceptually and linguistically. Unfortunately, Aquina's Summa in Latin is eight volumes. It will take quite a while for me to finish. However, there is some good news. I have recently put effort into expanding my ability to read academic French to also read literary French. I have started with Voltaire's Candide and, at the current pace, should be able to write a review of that in a month or so. I will likely continue with other French authors in the Great Books set. Hopefully this will keep the posts flowing while I tackle the Summa.

Next up on the list are The Works of Archimedes. This Dover edition is basically your only option these days. Sir Thomas Heath's translation is the only game in town and Dover's edition is the only edition still in print. If you are desperate for a better quality binding, Cambridge University Press put out Heath's original translation in hardcover in 1897. I opted to track down a copy of that. The downside is that Archimedes' The Method would not be rediscovered for nearly another decade after the CUP edition came out. They released a pamphlet supplement of The Method also by Heath. Unfortunately, I only discovered this after reading all of the 1897 edition. The supplement is quite rare now but I found exactly one copy in the hands of a Latvian book dealer. It was surprisingly cheap. Unfortunately, it will probably take several weeks to arrive so I may need make an addendum to this post if anything really interesting crops up in there. So, while I have not seen the Dove edition in person, it is probably the best of bet for any sane reader who does not want to spend a lot of time and cash with antiquarian book dealer listings.

Archimedes' work greatly resembles that of Euclid, from a modern perspective. So, a lot of what I said about the eye-opening experience of Euclid could also easily apply to Archimedes, if Archimedes is the reader's first introduction to Greek mathematics. However, I think Euclid would be easier on the first time reader. Euclid's Elements describes a system of geometry with enough detail that one can just start on the first page with no prior knowledge and make it all the way through to the end. Archimedes is not so forgiving. While Euclid's work can and did (even still does, in certain corners) serve as a textbook, most of Archimedes' works were simply problems that he wanted to tackle. His intended audience was fellow mathematicians, such as Dositheus of Pelusium, Conon of Samos, and other members of the illustrious Alexandrian crowd. Further, Archimedes' surviving works make reference and depend on other works that do not survive. Since we have a full-blown system of geometry and mathematics of our own to rely on, filling in the missing pieces is not too difficult. However, these things together mean that Euclid is going to provide a smoother first hit for a prospective student of Greek mathematics.

Archimedes has a lot of very Euclid-like proofs on spheres, cylinders, circles, conoids, and spheroids. But Archimedes is at his best when he tries to tackle specific and concrete problems. This is why, despite his great purely mathematical achievements, he is considered the father of engineering; while he was a great mathematician, he was the greatest engineer. I will give a few examples of my favorites.

Archimedes, like many mathematicians of the centuries, sought to figure out the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, i.e. pi. There is an age-old philosophical question about whether or not there is a difference between a circle and a polygon with an infinite (or simply extremely high) number of sides. An ideal circle is certainly different has no sides. But maybe in the real universe of Planck measurements there is no difference. Ultimately, for Archimedes' purposes, and most purposes involving pi, the answer does not really matter. The length of the sides of a polygon are very easy to measure. And a polygon drawn hugging the inside or outside of a circle will more closely approximate the circle as the number of sides goes up. Therefore, a polygon with a high number of sides can give a good approximation of pi. And the more sides one adds, the closer one gets. Archimedes chooses to go up to 96 sides, one polygon hugging the outside and one hugging the inside of a circle. This gives a lower bound for pi at 3 10/71 and an upper bound at 3 1/7. If these two values are averaged, it gives pi accurate up to 3.141. Further sides could be used to produce infinitely more values. Christoph Grienberger, an Austrian mathematician, pushed Archimedes' approach all the way to 39 digits of accuracy. Interestingly, Wikipedia is very misleading on this topic. Archimedes stopped at his 96-sided polygon proof because it was more than sufficient and smashed the accuracy of all existing estimates. Extending it further was an obvious practice left up to the reader. He had solved pi.

Archimedes also has a fascinating work where he describes the process of calculating how many grains of sand it would take to fill up the universe. He does this in response to the notion that there is no number big enough to count the grains of sand on Earth. His numbers for the size of the Earth and the universe are wildly off. His estimation for the size of the Earth is off by an order of magnitude and he dismisses the approximations of his own day which were actually fairly accurate. Still, while his methodology is bogus, he comes up with the same basic idea of our modern scientific notation of large numbers to represent the number of grains of sand it would take to fill the universe. In a sense, he fumbles the theoretical but nails the practical here.

I was always fascinated by the mechanics of seesaws as a child, particularly the "trick" of moving along the seesaw to allow children of different sizes to still play with one another. He describes the math behind this process, along with a few methods for figuring out the center of gravity of common shapes, in his On the Equilibrium of Planes. The math here was surprisingly simple and a real personal joy for me.

Archimedes also describes the mechanics of hydrostatics, i.e. how things float, sink, and/or displace liquid. In other words, Archimedes knows what floats your boat. Given that we have already established that he also knows what tilts your seesaw, I think you are in for a good time. The math to solve the famous problem of how much gold is really in a crown is all laid out here, though he does not actually recount the story. It is possible that he came up with the method and wrote it down before discovering that particular practical use. It is also possible that the story of Archimedes and the gold crown was merely an illustrative story that later came to be treated as history by Vitruvius.

Heath, in his introduction, argues that Archimedes was fairly close to giving us Calculus. And I think he is right. Archimedes' section on spirals describes them both in geometric terms, i.e. moving along a circle and a line at the same time, and in terms of a change in magnitude over time. He also tackles the problem of calculating the area of these spirals. Elsewhere, he deals with calculating the area under many rather complicated curves. Combined with his fascination with mechanics, who knows what could have been, if only more interest had been given to Archimedes, more of his works preserved, or the scholarly community in Alexandria not hobbled over the years?

Way after than promised, I have finished reading the New Testament, also known as Bible II: The Adventures of God Junior. For details about the edition I chose, see my previous post: Antiquum Testamentum.

While it should come as no surprise to readers with a Christian background, the New Testament is radically different from the Old Testament. Rather than tales of the previously-mentioned endless warfare in the meat-grinder of civilization, the New Testament covers a time of relative peace in the Middle East, the so-called Pax Romana or Roman Peace. The God of the New Testament is less about crushing your enemies, adhering to a long list of rules, and wrecking false idols than he is about loving one's fellow man, forgiveness, and "faith".

I put faith in quotes because the Latin word for faith, fides, has a broader meaning than the typical modern English usage. When we say faith, we tend to mean belief, or even blind belief. But the sense of the Latin equivalent is more a reciprocal relationship of loyalty and honesty. Fides is the same word we see show up in variant forms in phrases like bona fide and semper fi. It is the faith of "good faith". And it's interesting to see this contrasted with what we tend to translate as "works". The Latin opus (plural opera) is fairly translated as work or works. When I consider what Paul says in the larger context of Jewish law, one of the things he seemed to be saying was that it is important to follow Jesus and God's teachings honestly rather than simply going through the motion. I can think of two good examples of what I believe is meant by works rather than faith. First, consider the issue of the disciples picking wheat on the Sabbath or Jesus healing the sick on the Sabbath. Technically this is against the rules since the Sabbath is a day of rest. However, as Jesus says, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." What rest is there in hunger or illness? These things may violate the letter of the old law, but not the spirit of it since a starving or sick man can have no rest. To take another example, among modern Jews, there are certain people who believe in a long list of things that should not be done on the Sabbath. One of these things not to be done on the Sabbath is dialing a telephone. To overcome limitations like this, less faithful Jews have developed various devices and tricks. For example, I saw a video once of a man who had bought a fake hand on a stick that he would use to dial his phone. He argued that the hand dialed the phone, not him. Therefore he claimed that he had no broken any rule. That is not a faithful adherence to God's old law. Thus it is easy to see the point of the argument that works without faith mean nothing.

Non-Christians may find it odd that I make reference to the "old law". By that I mean the laws given in the Old Testament, the ones Jews adhere to in varying degrees to this day. These laws were superseded with Jesus' arrival. When asked about what laws people should adhere to, it is said in the gospels that Jesus only explicitly listed a few things: do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not give false testimony, honor your mother and father, and love thy neighbor. Acts and the epistles of Paul further clarify that dietary restrictions and circumcision definitely do not apply to converts. This is important to keep in mind when common criticisms about the "hypocrisy" of Christians are thrown around. The majority of such criticisms depend on citations from Leviticus in the Old Testament. Aside from those things which also appear in the New Testament, nothing in Leviticus is prohibited to Christians. And many things in Leviticus are, arguably, not even prohibit to non-priestly Jews. Take for example homosexuality. In Leviticus, death is the punishment for homosexuality. In Romans, it is said to be a sin but it is in a list of sins so broad that all of us our guilty. Paul's point, a point commonly reiterated in the modern Catholic church but less so in Protestant churches, is that we are all sinners and our only potential redemption is through God's grace. In other words, homosexuals are just like the rest of us: forgiven through Jesus and damned without him. This difference between Romans and Leviticus is not a contradiction for Christians. The rules of Leviticus simply do not matter anymore. Thus there is no hypocrisy or contradiction here. Let he who is without reading comprehension go back to getting stoned.

On the topic of inconsistency and contradiction, there is some truth to the fact that the gospels do not all tell the same story of Jesus' life. However, having studied both medieval manuscript transmission, oral transmission, and history more generally, parallel accounts like this almost never have this level of consistency. The differences are primarily in the level of detail. For example, if I'm not mistaken, the story of Lazarus shows up in both Mark and John but only John goes into enough detail to actually give Lazarus' name. Faithfully recording the gospels must have been very serious business in the early church and that seems only natural given the obvious importance of God's son showing up, delivering the new law, raising the dead, healing the sick, and then coming back from the dead himself. Similarly, the idea that there is "no evidence" that Jesus ever existed is farcical unless one arbitrarily decides that the Bible somehow does not count. I think most people would be surprised how little evidence we have for people and events in antiquity. It is not that rare to know of something from a single manuscript copy of a single work. And yet we accept those things as historical fact. If you want to start saying that Jesus did not exist at all, you need to start questioning half of the things you think you know about the ancient world.

More generally, most of the criticisms of Christianity that I personally had or had read that lead me to become an atheist as a teenager simply fall apart with a single honest reading of the Bible as a trained historian. It really comes down to a few simple questions, which correspond very nicely with the affirmations in the Nicene Creed. Do you believe there is a God who created the universe? Do you believe that he became man in the form of Jesus? Do you believe that Jesus was killed and came back from the dead? Do you agree with his teachings that we should probably not murder, steal, and so on? Most people can agree to the last question easily. A lot of people have no problem with the first question, though it is quite the sticky wicket. It is those middle two questions that I find the most difficult. Did the apostles and disciples really see what they think they saw? Was human incarnation really the best method God could come up with? If one accepts that we live in a created universe with some driving force behind it, these things certainly seem possible. Unfortunately, without witnessing them, I can not, thus far, come up with an ironclad argument for why these things would be so. Still, this is progress. When reading the Great Books, I am often left with more questions than I started with. I think the Bible is the first time where I have read something and eliminated more questions than I gained. And I have definitely vastly narrowed down the doubts I may have about the Christian faith.

In any case, next up should be Euclid, as I had originally planned. Stay tuned.

Next up is Galen: On the Natural Faculties (Loeb Classical Library). It's another Loeb but aside from the original Great Books volume, it's just about the only translation available. The remarks in my previous post about Hippocrates and the respective Loeb editions more or less apply equally to this volume of Galen. The only thing I would add is that this volume of Galen has a very extensive introduction and many useful footnotes, even compared to the Loeb norm. A.J. Brock is to be commended for his thorough work.

Galen was a Greek born in the 2nd century AD, well after the Roman conquest of Greece. His father was well-educated and reportedly virtuous architect. His mother, on the other hand, was said to be an irrational and angry woman who caused no end of grief for Galen's father. Learning by example and counter example, Galen sought to emulate his father as much as possible and to shy away from the behaviours of his mother. As a young man, he wandered the major hubs of learning in the Eastern Mediterranean. After returning home and working as a surgeon for gladiators, he eventually made his way to Rome. He did not like what he found.

Much like the days of Plato, the best wisdom of those that had gone before was often ignored in Rome in favour of novel theories peddled by the reigning sophists of the day. Galen pitted his knowledge of Hippocrates, supplemented by his own experiments, against these sophists with limited results in his own day. In one instance, he argued against a prevailing notion that the bladder was a useless organ. Galen attempted to argue that he had seen the bladder swell with urine in animals and further that Aristotle says that nature does nothing without reason. His opponent remained unconvinced. Galen resorted to literally slicing open some poor animal right in front of the man. He then tied something around the animal's penis to keep it from urinating. He patched the animal back up and then reopened it later to show that the bladder was now swollen. He then untied the animal's penis and urine immediately came forth. The animal's bladder deflated. Galen's opponent was still not convinced.

Supporting arguments with evidence from vivisections was a favored tactic of Galen's. Empiricism, however, is not a foolproof method against certain types of minds. Galen persisted in his arguments. He won great favor among some. He even became the personal physician of the great Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom we will read a work of later. It is hard not to strongly believe in truths one has witnessed first hand and can reproduce on command, provided a dog can be found quickly. And yet some people will always remain immune to reason. It was a case of an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object. The expected social catastrophe ensued and Galen was forced to flee for his life from the other medical practitioners in Rome. Marcus Aurelius would later beg him to come back but he refused.

So, the moral of the story is that while you can lead a sophist to a dog's piss-filled bladder, but you can't make him drink believe that it plays a role in dealing with urine. And adherence to the truth can be so enraging for the indoctrinated that not even the protection of one of the greatest Roman emperors can be counted on to preserve truth's advocate.

Ps. The title is actually a pun when translated to Swedish.

Next up is the second half of Aristotle's complete works: The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Vol. 2 (Bollingen Series LXXI-2). My previous entry describes my general thoughts on this particular edition. I will only add that the binding on my copy of volume two has started to come apart. It survived a cover-to-cover reading but it will likely need some minor repair in the near future.

Since I don't need to spend much time talking about the edition itself this time, it may be worth using this time/space to provide a few book care tips. On the topic of repair, I highly recommend that any serious reader pick up some acid free linen tape like this stuff: Lineco Self Adhesive Linen Hinging Tape 1.25 in. x 35 ft. white linen tape. I've managed to repair more than a few books with that stuff. It works pretty well and looks great. If you buy some linen tape other than what I linked above, be absolutely sure that it is acid free or it will start slowly eating away at your books. You can see the effect of acidity in older books first by the yellowing of the pages and then eventually stiffness and finally crumbling. This can also be a problem with storing papers or books in cardboard boxes. If you are going to store paper stuff in boxes, I also recommend picking up one of these: American Crafts Scrapbook Utility Pen, PH Tester Pen. The pens basically turn a part of the target paper or cardboard into a little litmus strip and you can use it to test whether or not the material is acidic. With cardboard boxes, there's really a race to the bottom and certain manufacturers, particularly those located in a certain East Asian country with a huge population, will falsely claim that their cardboard is acid free. Without this pen you wont find out until your books are already damaged.

Now, back to the matter at hand. This second volume has a lot more of Aristotle's truly essential works which I think everyone should read. I mean in particular: Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics.

Politics outlines the different forms a government can take along with their various strengths and weaknesses. In this modern age, there is a common belief that democracy is the only truly legitimate form of government. Aristotle doesn't seem to think too highly of it because it has several predictable modes of failure. One in particular should seem rather familiar: the lower class, if it is abundant enough, will use its votes to start redistributing the property of the middle and upper class and it will continue to do so until either these classes revolt, flee, or are reduced to the point where there's nothing left to "redistribute". But as Aristotle shows, every form of government fails sooner or later when bad men inevitably end up in charge. The form of government does not prevent failure itself. The form only dictates the possible failure modes. Historically, the government of today is the one which addresses the failure mode of yesterday's government.

Rhetoric is a particularly interesting work in today's intellectual atmosphere. We don't really teach rhetoric as a subject anymore. We teach "writing" and we teach "critical thinking" or "logic". Our teaching on identifying bad logic in written arguments usually focuses on logical fallacies. Now, logical fallacies are a real problem that everyone should understand. But this approach alone has its limit. It focuses primarily on errors made on the production side, i.e. in the arguer's writing and thinking. Rhetoric is, in a way, the inverse of that. Rhetoric considers errors in thinking produced on the consumption side, i.e. in the listener or reader's own thoughts. Now, strictly speaking, rhetoric can involve the deliberate use of logical fallacies. However, that is not necessarily so and Aristotle tends to shy away from such tactics. But that doesn't leave the speaker without options for manipulation. To give one simple example, it's not really a failure of logic on the speaker's part to praise the virtues of the listener. It just has nothing to do with the argument at hand. And yet it still leaves the listener positively disposed toward everything which follows. The error is not the speaker's; the error is the listener's. This is the side we don't really teach anymore and that leaves our citizenry open to manipulation. We should fix it. The fact that education standards are created by those doing the manipulating means that we wont.

Poetics outlines a lot of what Aristotle thinks is essential to literature and what simply makes some works better than others. It is very focused on stage tragedies but a great deal of what he says is universal. And it's a lot more in-depth than the usual glib summary of "it's about how plays should have unity of place, time, and action". It's also a pretty short read in itself so I wont bore you with the details.

That said, there is one particular nugget in his Poetics which I think addresses a wide-spread modern misconception in the literary world. Among the things Aristotle says are essential to tragedy (by tragedy Aristotle means most plays which we today would not consider comedies), he lists "thought". And by "thought" he means, "proving or disproving some particular point, or enunciating some universal proposition." Now, the 20th-century German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht has a related idea, and that is that "all art is political". This is similar to Aristotle's idea that a tragedy must fundamentally involve "proving or disproving".

What about Aristotle's other option, "enunciating some universal proposition"? One would think this would be one sticky wicket for Brecht and friends. However, according to Brecht, in the cases when a piece of art seems apolitical, it is because it is actually reinforcing the status quo. In other words, to Brecht, there are no universal propositions. This is a common theme in 20th-century thought: everything is relative, everything is a social construct, and perception determines reality.

Are there truly no universally human ideas? I, and Aristotle, would say that there certainly are. There are some ideas which aren't even limited to humans. For example, there is a notion that beauty is merely what society tells us it is. But there are certain elements, such as symmetry, which clearly influence the mating choices of not just humans but virtually every animal in existence. Likewise, all animals, including humans, have some drive toward self-preservation such that death, unless there are some other mitigating circumstances involved, is certainly a universal ill. The whole realm of science is based on the idea that there are things which exist and can be measured. Perception does not determine atomic weight. Perception does not create gravity. The Earth will orbit the sun even if a smart fellow such as Aristotle denies it. These things are certainly universally true and apolitical, not merely social constructs accepted because they are part of the status quo. The only way out of this argument is to insist what we take to be objectively real is merely "politics", i.e. an invention of the culture and time we live in. But insist all you like Brechtians; the universe wont care.

After many months, I finally knocked out the next item in the list: Plato: Complete Works. First, as per the usual,  here a few words about this edition. It has a few things going for it. It's relatively cheap for the massive amount of content--roughly $50 for 1,800 pages or so from one of the pillars of Western thought. And as an added bonus, you wont get just the works of Plato, but also the works of people who have pretended to be Plato gotten away with it for at least a century or two. So, it's plenty of the prolific Plato and pieces from the petty posers. The translations themselves were quite readable. The footnotes aren't extensive but I feel like they hit the sweet spot on that front. I think I found about half of the footnotes useful or interesting so though they are few, they aren't a huge waste of useless information or obvious information like some of the stuff I've picked up in the past. And hey, they're actual footnotes, not the endnotes that cheap publishers seem to have a hardon for these days. The only criticism I really have about this edition is that it's a single volume. While it may sound handy to have it all in a single book, I found holding this thing up to read to be a serious pain in the ass. Reading it in bed before falling asleep just isn't possible. But I suppose its metaphorical weight is just as much an impediment to reading that way as its physical weight. I think I would have preferred it in a handier 2-6 volume set. That would certainly drive up costs, however. So all in all, good job John M. Cooper and Hackett Publishing.

My view of the text itself is not quite as universally positive. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Plato is pretty amazing, especially for the first time reader. His Republic is an absolute must. Laws is also really good but much it felt like a watering down of Republic. Symposium is also a must if you have any interest in the topic of love. Just kind of work around the fact that it's broadly praising relationships between adult men and teenage boys. The dialogues are where things get rough. They all work off of a system of questions and answers. That's where the dialogue bit comes in. It's a perfectly reasonable way of approaching problems. Unfortunately, there's a lot of repetition when you put them all in a big collection. By Plato's reckoning, all of life's great questions really begin with establishing that a shipwright is one who builds ships, a farmer is one who farms, and a doctor is one who treats the body. Plato also relies heavily on the so-called "method of division". This involves a process of trying to identify and categorize all things of a related type. Plato is quite bad at making these sorts of divisions and it often throws the remainder of the dialogue off the rails. A man can only take so much. For that reason, the bigger works went much quicker for me.

There are plenty of gems to be found in the dialogues if you're willing to put in the work. If you're in a hurry, you may want to pick and choose dialogues based on Cooper's summaries at the beginning. Covering them all here would not be practical. Of the smaller dialogues, I think Theaetetus was one of the stronger arguments and the most relevant today. Here Plato tackles the problem of whether reality is objective, subjective, or a mix. This is a topic somewhat dear to me and I even wrote a paper on it a million years ago for a derpy applied philosophy class as a teenager in community college. However, I hadn't actually read Theaetetus at the time. Given the similarities between my argument and Plato's, I now understand why the professor found it both worthy of an A and so damn amusing. Basically, if there is such a thing as objective reality, our job is done because everything is just like we perceive it. Now, we know that isn't, strictly speaking the case. Our senses fool us quite often under certain circumstances. But by and large, with the right methodology, we can usually produce consistent observations. Our prior technological progress kind of depends on that fact. Now, let us suppose that someone comes along, maybe from the local Zen center, and insists that perception determines reality and there's no such thing as an objective reality. This is usually followed by an explanation of how reality "really" works. Now, first off, if reality is really subjective, logically you can tell that guy to fuck off. His assessment of reality cannot be proven to be any more correct than whatever you already have in your head. And if perception does determine reality and you are perceiving a reality that behaves entirely like an objective one, then that "fact" really doesn't change anything at all. So, in short, objective reality either truly exists or you've derped your way into creating one well enough that the difference is purely academic. Even shorter, New Agers can suck Plato's dick.

Now, as I said, the really good stuff is really in Republic and Laws. Since I think Laws is largely a dilution of Republic to make it more palatable and practical for real-world implementation, let's just stick to the more philosophically pure Republic. The goal of Republic is to outline an ideal society that be productive, secure, and full of virtue. Now, this virtue bit is a little circular. Plato's arguments about the virtues usually end up arguing that certain virtues are what they are because it's what's good for the city. So, an ideal city is one full of virtue and virtue is what makes an ideal city. Now, it's important to understand that the Greek "arete" that gets translated as "virtue" basically means the qualities which make something fit for its purpose. So, for example, sharpness would be a "virtue" of a knife. Now, if Plato feels that virtue is whatever is good for the city, that implies that Plato thinks that man's purpose is to serve the State. I don't know about you, but I certainly have other priorities. But defining virtue gets a lot harder to advocate when it doesn't have a clear payoff. Why be good? Because it makes the State stronger and/or makes God happy. There's a clear payoff in most virtue systems because simply saying "It's the right thing to do, dickknob." isn't the most obviously logical of arguments. I don't have any better answers but I remain dissatisfied with Plato's conception of virtue.

Now, things get even creepier for the libertarian-minded when we get to Plato's actual planned implementation. He outlines a process for testing children from a young age to determine who is the most talented. These children would then be placed in a rigid caste system with virtually zero social mobility once the testing is done. Further, all forms of stories would be censored to ensure that they advocate Plato's system of virtues. Even the myths about the gods are up on the chopping block. Plato believed that control of literature, performance, and myth was the way to make virtuous society. I find it fascinating to see just how old this idea of making society "better" through extreme authoritarianism really is. You could say that any mythical group like the Illuminati is really just a bunch of Platonist extremists. And somehow I find that idea hilarious. I mean, if you just switch it from "there's a secret organization controlling everything" to "there are radical Platonists trying to control everything" it seems a lot more plausible. I mean, obfuscation of the real mechanisms of power is pretty central to Plato's plan. It's such an old idea, someone out there has to have at least attempted it. I've read that people did in Byzantium at least. The idea really just breaks down in the logistics of controlling that much stuff and in assuming that media and education dictate thought enough for reliable control. Or maybe I'm wrong about that part, radical Platonists really do control the world, and I'm going to get thrown into a black van and kidnapped tomorrow. trolololo

Next up is Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It is the history of the ~30 year war between Sparta and Athens told by a prominent Athenian citizen who spent half the war in exile with the Spartas due to his having commanded a failed expedition. Thus all lot of the history is a first-hand account with the remaining being almost entirely compromised of second-hand accounts.

The edition I've linked is another Landmark edition. This one has meatier footnotes and a nice big map at the end, though all the maps in this volume are in black and white. So two of my major criticisms of their Herodotus edition have been somewhat ameliorated. Sadly, the Thucydides predates the Herodotus edition so I guess this wasn't a general trend in the series. Maybe someday I'll try their Xenophon or Arrian and report my findings.

I'll start off with the bad part of Thucydides. His history is largely a military one, owing to the nature of the topic. If you aren't into military history, and I'm not, some of the long passages about circumvallation and hoplite formations can be exhausting. But a lot of other history-loving folks get a serious hard-on for that sort of thing. If you are one of those folks, I guess you're in for a treat. It just isn't for me, at least not to the extent it is present in Thucydides. And it is still valuable and useful information.

On the upside, even if you just skim those aspects, Thucydides is pretty brilliant in his commentaries. He also loads up on some brilliant Greek and Spartan speeches, the treaties, and the very occasional cultural tidbit. I'm tempted to bomb you folks with quotes. I shall abstain. Thucydides tries to maintain objectivity throughout. This is pretty hilarious when Cleon comes up. You may remember him as the corrupt politician mocked by Aristophanes. It's hard to describe but the weight is in what is not said. Despite being as diplomatic as possible, you get the sense that Thucydides hated this man more than any other figure in his history.

There are some valuable lessons to learn from the course of the war. First, the war largely started due to the fact that Spartan and Athenian influenced expanded so greatly that they started to have conflicts among their various allies and client states. Basically, they started to step on each other's toes. But neither was really interested in a direct confrontation. The overlapping spheres of influence simply made it inevitable. It is unnecessary entanglements and its consequences in action. Second, when Athens started losing, people started blaming anything and everything, even democracy itself. As such, democracy more or less died for the bulk of the war, replaced with unstable tyrannies and oligarchies. Defeat spurs on knee-jerk reactions. On the upside, it can also produce some serious rethinking in the long run. This war gave us Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics, which you'll hear about more in the future. Third, prolonged war weakened both Athens and Sparta permanently. The ruling Spartan class was all but spent by the end. Athens lost its empire. They were no longer capable of challenging Persian power on the Persian side of the pond, much to the woe of the Ionian Greeks over there. And before long, the inevitable happened: they got steamrolled by a foreign power. But they got lucky there. That invading power would be Alexander the Great and his semi-Hellenic Macedonians, which assured a strong Greek presence on that side of the Mediterranean until the fall of Byzantium some 1800 years later. Obviously they'd lose out to the Romans but Greek culture quickly became one of the pillars of the Empire and ultimately the Greek side outlasted the Roman side.

Next up on my list is supposed to be Plato. However, I'm going to take a detour to read a book that is less than a year old and even review it here. I'm hoping it has a touch of that slow-fermenting, crisis-spawned magic of Plato and Aristotle. I probably wont be doing this sort of thing often, maybe not at all ever again, but the guy gave me a free signed copy of the book and he's kind of a big deal in his area of expertise so you could say I'm obligated to do a review. I'll leave the particulars as a surprise.

Rounding out the volume of Greek drama is Aristophanes: The Complete Plays. Now, the translation of Aristophanes one gets is extremely important. His plays have a lot of swearing and sometimes massive strap-ons. For the bulk of the 20th century, this stuff was considered too racy as is. Unfortunately, this means that virtually every translation available cuts out all these good bits. Paul Roche's translation, linked above, keeps it all intact as much as possible.

Roche's translation does suffer from two problems, however. First, Aristophanes makes extensive use of dialects to show class and place of origin. Roche tries to emulate this with British regional and class dialects or accents. I thought this was a decent half-measure for a virtually intractable problem. Judging from reviews, a lot of people disagree with me here. So if you genuinely don't like Roche's solution or you are some sort of data-driven plebeian whose tastes are enslaved to Amazon reviews, look elsewhere. Except then you'll be stuck with translations which have "docked the cock", so to speak. The other issue is that Paul Roche is almost a counterfeit native English speaker. He grew up in India and spent a lot of his life outside of English-speaking countries and of English-speaking countries he did spend time in he was more often in the United States than Britain. His idiom is therefore peculiar at times as his English seems to be disproportionately influenced by written English rather than spoken English. In more formal prose, I probably wouldn't have even noticed. But Aristophanes' language is meant to be that of everyday life. Roche tries to emulate that but, knowing little about how English speakers sound in everyday life, things don't always turn out as one might expect. His use of Cockney, for example, is more the Cockney of Dickens than 20th century London. And one of the footnotes comically refers to the "King's English". The fellow must have been out of the loop for a while.

But really, this is all just nitpicking. His translations are awesome. His footnotes are extensive without being tedious or patronizing. And they're actual footnotes, not endnotes. With the tragedies, endnotes were acceptable because you really didn't need to know much that wasn't in the Homeric literature and other plays. The comedies, on the other hand, heavily emphasize current events and culture, including making reference to other plays that survive only in fragments or not at all. Having read the tragedies and the Homeric stuff is still enough for a lot of the jokes. And the giant floppy cocks, of course, are eternal wit. That leaves about a third of the jokes that don't really work without explanation.

To speed things up, I just read all eleven of Aristophanes' surviving plays in one go. For the sake of brevity, I'll lump his similar play together. First up are the anti-war plays: Acharnians, Knights, Peace, and Wasps. Aristophanes spent the bulk of his youth and productive years living with the consequences of constant warfare, mostly between his native Athens and Sparta, with the occasional Persian bungling. The war lasted for nearly three decades, off and on. At various points this war cost Athens its men, its economy, its ships, its allies, its democracy, and much more. In Aristophanes' view, war with Sparta was ultimately pointless. Sparta was a land power while Athens was a naval power. Athens had a little empire from the black sea to Sicily which made them one of the foremost hubs of Mediterranean trade. This wealth gave them a city that Sparta's war- and slave-driven economy couldn't rival. But instead of simply enjoying what they had, Athens pursued a land war with a superior land power in that land power's own backyard when, at least in Aristophanes' view, they could have just stayed out of inland Greek politics and been no worse for it. And at several stages the Spartans--the fucking SPARTANS--tried to make peace. When a government wants war more than Sparta, something is seriously wrong. Aristophanes spends most of these plays mocking those who perpetuated the war. The main focus is one fellow: Cleon. He was apparently a rat bastard of a politician who succeeded in being present at one major military success, though he only ordered another Athenian commander to actually get the job done. He then milked that one success for all it was worth. I find it fascinating that taking credit for ordering someone else to do something was considered grounds for ridicule on the public stage. These days, we accept political leaders taking credit for the success of our generals without even thinking about the logic of it. We just take "Mission Accomplished" and "I got Osama bin Laden" at face value. He also takes time to poke fun at the arms dealers. He aptly points out that though the arms dealers are doing brisk business, the war was making it impossible to acquire luxury goods and even many staple goods from the rest of Greece. When Aristophanes was a child, Athens was a city of relative opulence and luxury. As the war dragged on, even the middle class had problems getting enough food. You could allegedly tell a servant from his master because the servant was better dressed. The implication is that there wasn't actually enough to go around but servants had strict customary rights for compensation that were established in a time of opulence. The custom did not change with the economy.

For all that depressing talk, the anti-war plays are quite funny. In Acharnians, a merchant negotiates his own separate peace with Sparta and is able to do business with all of Greece openly in his front yard as his property effectively became its own sovereign state. His business booms and the arms dealers are enraged. The point being that Athens' economy would be booming since it was a natural center of trade and only the war was hindering things. Knights is about an equestrian order that enlists a sausage dealer to confront the aforementioned Cleon for control of Athens. The rationale was that an unqualified low-born sausage dealer would be a better leader than an unqualified low-born warmongering tanner. The sausage-dealer is called "Sausageman". He fights people using a string of sausage. I really wish I could see this staged. In Peace, some enterprising fellows decide to fly a dung beetle to Mount Olympus to rescue Peace, whom Ares (War) had buried with the consent of Zeus, consent given due to Zeus' frustration with Greece's apparent boundless stupidity. Excavating Peace is no easy task but the men are able to enlist more than enough support from average people, the point being that the common people never actually want war unless they are manipulated by politicians. Wasps is not overtly anti-war. It instead looks at the effect the corrupt warmongers had on the domestic courts. Basically, while the war raged on, the courts became a farce. The rule of law was undermined. Basic rights were no longer respected. It is all depressingly familiar. There's a funny bit involving a trial of house pets and some stolen cheese.

Aristophanes also writes a number of plays about women. In two of these feminine plays, Lysistrata and A Parliament of Women, Aristophanes implies that men had let their state deteriorate so greatly that they no longer deserved to be in charge anymore and so women should usurp power. Parliament basically has the women declare a pseudo-communist state and pokes fun at the natural results of that. In Athens' state of war-induced poverty, the ideas of redistribution of wealth and communal property gained some fans. Because obviously capitalism had failed. Their poverty was most definitely not the result of three decades of being warmongering assholes. Once again, this is depressingly familiar. As we'll see later, Plato kind of went full-retard with this in his Republic. Women at Thesmophoria Festival is mostly Aristophanes giving voice to complaints about Euripides portrayal of women as seducers, adulterers, general whores, and murderers. There's not much to do with the war, courts, or economy in this last one.

Aristophanes gets more philosophical than political sometimes. In Clouds, he basically parodies the Sophists and insists that they are all vile atheists who give bad reasoning the semblance of good and are otherwise ruining the youth of the day. He lumps Socrates in with these guys though Socrates was not a Sophist. Frogs was written after the deaths of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. In it, Dionysus gets sick of the sad state of theater, dresses up as Hercules, and charges into hell determined to bring one of the great playwrights back. Hilarity ensues. Sophocles had only just died so he doesn't really factor much into the play. But Aeschylus and Euripides have a prolonged and amusing duel to prove which one is better. There's also a mostly silent chorus of mimes dressed as frogs in the background the whole time. Plutus is an imagining of the world without the threat of poverty. Basically, no-one has any reason to produce anything of value. Sure, if we all had our basic needs met, some of us would try to create things and better ourselves for their own sake. Many would not. And most of us would probably still do something but not nearly as much as we would if it weren't for the threat of poverty. In short, Aristophanes is saying that wealth makes us soft and weak while poverty spurs us on to do great things. It certainly made me take undergrad way more seriously than most of my peers.

Finally, there's Birds. In this play, Aristophanes posits what would happen if birds ruled the world. Hilarity ensues. It's largely apolitical. Basically, Aristophanes got complacent during a brief period of peace, mistakenly believing that peace was the new state of things.

All in all, Aristophanes' comedies have aged better than anything else I've read. Once you know the political figures being mocked, it is non-stop lulz. At the same time, there is biting social commentary in there that applies just as much to us today as it did to Aristophanes' audience. Like I believe I said about one of the tragedies, if you read only some of this stuff, the comedies of Aristophanes should be at the top of your list. But without all the tragedies and the Homeric stuff, you'll be missing half the fun. That was kind of Adler's point in choosing these books. They are all in a long running conversation with one another.

Next up is the fourth volume of Euripides, including: Herakles, Phoenician Women, and Bacchae. Yeah, only three in this volume so I would say it is the shortest volume of Euripides but the physical book is actually like an inch taller than the others. This made me notice that there are a lot of little discrepancies between the various volumes in the set. They look a little weird lined up on a shelf. What the hell, Oxford University Press? But if I just wanted something that looked pretty on the shelf, I probably would have bought the real Great Books series.

Herakles is a pretty strange play. Especially since I did not realize that the wife and kids in this play are separate from the wife and kids found in other Hercules plays until after I finished reading it. Which is a little awkward since the two other plays I'm thinking of involve the death of Hercules at the hands of his wife and the survival of his children after his death while this play is all about how Hera makes Hercules go crazy and murder his entire family. After he recovers his wits, he decides he wants to kill himself. But good old Theseus, freshly rescued from Hades, is there to talk him out of it. I guess he gets over it because all these dead people aren't really mentioned in those other two plays which are later chronologically. He also takes a third wife after he dies and becomes a god. Incidentally, once he dies, he is in both Hades and Olympus due to his half-mortal/half-divine nature. His ten labors are also commonly explained to have become twelve because two of the originals "didn't count". His sidekick is also quite variable. I'm skeptical that Hercules' story was ever as cohesive and monolithic as these playwrights portray. I suspect they, or their literary predecessors, just crunched a bunch of oral tales into a somewhat cohesive whole. In any case, Hercules' reaction at the end is very moving. And Madness herself basically calling Hera bitch for what she was doing is pretty awesome.

Phoenician Women is possibly my favorite play so far. It has elements from all of the Oedipus plays, Seven Against Thebes, Iphigenia at Aulis, nearly any play with slave women, and so many more. It's like an action-packed summary of half of Greek Tragedy. I really want to see this play staged someday. It takes place shortly after Oedipus gouges out his eyes but is still before he has left the city and continues until Antigone tries to bury her slain brothers. The Phoenician women of the title actually have very little relevance to the overall play. I would say this is a definite must read, with the caveat that it may not really have the same thrill for someone who hasn't read most of all the other tragedies. It is a pretty sweet payoff for all that work though.

Bacchae is one of Euripides' more famous plays. So I kind of went into this one with high expectations. In short, Bacchus shows up to Thebes, place of his birth, and tries to force them into worshiping as the god that he is, his father being Zeus. His scheme, successful in the end, mostly revolves around stealing all the women and getting them to dance drunkenly in the mountains. It's a little silly. It is probably a lot more entertaining staged, what with all the drunken dancing women. As a read, I didn't much enjoy it. But ultimately Euripides' track record is still pretty solid with me, so I don't really mind.

One more volume of Greek Tragedy to go, folks!