John Henry Newman: The Idea of A University, 1854

The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fullness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at least originated.

John Henry Newman was a man in search of trouble. Highlights of his eventful life include the following:

• Ordaining as an Anglican preist and denouncing the Pope


• A switch, at age 44, to Catholicism


• Defending the Pope during the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England


• Getting successfully sued for libel by a Dominican monk


• Fired as rector of Dublin Catholic University after an essay he wrote was censured by Rome, thought to be a statement against papal infallibility


• Taking on Anglicans once the doctrine of papal infallibility was confirmed, in defense of the Pope

Amazing. He comes full circle in 89 years of full on living.

Throughout his life he remained fairly suspicious of authority and his thoughts on universities reflected that somewhat. He was truly ahead of his time in many ways.

BuddhaNet’s Online Buddhist Study Guide

Cool.

On Early Islam

Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who ultimately assimilated it. Why did the reverse not happen? By tracing the major currents of medieval Islamic and Christian thought, this article, in part, proposes that the outcome had little to do with the virtues or vices of the tenets of either Islam or Christianity (they were both obstacles), but with older and deeper dispositions of mass belief. The Roman Christians (unlike the Byzantine Christians) lacked a significant spiritual-mystical dimension in the faith of their masses, unlike in the Islamic heartland, where such presence was strong. In particular, the latter led to Sufism, the dominant face of Islam until the 19th century (when orthodoxy began rising, partly in reaction to colonialism and modernism). Widespread mysticism thus indirectly denied critical mass to the early Islamic rationalism.

In the medieval West, on the other hand, there was hardly a mystical tradition; it had precious little of the non-denominational spirituality that seeks worldly detachment. As Protestant reinterpretation and Greek rationalism challenged their dogma-centric metaphysics, the temporal naturally gained wider emphasis, with its external engagement and human agency. It fostered popular attitudes and values similar to those of Classical Greece, which too had no spirituality. Notably, this took root in regions with relatively recent barbarian pasts and poorer records of spiritual life � northwestern Europe. At the expense of Catholicism, these attitudes snowballed into the abstraction of individualism, ultimately leading to the scientific method and political institutions built via negotiation. Much of what followed sprang from an interplay of its internal logic and contingency.

In the Epilogue, I propose a different classification, from the clich�d east-west, of mankind’s significant and seminal metaphysical responses down the ages. It would be no fun writing this just for the sake of polemics � like Protagoras, I am ever mindful of the shortness of human life, if not the obscurity of the theme � this article also discusses some of the key events and the lives & times of many remarkable personalities of early Islam: al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Firdausi, al-Farabi, Ibn al-Arabi, and Avicenna, besides others.

Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher

A central concept which Escher captured is that of self-reference, which any believe lies near the heart of the enigma of consciousness � and the brain’s ability to process information in a way that no computer has yet mimicked successfully.

The lithograph Drawing Hands and the woodcut Fish and Scales each captures this idea in a different way. In the former the self-reference is direct and conceptual; the hands draw themselves much the way that consciousness considers and constructs itself, mysteriously, with both self and self-reference inseparable and coequal. In Fish and Scales, on the other hand, the self-reference is more functional; one might rather call it self-resemblence. In this way the woodcut describes not only fish but all organisms, for although we are not built, at least physically, from small copies of ourselves, in an information-theoretic sense we are indeed built in just such a way, for every cell of our bodies carries the complete information describing the entire creature, in the form of DNA.

On a deeper level, self-reference is found in the way our worlds of perception reflect and intersect one another. We are each like a character in a book who is reading his or her own story, or like a picture of a mirror reflecting its own landscape. Many of Escher’s works exhibit this theme of intersecting worlds, but we will here consider only one of the exemplars. As is common in Escher’s treatment of this idea, the lithograph Three Spheres II makes use of the reflective properties of a spherical mirror. Here, as Hofstatder noted, �every part of the world seems to contain, and be contained in, every other part . . ..� The spheres relfect one another, the artist, the room in which he works, and the paper upon which he draws the spheres.

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During the evening of November 6, 2002, astronomers using the 1.2-meter reflector at Haleakala, Hawaii, discovered a 17th-magnitude comet as part of the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) program. Designated Comet NEAT (C/2002 V1), it brightened quickly through December, leading to a suggestion that at perihelion on February 18th, it could become quite bright (though largely swamped in the Sun’s glare). Currently estimated to be magnitude 6.8, the comet can be seen in the western sky after sunset, just below the Great Square of Pegasus.

However, according to comet expert John Bortle, the future of Comet NEAT is unclear. During the second week of January, the comet’s activity has been shrouded in moonlight. Since its coma is very large and diffuse, no one is quite sure just how bright it currently is. Realistic forecasts for the comet’s immediate future aren’t possible until observations can be obtained in a moonless sky.

According to Bortle, there is “the possibility that the comet will briefly become visible telescopically during the daytime within a day or two either side of perihelion passage � an event that has not occurred since Comet West rounded the Sun in the winter of 1976!” But don’t get too excited � more will be known about this comet’s future within the next few days.

From: Sky and Telescope