Some events and quotes from early 1916

February 6: Jan Smuts (future Prime Minister of South Africa) accepts command of a British force, which includes African and Indian soldiers, that is to capture German East Africa. One of Alfred North Whitehead's sons, Thomas North Whitehead (later a professor at Harvard Business School), serves in the east Africa campaign.

February 12: From a letter by Arthur Graeme West:

I got a "Spenser" from T....., and am now travelling through "The Faerie Queen" with the chaste Britomart. Yes, by all means send me "Tom Jones": those long things I can manage very well here, when we are back from the hellish trenches, where I find it hard to read, though I can manage to write letters, more or less.....How bloody people seem to be in England about peace and peace meetings. I suppose they are getting rather Prussian in the country, but are all peace meetings always broken up by soldiers (who've probably never been here at all)? (West, Diary of a Dead Officer, p. 12)

February 23: Étienne Gilson is taken prisoner by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Indian troops at Kut Al Amara

Source of above image.

March 1: An excerpt from Abhi Le Baghdad by Sisir Sarbadhikari, who served with the British Indian forces that were trapped in the Siege of Kut Al Amara (about 100 miles south of Baghdad):

A bombardment started on the morning of March 1....A Gurkha was standing outside his tent, smoking, and the bomb fell near him. For a while there was only smoke and dust. When it cleared we saw only chunks of flesh and bone; the earth around there had turned into blood-soaked mud. (Sisir Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad, trans. Amitav Ghosh [Calcutta, 1958], p. 80)

On April 27, three British intelligence agents, including Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), offered the Ottoman commanders a million pounds' worth of gold in exchange for release of the troops at Kut. The offer was refused. The British Indian forces surrendered to the Ottoman forces on April 29, 1916. At the time, it was the largest surrender of troops that the British had made.

March 1: Benito Mussolini promoted to rank of Corporal. From his recommendation:

For his exemplary activity, high Bersaglieresque spirit and calmness. Always first in every enterprise of work or daring. Heedless of discomforts, zealous and scrupulous in the carrying out of his duties.

March 2: Charles de Gaulle is wounded and captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun.

Franz Marc, 'Dreaming Horse' - Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

March 4: Artist Franz Marc is killed at the Battle of Verdun. 'In one day at Verdun...7,000 horses were killed by German and French shelling....In one of his last letters before his death, the German painter Franz Marc exclaimed: "The poor horses!"' Shortly after his death, Marc's 1914 paper ('Im Fegefeuer des Krieges') is published with the epigraph 'Im Anfang war die Tat'.

March 8: Edmund Husserl's son Wolfgang Husserl is killed at the Battle of Verdun. In a letter to Hugo Münsterberg, Husserl writes, 'In this conflict, they [young Germans] went to fight in a Fichtean spirit, considering it a holy war, and to offer themselves wholeheartedly in sacrifice to the homeland'. (trans. by me from a French translation of the original German in Marc de Launay's 'Professorenkriegsliteratur' Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 3 [2001]: 83-100 [at 96, n. 47])

March 17: Apollinaire receives a head wound from shrapnel, from which he never recovered. He died in 1918.

Apollinaire

 March 20: From Siegfried Sassoon's letter to Edward Dent:

On 18 March 1916 David Thomas was wounded in the jaw and died the same evening, aged 20: ‘an artery went, & he was choked,—drowned in his own blood....When the parson had finished (& the machine-guns kept making his words inaudible) a big thing fell about 150 yds away & burst with a final smash. And so my Tommy went away, happy and stainless.

-Shortly afterwards, Sassoon writes the poem 'Golgotha'.

March 23: Wittgenstein receives orders that transfer him to the eastern front; he takes with him a copy of the Brothers Karamazov. His diary entry for April 6 is 'Life is one'.

March 24: Spanish composer Enrique Granados Campiña is killed when his ship is sunk by a U-boat.

Late March: Eugene Bullard is seriously injured at the Battle of Verdun. Though American, he had joined the French forces. He was the first African-American military pilot, and he later worked as a club owner and as Louis Armstrong's French interpreter.

Christopher Eccleston reading Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce Et Decorum Est':


Also in March: Arthur Graham West writes a poem called 'Night Patrol'.

April 3: Ernst Toller suffers from shell-shock and is removed from the front at the Battle of Verdun. On April 29, at a hospital near Strasbourg, he is diagnosed as having suffered a complete nervous collapse and is removed from active service. (F. S. L. Schouten, Ernst Toller: an intellectual youth biography, 1893-1918, Ph.D. dissertation, 2007, pp. 108-110)

April 10: After meeting with David Lloyd-George (then Minister of Munitions), Bertrand Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) that Lloyd-George 'was very unsatisfactory & I think only wanted to exercise his skill in trying to start a process of bargaining.' On April 25, Russell reports to Morrell that

I got the impression that Ll. George expects the war to go on for a long time yet; also that he thinks the whole situation very black. He seemed quite heartless. 

Lloyd George had invited Russell and other members of the No-Conscription Fellowship to meet and discuss the situation of conscientious objectors, some of whom were in a legal position no different from that of deserters (who could be shot).

April 22: Siegfried Sassoon writes a poem called 'Stand-to: Good-Friday morning'.

April 24-30: Lenin attends a conference of the International Socialist Commission in Kienthal, Switzerland.

April 28: In a performance at the Bürgertheater in Vienna, Austrian troops on leave re-enact the March 21st Battle of Uscieczko, which they lost to the Russians. Karl Kraus pillories the event in Die Fackel:

As those up there knelt down to pray before the audience, and as those up there saluted, and the vermin down below cheered them and sang patriotic songs, and stood there side by side in their top hats and tails, it struck him as the most terrible of all contrasts, like an infernal battle between the glory of God and the arguments of the devil, and the anguish for a delirious humanity, mocking its own sacrifice.

Audio of Kraus reading from 'Die letzten Tage der Menschheit'; and of Kraus reading a passage about Verdun.

May11: Physicist Karl Schwarzschild dies from an illness that he caught while serving on the Russian front. Albert Einstein is critical of Schwarzschild for having joined the war effort. In a letter to Michele Besso (on May 14), Einstein writes: 'Schwarzchild ... is a real loss. He would have been a gem, had he been as decent as he was clever.' (quoted from Thomas Levenson, Einstein in Berlin [Bantam Books, 2003], p. 130)

May 12: After meeting with Prime Minister Asquith (on May 11), Bertrand Russell reports to Ottoline Morrell that he is 'immensely encouraged'. Asquith was 'very sympathetic' and seemed 'prepared to exert himself to prevent C. O.'s being shot'. On May 12, Asquith sends a note to General Haig, instructing him not to have conscientious objectors shot for disobeying orders.

May 16: Karl Planck (son of Max Planck) is killed at the Battle of Verdun.

May: Edmund Blunden arrives in France as part of the 11th Royal Sussex Battalion.

A no foolin' philosophy link list (now with more videos)

A New Yorker article in which Jill Lepore applies some of the insights of Michael Lynch and Barbara Shapiro.

Joe Gelonesi interviews Noam Chomsky on Aussie radio.

Viggo Mortensen will read Albert Camus' 'The Human Crisis' (part of the festivities commemorating the 70th anniversary of Camus' visit to New York). Robert Zaretsky on NY's Camus festival.

Zadie Smith on Schopenhauer. I've heard that Tolstoy was into Schopenhauer while writing Anna Karenina. Here's a Schopenhauerian passage from that novel (Rosamund Bartlett's translation):

[Vronsky] soon began to feel that the fulfilment of his desires had given him no more than a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he had been expecting. This fulfilment had shown him the error people invariably make when they imagine happiness to be the fulfilment of desires. In the initial period after joining his life to hers and putting on civilian clothes, he experienced the full delights of freedom in general, which he had not known before, and also the freedom of love, and he was content, but not for long. He soon felt desires for desires, and tedium arising in his soul. Independent of his will, he began grasping at every passing whim, perceiving it as a desire and a purpose. (Oxford University Press, trans. Rosamund Bartlett [2014], p. 467)

Christopher Donohue: 'Herbert Spencer on Instinct and Intelligence: The Background of the “Cambridge Mind”'.

Dwight Garner reviews a new English translation of Carlo Rovelli's physics book. Rovelli was interviewed at Philosophy Bites last November. Rovelli's conversation with Lee Smolin in 2012. And here's Rovelli in 2014 on philosophy's relevance (ht Wayne Myrvold).

At the Edge, Janna Levin on gravitational waves. Also at the Edge, Rebecca Goldstein on 'pursuing a coherent human life' and an entry on the late Verena Huber-Dyson.

At the LARB, Matthew Stanley reviews Marcelo Gleiser's The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning; Daniel Hirschman reviews Harry Frankfurt's On Inequality; and Robert L. Kehoe III reviews Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers. Finally, Aurelian Craiutu on Michael Oakeshott's Notebooks, 1922-1986.

A translation of a 1969 conversation with Adorno from Der Spiegel.


A bio of Angela Davis by Miranda Bain at The Heroine Collective.

'Lev Shestov.: Russia's answer to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche' by Sergei Tseytlin.

Mike Rottmann: 'Reestablishing Philosophy in a Destroyed Country: Karl Löwith’s Return to Germany'.

Stephen Cowley summarizes the introduction to Pierre Osmo's French translation of Rudolf Haym's Hegel and his Time. (German bio for Haym) Here's a blurb on Haym's book from an 1857 issue of The Christian Examiner.

Interesting site on Caroline Schelling. The project was NEH-funded and seems to have run approx. from 2005 till 2007.

'Kant gives love advice to a heartbroken young woman (1791)'.

Cambridge University Press has released a collection of Onora O'Neill's essays on Kant.

In the latest issue of Philosophy and Literature, Theodore Ziolkowski has a brief item called 'Philosophers into Fiction', in which he documents fictional treatments of philosophers (esp. Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Both Pea Soup and (more recently) Daily Nous have threads on philosophers in fiction (to which I contributed under my tag 'praymont'). Here's another instance: Andre Malraux's novel Man's Fate includes a character based on Bernard Groethuysen (according to p. 292 of a piece by Daniel Gordon in History & Theory 36 [1997]).

From Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein (1993), with Karl Johnson as Ludwig and Tilda Swinton as Lady Ottoline Morrell: 


Lady Constance Malleson (Colette), an actress and writer who was romantically involved with Bertrand Russell, wrote a roman à clef which featured Russell, Joad, Lady Ottolline Morrell and others. Here's a decoder key for the novel from John Slater's biographical article (in Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies [1975]): 'In fact the book is a very thinly disguised account of her relationship with Russell. He appears as Don Gregorio del Orellano,a Cambridge astronomer;... Lady Ottoline is Magdalena, the Marquesa de Santa Segunda; C.E.M. Joad is Owen West; Dora Black, Russell's second wife, is Gertrude West; T. S. Eliot is T. C. Maynard; Clifford Allen is Jevons; and Maurice Elvey, a director of silent pictures in whose [film] Hindle Wakes Colette starred, ... is Marcus Beazely.'

Julie Crawford reviews Danielle Dutton's novel Margaret the First, which is based on the life of Margaret Cavendish; Dutton's novel is also reviewed by Sian Norris and by Natalie Helberg. Dutton interviewed.

More about Cavendish: Lara Dodds on Virginia Woolf's criticism of Cavendish's style; Woolf wrote about Cavendish in A Room of One's Own and in The Common Reader; and Lisa Sarasohn's review (pdf) of Anna Battigelli's 1998 book, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind (also reviewed here).

Interview with Luc Foisneau, who directed the publication of the Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle.

Gary Wills reviews Robin Lane Fox's Augustine: Conversions to Confessions. Fox replies, and so does Wills.

Paul E. Meehl's videos on philosophical psychology.

'Kenneth Garden, Associate Professor at Tufts University, reexamines al-Ghazali’s work from an historical hermeneutical [stance] in The First Islamic Reviver: Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and his Revival of the Religious Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2014)'.

Last 12 minutes of Jarman's Tempest (1979), with a performance by Elisabeth Welch:

Analytic philosophy and World War I

I'm struck by the dearth of references to World War I in standard histories of analytic philosophy. I don't pretend to have done a comprehensive search, but the War doesn't figure prominently in many of the more well-known histories (e.g., those by Passmore, G. J. Warnock, and Soames). There have, of late, been publications that situate Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle within the broader cultural trends that followed the War, but I'm not aware of any work that performs a similar function in connection with the analytic philosophers of the UK.

The War is known to have had a tremendous cultural impact in the UK. Historians sometimes speak of the 'long 19th century' as ending only after 1918. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell traces a host of cultural trends to the War (esp. the increased use of irony). But in many histories of analytic philosophy, you get the impression that the British branch of this tradition was nurtured in an order of reasons well insulated from messy (or muddy) causes. It's mostly context of justification with little context of discovery (little, at least, that reaches beyond university campuses).

There must have been some interesting Great War impact (immediate or delayed) on the growth of analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein composed his Tractatus while he was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian forces and a prisoner of war. Russell lost his position at Cambridge due to his opposition to the War and jeopardized his own well-being via his run-ins with the law over the War's continuation. So, the War loomed large in the lives of two of the most influential, early analytic philosophers. There must be some publications about the War's impact on Wittgenstein's thinking. With regard to Russell, there's this bit by Father Copleston:

One effect of the First World War on Russell's mind was to turn it away from the idea of an eternal realm of abstract truth, where one can take refuge in the contemplation of timeless and non-human beauty, to concentration on the actual concrete world. And this meant, in part at least, a turning away from purely logical studies to the parts of psychology and linguistics which seemed to be relevant to epistemology. (History of Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, p. 438)

I have yet to chase down Copleston's references in this part of his book, so I don't know if the author is here paraphrasing Russell or giving his own interpretation of the war's effect.

In a retrospective paper, Gilbert Ryle wrote:

For the First World War had, between 1914 and 1918, virtually extinguished a whole generation. To the academic world as outside it, to the departments of philosophy as to those of other disciplines, there returned a bare handful of mediators between us, who in 1918 were too young for active military service, and the members of 'the old gang' who, in 1914, had been too old for it. ('Fifty Years of Philosophy and Philosophers', Philosophy 51 [1976]: 383)

Ryle characterizes the War's influence in negative terms as an absence, a missing generation.

Several British philosophers saw active duty in the British forces in WWI. Here are the ones whom I've so far found:

John David Mabbott (officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery; Oxford, President of St. John's College);
Henry Habberley Price (Royal Flying Corps; Oxford, Wykeham Professor at New College);
Geoffrey Reginald Gilchrist Mure (Warwicks Royal Horse Artillery; Oxford, Warden of Merton College, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford);
Thomas Dewar Weldon (Royal Field Artillery; Oxford, Magdalen College);
Charles Arthur Campbell (10th Borders Regiment; Glasgow, Dean of Faculties);
John Macmurray (Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders; University College, London (Dept. Head), Edinburgh);
Sir Walter Hamilton Moberly (Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry; Birmingham, Vice-Chancellor of the Manchester University);
John Leofric Stocks (King's Royal Rifle Corps; Oxford, Manchester, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool); and
Arthur Aston Luce (12th Royal Irish Rifles; Trinity College, Dublin, Vice-Provost).
(Added, Aug. 29, 2016: John Albert Chadwick)
(Added, Jan. 7, 2018: Leon Roth)
(Added, Feb. 3, 2018: Alexander Dunlop Lindsay)

Some reflections:

1. Only three of these philosophers were within the tradition of analytic philosophy (Price, Mabbott, and Weldon). Re. Price: while I think he was an analytic philosopher, he was out of sympathy with some of the main trends in that tradition. E.g., he addressed traditionally metaphysical topics.

2. Many on this list were very much engaged in metaphysics. Price wrote about God and the survival of death (and was President of the Society for Psychical Research [1939-41]). Campbell and Macmurray wrote about free will. Luce was a Berkleyan idealist, Mure an idealist of the Hegelian variety. Moberly was a devout Anglican who criticized retributivist models of punishment. Mabbott and Weldon, though not focused on metaphysics, wrote about topics that were seldom addressed by other analytic philosophers in their time; both published books on political philosophy, and Mabbott published on punishment (defending retributivism).

3. It's interesting that so many of these WWI veterans went on to hold high administrative positions in universities.

4. I'm looking through Mabbott's autobiography Oxford Memories, but his remarks there about the War seem largely confined to his own experience of it. However, in Chapter 10 of his book The State and the Citizen: An Introduction to Political Philosophy ('The State as a Centre of Sympathy and Co-operation'), Mabbott examines the extent to which the state can promote 'sympathy and willing co-operation'. ^{(The State and the Citizen [London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1948], p. 95)} He says that the 'ideals of service and fellowship ... seldom survive the early moments or the crisis of a war, before the inevitable disillusion sets in'. ^{(Ibid., p. 96)} He adds that in WWI, one sees how 'war brought out the worst everywhere, in the Church, the Press, the Government, the Army, how even where decency lurked, in the trenches for instance, it was a soured and acid decency, the dogged acceptance of necessary evil rather than the high heroism of the early days'. ^{(Ibid., pp. 96-7, footnotes omitted)} (In the omitted footnotes, Mabbott gives examples to illustrate his points about the Church and the Press.) It's interesting that Mabbott leaves academia out of his list of corrupted institutions. Also of note is that he quotes approvingly from C. E. Montague's Disenchantment in this part of his book.

5. There was at least one promising, young French philosopher who was killed in WWI (Pierre Rousselot), and at least two German philosophers were (Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach). (Indeed, it appears that whole discussion circles in Germany never recovered.) However, I'm not aware of any UK philosophers who were killed in the War. Were there any?

6. Perhaps a major, long-term consequence of the War was a turning away from comprehensive systems in favour of more piecemeal intellectual exercises -- more Cook Wilson and less Bradley. There was also more attention to concrete phenomena and a suspicion of abstraction.

Three mistakes in a recent book on Einstein and Bergson

I've seen few philosophical works on the books-of-the-year lists. One of the few is The Physicist and the Philosopher by Jimena Canales. The focus of the book is a dispute between Einstein and Bergson about the nature of time.

I've just bought the book and haven't had time, yet, to read it. However, after skimming some pages I've found three mistakes.

First, on p. 183, Canales says that 'Einstein admired Eddington for refusing to fight during World War I and liked Bertrand Russell, who had been imprisoned for refusing to join the army, for similar reasons'. In fact, Russell was fined in 1916 for writing an anti-war pamphlet, and was imprisoned for six months at the end of the war because he had written that American troops in the UK might be used for breaking strikes.

Secondly, on p. 204, Canales writes that Jacques Maritain 'helped craft' the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, the Charter was written after public consultations in 1980 and came into effect in 1982. Maritain died in 1973. I can find no evidence that Maritain contributed to Canada's earlier Bill of Rights (1960).

Thirdly, on p. 205, Canales reports that 'Maritain is known for having coined the word "scientism".' In fact, he isn't known for having coined the word, since it was being used before he used it (in 1910).

Update (Dec. 16): A colleague has informed me that Canales' book is longer than it needs to be (i.e., could do with a good edit) but is worth a read.

Fact-Opinion 1, Introductory notes on 'opinion' (part a)

I hope to make some progress in explaining how today's fact-opinion distinction arose. Philosophers don't take well to this distinction, which has come in for much criticism of late. Perhaps some of the disagreement about the distinction stems from diverse interpretations of the key terms. Here's a quick and dirty summary of a naive and plausible interpretation of 'opinion' and 'fact', one that I take many philosophers to adopt (even if they go on to develop more sophisticated accounts of the terms):

Opinions are in the mind. They're beliefs about how things are in the world. That is, they're beliefs, or judgments, about what the facts are. The facts are objective states of affairs that exist regardless of our opinions (unless they're facts about opinions). The facts are facts regardless of whether we're aware of them. An opinion is true (or factual) if it accurately reflects the facts; otherwise, an opinion is false.

Since opinions are beliefs, and since beliefs that are true and that are rationally justified in the right way (or, perhaps, that were brought about in the right way) count as knowledge, some opinions can become knowledge. Take an opinion, add truth and enough justification (of the right sort) and, voila, you've got knowledge.

This interpretation of the key terms is consistent with some historical evidence concerning their use. For instance, via the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; not the open-access edition), I found the following nugget from John Milton:

Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. (Milton, Areopagitica, 1644)

What they now opine, they may some day know. Once they've acquired the knowledge, we may say that their old opinion is not just an opinion but, also, genuine knowledge. Or, if we prefer to treat knowledge and opinion as mutually exclusive categories, we may say that their old opinion is no longer an opinion but is, instead, knowledge. We'll incline towards this latter approach if we use 'opinion' as short for mere opinion or if we're enamoured of the ancient Greek distinction between doxa and episteme. Regardless, we may then contrast opinion with knowledge in something like the way that Thomas Reid does in this passage:

Knowledge, I think, sometimes signifies things known; sometimes that act of the mind by which we know them. And in like manner opinion sometimes signifies things believed; sometimes the act of the mind by which we believe them. ... In knowledge, we judge without doubting; in opinion, with some mixture of doubt. (Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Essay VI 'Of Judgment', Ch. I ['Of Judgment in General'], sec. iii, 1785)

Reid isn't using the terms exactly as I did in my quick and dirty account, for here (at least) he puts the knowledge-opinion distinction chiefly in psychological terms; opinion sounds like a more tentatively held belief.* Still, the contrast is between opinion and knowledge, not between opinion and fact. What would be the point of opting for the latter juxtaposition? After all, opinions are mental states, but facts are what those states purport to be about and are not, themselves, mental states. 

So, my quick and dirty interpretation is roughly in sync with the above excerpts from Reid and Milton. In addition, it  accords with the following quotation of John Locke, who also contrasts opinion with knowledge:

It is therefore worth while to search out the bounds between opinion and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our persuasion. ... I shall make some inquiry into the nature and grounds of faith or opinion: whereby I mean that assent which we give to any proposition as true, of whose truth yet we have no certain knowledge. (Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, ch. i, paragraph 3, 1689)

Here, to hold an opinion is to take something to be true; and this taking, while not 'yet' certain, is at least  susceptible of rational support (and critique). All three of the above-quoted authors use 'opinion' in this fashion.

It looks like somewhere along the way, 'opinion' took on another interpretation, one that exempted the opinion-holder from rational accountability. This conjecture is suggested by a 19th-Century article in the Spectator about Lord John Russell (Bertrand Russell's grandfather). The article, called 'Odd Habit in a Leading Statesman' (Feb. 17, 1849), quotes Lord John as saying,

I am told, 'you then [in 1846] opposed coercion, and you now propose it yourself.' It is quite true that I am liable to that charge. All I can say is, that I thought that bill was not adapted to the circumstances of the time .... But that, again, is entirely a matter of opinion. Those who differ from me may hold the reverse view. (Spectator, Feb. 17, 1849, p. 10)

Russell's critics then opine:

It may almost be said that Lord John Russell never gives a reason in support of his 'opinion'; for he uses that word in the vulgar sense, to mean an impression which is not to be accounted for beyond its bare enunciation. ... How is it that Lord John cannot state the elements of his opinion and the grounds of his judgment,—describe the circumstances in 1846, and show in what the bill of that year failed to fit them...?  We do not say that Lord John has not elements for his opinion or grounds for his reason; but it is not 'condensation' of oratory to omit all statement of them, any more than an impression unsupported by distinctly explained reasons is to be accepted as a well-grounded and matured, a 'wise' opinion. Lord John, as a man, has a right to his own opinion, or even to his own unexplained impressions; but few men have been allowed to retain offices of trust who have so steadily fallen into the habit of not stating reasons for what they do. (Ibid., [Emphasis added])

Once more, we see that 'opinion', in its established, centuries-old use, was not meant to preempt any call for rational critique. Interestingly, we see also that the word had taken on a 'vulgar', second sense in which it was apparently meant to do just that.



The word 'fact' has undergone more changes in meaning, which I'll examine in subsequent posts. For now, I'll note that I follow Barbara J. Shapiro ^{(in Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 [Cornell University Press, 2000])} in saying that the legal use of 'fact' set the course for that term's use beyond the law and especially in the sciences. Shapiro marshals much evidence having to do with Sir Francis Bacon, but I don't know if she adduces the following quotation (from 1605):

This facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly authorised or warranted, is of two kinds according to the subject: for it is either a belief of history (as the lawyers speak, matter of fact); or else of matter of art and opinion. (Bacon, 'The Advancement of Learning', Book I, iv, paragraph 9, 1605)

Bacon, lawyer and excogitator on scientific method, here introduces the phrase 'matter of fact' as a technical term from the law. In that domain, it contrasts with matters of law.

Consider the following way of marking the contrast between matters of fact and matters of opinion, which is drawn from an influential, 19th-Century textbook. The book is Elements of Rhetoric by Richard Whately. According to Bishop Whately,

By a 'Matter of Fact' is meant, something which might, conceivably, be submitted to the senses; and about which it is supposed there could be no disagreement among persons who should be present, and to whose senses it should be submitted; and by a 'Matter [or Question] of Opinion' is understood, anything respecting which an exercise of judgment would be called for on the part of those who should have certain objects before them, and who might conceivably disagree in their judgment thereupon. ... [I]t is not meant ... that there is any greater certainty ... in the one case than in the other. [For example,] [t]hat one of Alexander's friends did, or did not, administer poison to him, every one would allow to be a question of fact; though it may be involved in inextricable doubt: while the question, what sort of an act that was, supposing it to have taken place, all would allow to be a question of opinion; though probably all would agree in their opinion thereupon. (Whately, Elements of Rhetoric, 7th edition, ch. II, sec. 4, p. 52 [pp. 58-9 in the English edition published by Fellowes], 1846)

Whately's conception of matters of fact is consonant with the one that one finds in the law. Also, Whately takes one's view on a matter of opinion to be a truth-claim, where there may be more certainty regarding the claim's truth than there is for a belief about a matter of fact. In his example, as long as we lack good evidence, our beliefs about whether Alexander's friend poisoned poor Alex remain mere opinions (about a matter of fact). This use of 'opinion' fits with the above characterizations offered by Reid and Locke -- opinions suffer from doubt or a lack of certainty. But our conviction that it's wrong to poison one's friend is held with more certainty. Indeed, we may feel no doubt on the matter. One who adopts Reid's understanding of the knowledge-opinion divide would, then, conclude that this moral conviction is knowledge of a moral fact, but I think Whately would still classify it as an opinion -- a correct, rational one, but an opinion nonetheless.

*[Note Added on June 6: While Reid there pitches the knowledge-opinion distinction in seemingly psychological terms, his more considered formulations put the difference in an epistemological way. E.g., he says that opinion 'stands upon a weaker foundation, and is more liable to be shaken and overturned' than knowledge. In accordance with an epistemological formulation such as this, Reid can say that while one might not actually harbour doubts about a belief, one ought to (owing to its weaker foundation -- of which one might be unaware), and this is what makes it a mere opinion rather than knowledge. On this account, a Reidian (and Lockean) on the knowledge-opinion distinction might say that in Whately's example, one who feels no doubt concerning a belief about morality perhaps ought to feel some doubt, since the belief has a weaker foundation, which would make the belief an opinion only.]

January philosophy links

Eric Banks interviewed about his new book The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived. Banks wrote an earlier book called Ernst Mach's World Elements.

Thomas Dixon on the history of the term 'altruism' (in a series called 'Philosophical Keywords'). In giving the rationale for this new blog project, Dixon mentions 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s view, expressed in the latter’s Aids to Reflection (1825), that there were cases when "more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign".’

Seyla Benhabib on the Charlie Hebdo massacres.

At Siris, 'the Key to Mill's Utilitarianism'.

David Auerbach's 4th post on Simmel's Philosophy of Money.

Duncan Richter has a couple of new drafts (developed from blog posts) on Winch, Wittgenstein, and religious experience.

Isabelle Kalinowski on 'Max Weber and Capitalism's Strange Reality'.

'Cassirer on Enlightenment in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Part 2)'.

More about Putin's philosopher, Ivan Ilyin.

Eric Voegelin at 114.

Musical interlude:


'The story of historian Natalie Zemon Davis, as she tells it, is largely one about the benefits that have accrued to an outsider'.

Elucidations podcast of Sally Sedgwick on Hegel and Kant.

Rebuilding a positivist church in Brazil:

The positivist ritual consists of classical music, readings from Comte’s works, debate and invocations to the Supreme Being. It was conducted weekly until one night in 2009 when the roof, its wooden beams weakened by Brazil’s notorious tropical termites, suddenly caved in.

In E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'Master Flea', Peregrinus (aka Mr. Peregrine Tyss) uses 'a microscope that allows him to observe people’s thoughts from the motion of their physical brain and nerves', thereby anticipating Herbert Feigl's autocerebroscope (elaborated upon by Paul E. Meehl). Hoffmann's 'Automata' (pdf) made io9's short list for the Victorian Hugos (1886, the year of its English translation).  Here's Hoffmann's 'Sandman'. At Gutenberg.

'Take me then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expression.' In 'Shadows of the Coming Race' (1879) by George Eliot, we're outwitted and displaced by self-reproducing, mechanical zombies. Eliot's reflections were prompted by T. H. Huxley's 'On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata'.

Here's a neat old book, Contemporary Thought in France, in which Félix de Dantec (one of the early users of 'scientisme') is said to have adopted Huxley's epiphenomenalism. The book was written by Isaac Benrubi and translated from the German by Ernest B. Dicker in 1926 (the year of its initial publication).

Parts 1 and 2 of 'C. S. Lewis and the Inklings' on CBC Radio.

Harald Sack on 'Alfred Tarski and the Undefinability of Truth'.

Logicians in fiction:

Laura Mae Isaacman interviews Yannick Grannec about Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, 'a fictional story that re-imagines the life of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele'.

Re. Richard Montague: Sacha Arnold on echoes of Montague in Samuel Delany's pornutopic Mad Man and in Aifric Campbell's Semantics of Murder.

Bertrand Russell was a basis for Scogan, an unflattering character in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. Russell was also a model for Sir Joshua Malleson in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, for Thornton Tyrell in Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and for Mr. Apollinax in a poem by T. S. Eliot. Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It is about Russell, Wittgenstein, and G. E. Moore.

Philosophy in the wider world

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a site devoted to theories of causal history. The site has entries for many ancient and early modern philosophers as well as for Russell, Schlick, Popper, Reichenbach, Hempel, Mackie, Suppes, David Lewis, Marjorie Grene, Paul Humphreys, Nancy Cartwright, James Woodward, and Christopher Hitchcock.

It's always interesting to find philosophers being cited in the medical sciences literature. Last July, I noted Carl Hempel's influence on the DSM. There is also Karl Popper's impact in epidemiology. For instance, Mervyn Susser and his partner, Zena Stein, made use of Popper's work. Susser also made reference to the work of Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, and Mario Bunge (among other philosophers).

The journal History of Psychiatry has an article on 'Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and its impact on the theory of psychopathology' by Norbert Andersch and John Cutting.

The same journal also has published 'Karl Jaspers on the disease entity: Kantian ideas and Weberian ideal types' by Chris Walker.

Blossom Dearie:


I posted last June about Berkeley's popularity among the poets. Peter Brooke reviews a book from 2010 called ‘We Irish’ in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone by W. J. McCormack. According to the book, somehow the Italian fascists (esp. Giovanni Gentile) co-opted Berkeley for their awful ideology. McCormack's book is also reviewed in Berkeley Studies by Tom Jones.

Wuthering Expectations has a post about Schopenhauer's influence on the French Decadents (something to which I alluded in a couple of posts). If I ever get the time, I'd like to look more closely at Schopenhauer's influence on Anna Karenina.

From the Huffington Post: 'The Unexpected Way Philosophy Majors Are Changing The World Of Business'.

The BBC Radio 4 has a series called Baldi, which is about a 'Franciscan priest and philosophy lecturer [who] turns amateur sleuth to solve murder mysteries'.

BBC Radio 3's series 'Wagner's Philosophers' (with broadcasts on Adorno, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the German idealists).

Blossom Dearie performed the Adjectives song ('Unpack Your Adjectives' -- it's on YouTube) for Schoolhouse Rock. This next song of hers' never made it onto children's TV:

Quoting Bertrand Russell (on Harvard in 1914)

I miss in the professors the atmosphere of meditation and absent-mindedness which one associates with thought -- they all seem more alert and business-like and punctual than one expects very good people to be. And they are all overworked; President Lowell, whom I find utterly loathsome, is determined to get his money's worth out of them and throw them on the scrap heap when they are used up. -- From Russell's letter to Lucy Donnelly (March 20, 1914) (reproduced on p. 41 of Bertrand Russell's America: His Transatlantic Travels and Writings. Volume 1 1896-1945, ed. Barry Feinberg, Ronald Kasrils [Routledge, 1973])

May Sinclair, Novelist and Philosopher

May Sinclair

Late in April on the Pea Soup blog, there was a query about philosophy in novels. I discovered that one such book was by Mrs. Humphry Ward (aka Mary Augusta Ward). The book, which appeared in 1888, was called Robert Elsmere. It was a bestseller and was reviewed by Gladstone. The novel amounted to a popularization of T. H. Green's philosophy.

Around the same time that Ward was at work on this novel, another British, female novelist was developing her own interpretation of Green. May Sinclair (1863-1946) had begun reading philosophy before she entered Cheltenham Ladies' College, but it was during her time there under the tutelage of Dorothea Beale that she took up philosophy in earnest. Sinclair's first publication, on Descartes, appeared in the college's journal in 1882. She published her first book (of poetry) in 1886 under the pseudonym 'Julian Sinclair'. She was the first female member of the Aristotelian Society, joining in 1917. In 1923, Sinclair presented a paper to the Aristotelian Society. It was called 'Primary and Secondary Consciousness'. Among those who commented on her paper that evening were Alfred North Whitehead and our old friend C. E. M. Joad.

It was Dorothea Beale who encouraged Sinclair to read the works of T. H. Green, who was the subject of 'The Ethical and Religious Import of Idealism', which Sinclair published in New World in 1893. Green confirmed Sinclair's interest in the German idealists, including Schopenhauer, whom she read avidly.

Sinclair published her first novel (Audrey Craven) in 1896. She had a blockbuster hit with Divine Fire (1904) (reviewed here), the popularity of which led to her tour of the United States in 1905. While in the USA, she met William James and visited President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House.

Sinclair's intensive study of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann left her receptive to Freud's new science of the unconscious. She was among the first novelists to incorporate such themes in her fiction, and she helped to establish one of the first psychoanalytic institutions in the UK (the Medico-Psychological Clinic) in 1913. According to Sinclair's entry in the Oxford DNB, she wrote the prospectus for the Clinic and was elected as one of its twelve founder members. She also sat on its Board of Management.

Sinclair is also known for being the first person to use William James' phrase 'stream of consciousness' in characterizing a work of fiction.

Her most highly regarded novel seems to be Mary Olivier. Here's a quotation from this work:

There was Schopenhauer, though. He didn’t cheat you. There was ‘reine Anschauung,’ pure perception; it happened when you looked at beautiful things. Beautiful things were crystal; you looked through them and saw Reality. You saw God. While the crystal flash lasted ‘Wille und Vorstellung’ the Will and the Idea, were not divided as they are in life; they were one. That was why beautiful things made you happy. --Mary Olivier, pp. 292-3; quoted from James Thrall, 'May Sinclair: Mystic Modern'.

While philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, literary scholars have. Some of them address the philosophical themes in her work. James Thrall, for example (in the above-linked work), focuses on Schopenhauer's influence. Christine Battersby, while acknowledging Schopenhauer's importance, argues that Spinoza is the philosopher whose thought is most evident in Sinclair's fiction. Two dissertations of interest in this connection are Leigh Wilson's 'It was as if she had said....': May Sinclair and reading narratives of cure and Justine McCarthy's Edges of the mind : psychic margins and the modernist aesthetic in Vernon Lee, Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Dion Fortune and Jane Harrison.

Philosophers haven't written much about Sinclair, but some have written about her. Bertrand Russell reviewed both of her books on idealism. He reviewed Sinclair's A Defence of Idealism in The Nation (August 31, 1918) and her The New Idealism in Nation and the Athenaeum (August 5, 1922). Both reviews appear in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays: 1914-1919.

It's unsurprising that Russell would be critical of books by an exponent of idealism, mysticism, and Jungian psychoanalysis. Still, he wrote to his mistress of the day, Lady Constance Malleson, that Sinclair's book 'was not very bad'. Russell took a generally respectful tone in both his reviews. He also corresponded with Sinclair about her defence of idealism.

Finally, we should admire Sinclair's courage in taking on Sir Almroth Wright, who had published an odious tract in which he opposed women's suffrage on supposedly scientific grounds. This prompted Sinclair not only to write a brief reply in the Times (of London) but also to produce a pamphlet called 'Feminism'. The details of this conflict are recounted by Jim Gough in 'May Sinclair: Idealism-Feminism and the Suffragist Movement'. Sinclair was a member of both the Women Writers' Suffrage League and the Women's Freedom League.

Sinclair's obituary in the Times (Nov. 15, 1946) appeared, suitably, under the heading 'Philosophy and the Novel'.
 

Joad as philosophical journalist and entertainer

The Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand devotes a chapter to Joad in Conversations in Bloomsbury, a collection of Anand's reminiscences about his student days in London (which includes four chapters on T. S. Eliot).  Anand met Joad in a class at Birkbeck College, after which the two had lunch together.  Impressed by the ensuing philosophical conversation, Anand reports that one of his friend's, Nikhil Sen, dismissed Joad as a  'good philosophical journalist' who 'says nothing very original.' (pp. 57-8).

This seems to have been the consensus reached by many of Joad's contemporaries.  Indeed, in his obituary in the Times of London (April 10, 1953), we are told that Joad 'had no interesting contribution to make as a philosopher.'  He is then characterized as an 'author, university teacher, controversialist, and entertainer'.

His lack of originality is borne out by the two main on-line encyclopedias of philosophy (the SEP and the IEP), in which the only discussion of Joad's views appears in Paisley Livingston's entry on the 'History of the Ontology of Art'.  (Joad's works are cited, though, in a number of entries.)

Joad does seem to have excelled as a philosophical journalist.  His expository gifts were noted by reviewers as diverse as Michael Oakeshott, Cyril Connolly, W. R. Inge, A. C. Ewing, Evelyn Underhill, H. L. Mencken, and even Bertrand Russell (who otherwise had only contempt for Joad).

One of Joad's virtues was his interest in non-western philosophy, especially Indian philosophy, about which he wrote a popular book.  According to one bio, 

Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936) assisted by Girija Mookerjee.

So, as a philosophical journalist Joad covered more than just his own home turf.  He opened Britons' eyes to another philosophical tradition.  And, at a time when Churchill was expressing his wretched views about Mahatma Gandhi, Joad published 'The Authority of Detachment and Moral Force: Mohandas Gandhi'.  This paper was included in a volume that Radharkrishnan edited in 1939, Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work.

Joad's coverage of philosophy was certainly biased -- he was a Platonist about pretty much everything -- but it helped some very bright individuals to find their way into philosophy.  In his autobiography, Antony Flew (e.g.) credits Joad's books as having spurred his philosophical development.  Also, in his 'Intellectual Autobiography', P. F. Strawson says that he first experienced the 'intellectual pull' of philosophy partly by way of 'some popular books on philosophy (notably by the not contemptible C. E. M. Joad)' (Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, p. xvii).

Joad of Joad Hall

Last Friday, Nigeness posted on Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891-1953), an Englishman who taught philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London.  Nigeness paints an unflattering picture of Joad.  I decided to dig up some more info on the man.

Joad finished his education at Oxford in 1914 -- he was a John Locke Scholar in Mental Philosophy at Oxford in that year -- after which he worked as a civil servant until 1930.  According to Jason Tomes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Joad was exempt from military service in WWI due to his position as a senior civil servant.  In 1930, he became the head of the philosophy department at Birkbeck College in the University of London "and ran it for or 23 years -- but he was never made a professor." (H/t to Man Without Qualities for that last link.)  A. J. Ayer put this point in stronger terms in his autobiography (Part of my Life, p. 302):  'He [Joad] taught philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, where they refused to make him a professor, though he allowed himself to be called so' (emphasis added).  In fact, Joad was 'called so' more than pretty much anybody else of his time.  The title 'Professor' came to be so indissolubly fused to his surname that Peter Clarke once wrote, 'Like Dr Johnson, Colonel House, or Professor Joad, he [Gladstone] has laid peculiar claim from beyond the grave to a conventional style of address' (London Review of Books [April 17, 1980]).  Joad's actual title at Birkbeck was 'Reader in Philosophy'; according to Tomes, 'the University gave him a DLitt degree in 1936 and promoted him to reader in 1945.'

Joad was praised mainly as a great teacher and popularizer rather than as an original philosopher or scholar.  He rose to fame in the UK as a founding member of the The Brains Trust, a radio program on the BBC. Here's a clip from the BBC archives (April 28, 1942) in which Joad, Julian Huxley and others discuss the establishment of a public, national health service (and the meaning of 'allergy'). Joad begins speaking at 1.46 and again at 5.06 and at 6.31. On this show he became famous for prefacing his comments with the phrase, 'It all depends on what you mean by ....'

Before achieving his fame on the radio, Joad achieved infamy.  He was vilified by many of his contemporaries for his opposition to conscription in WWI and, later, for his role in the infamous Oxford Union debate on February 9, 1933, where -- about ten days after Hitler had become the German Chancellor -- Joad defended the proposition, 'That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.'  His role in the debate (as a guest speaker) earned him the enmity of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill referred to the 1933 resolution twice in The Second World War, Volume 1: The Gathering Storm.  On p. 77, Churchill wrote, 'In 1933 the students of the Oxford Union, under the inspiration of a Mr. Joad, passed their ever-shameful resolution, "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country."'  'Mr. Joad' -- he was no professor in Churchill's eyes.  Indeed, according to Churchill, Joad's resolution influenced Great Britain's enemies:

Mussolini, like Hitler, regarded Britannia as a frightened, flabby old woman .... Lord Lloyd, who was on friendly terms with him [Mussolini], noted how he had been struck by the Joad resolution of the Oxford undergraduates in 1933. (p. 150)

The Daily Express characterized the debate's outcome in these ridiculous terms:  'There is no question but that the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success in the publicity that has followed this victory.'

Joad had held pacifist views since before WWI.  Under the influence of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw (among others), he joined the Fabian Society in 1912.  Like Shaw and Bertrand Russell, Joad opposed the UK's involvement in WWI.

Certainly Joad was not afraid to adopt unpopular positions (he wrote some stinging critiques of Christianity).  According to the Spartacus bio at the previous link, he supported the suffragists.  Unfortunately, as is noted in that same bio, he became a horrible sexist.  The Spartacus bio contains the following quotation from  Joad's 1932 autobiography:

I started my adult life, as I have recounted, with such high hopes of women, that the process of disillusionment has left a bitterness behind. If I was never sentimental enough to expect women to be soul mates, at least I thought to treat them as intellectual equals. It was a shock to find that the equality had been imposed by myself upon unequals who resented it. If only women could have remained at the silent-film stage, all would have been well; but the invention of talking has been as disastrous in women as it has in the cinema.

That's what a supposedly progressive public figure wrote in 1932.  Not surprisingly, Joad doesn't seem to have established any stable relationships with women.  He married in 1915 and left his wife in 1921.  He had three children from that marriage (two daughters and a son) but wasn't on speaking terms with any of them later in life.

Joad garnered little respect from the most prominent British philosophers of the day. Bertrand Russell disliked Joad and accused him of plagiarism.  I'm not sure of the details connected with this charge, but according to an anecdote that Ayer recounts (Part of my Life, p. 302), when Russell was asked to review a book by Joad, Russell replied, 'Modesty forbids.'

Joad had some contact with the Inklings in the early 1940's.  He attended an Inklings meeting in 1943.  He shows up in two of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters from that year.  In a letter to his son, Christopher, dated October 25, Tolkien said, 'Tomorrow night I am going to hobnob, chez Lewis, with Joad of Joad Hall.'  I was thinking of starting that joke ('Joad Hall') until I saw that Tolkien beat me to it.  (Actually, Tolkien attributes the joke to an unidentified author.)  Tolkien elaborated on the joke in a subsequent letter (Oct. 27) to Christopher, which is summarized at the Tolkien Gateway as follows:

Tolkien said that except for his face Joad was very like a toad, and in character closely resembled Mr. Toad of Toad Hall. He found him intelligent, kindly, and they agreed on many fundamental points. Joad had been in Russia and loathed it.

Perhaps it was Joad's trip to the Soviet Union in 1930 that initiated the long process in which he dropped many of his earlier beliefs.  While he strongly opposed Hitler and Mussolini, Joad was still a pacifist at the start of WWII.  However, according to Tomes in the ODNB (linked above), Joad had abandoned his pacifism by May, 1940, by which time he had concluded that war was necessary in order to save civilization.

Another major change in Joad's beliefs concerned religion.  By the time he debated C. S. Lewis at the Oxford Socratic Club on January 24, 1944, Joad had become a theist but not a Christian.  He seems to have been influenced by Lewis, though, as is evident from a paper by Joel D. Heck (here's the pdf), to the point where Joad joined the Church of England near the end of his life.  In 1952, he published his last book, The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy.

Joad was known for his passionate debates.  His exchange with Lewis in 1944 attracted more than twice as many spectators as the average Socratic Club debate.  According to Joad's New York Times obituary (April 10, 1953), he returned to the Oxford Union for a debate with Randolph Churchill in 1950.  Here's the resolution that Joad defended: 'That this House regrets the influence exercised by the US, as the dominant power among the democratic nations.'  In this debate, Joad said (I quote from the NY Times obit), 'Britain is tied to the wheels of the American chariot -- a chariot leading us to Hell.'  According to Time Magazine's coverage, Joad added, 'Money is the sole American standard of value.'  Joad had visited the United States exactly once.  It was at this debate that R. Churchill referred to Joad as 'a third-class Socrates.'

Joad's indiscretions caught up with him after WWII.  He boasted publicly that he regularly rode trains without paying for his tickets.  He was caught doing so in 1948.  The BBC responded by firing him.  No more Brains Trust for Joad.  He returned to infamy.

What a strange character.  He could easily have afforded to pay for his rail trips.  His habit of not doing so reminds me of rich people who shoplift, except that they tend not to make public declarations of their kleptomania.  It's as if Joad wanted to be caught and discredited.  Why? Did he feel guilty about something?

(More about Joad in a subsequent post.)