Epitaph on a Tyrant 4 Aug 2009 Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. W. H. Auden Philosophy Quotes Quotes
Epistemology Hume’s birthday 8 May 2011 So you may have noticed, David Hume turns 300 today. I reckon he looks a lot younger than that, almost modern. There’s an interesting discussion on the History of Philosophy of Science list about whether Hume is the greatest English language philosopher, as the Stanford article claims. Influence and importance… Read More
Philosophy Evolution quotes: The context of arguments 2 May 2013 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is… Read More
Administrative Knees, ligaments and evolving thoughts 5 Oct 2012 I’m really sorry I’ve been quiet so long. It’s not for lack of thoughts. First I went to Sydney to work on my Nature of Classification book and then attend a workshop on the future of history and philosophy (and social studies) of science in Australia. And then I came… Read More
Does any Auden specialist out there know this one? My two cents (from memory of unsystematic reading): “Poetry he invented” – Mao was a poet, while Hitler and Stalin were not. Auden visited China with Isherwood in the 30s, well before Mao was in power; but otherwise Auden didn’t pay too much attention to Asia. Auden flirted with authoritarianism at times – the poem in the late 30s mentioning “necessary murder” reflected leftish influence, though Auden was never much of a political animal. I gather Auden eventually disowned that poem, having been heavily attacked about it, by Orwell inter alia. I suspect that in the poem above, Auden was covering his tracks and not referring directly to any tyrant. Neither Mao, Stalin not Hitler had many “senators” to worry about – the poem might just as easily refer to Tiberius (though he too was no poet).
That’s way more than I knew. I just thought it was a metonymous tyrant. But if pushed I would have gone for Julius Caesar. I merely thought it worth bringing up now, for obvious reasons.