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 Believing and knowing 28 Apr 201129 Apr 2011 I was musing the other day, as I passed by a church school on a walk, on the difference between belief and knowledge. The teachers at that school must teach both. But, I thought, if they taught the wrong knowledge, a generation will arise in which knowledge will be corrupted… Read More
Philosophy Scoobie Doo Realism 2 Aug 201022 Jun 2018 Came across this at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk: Scoobie-Doo Realism wants to posit that there is an intellectual movement that should be called “Scoobie-Doo Realism.” People take up a stance of Scoobie-Doo Realism when they pose as hard nosed advocates of science and objectivity, because they can unmask a traditionally… Read More
General Science Some more on Toulmin 12 Dec 2009 The History of the Philosophy of Science list has been unusually active, and even more unusually fairly restrained and complimentary, in discussing Stephen Toulmin’s significance. One point, made by Avner Cohen, is that Toulmin himself had given an assessment of his work and his modus operandi in an interview in… 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.