When philosophy meets historical taxonomy 5 Apr 2010 Chris Taylor does this absolutely amazing blog. I find myself checking to see if he’s done another one of his wonderful taxon posts, where he picks some usually obscure group of animals and makes them interesting and alive. He’s done it again, for indrids, a group of lemurs, but what I love most of all is that he cites a philosopher of science, Ian Hacking. That’s some serious blogging. Biology Ecology and Biodiversity Philosophy Science Species and systematics Systematics
Biology Henry Gee’s book “The Accidental Species” 9 Oct 20139 Oct 2013 I have three rules in life. One is, Never get into a land war in Asia. The second is, Locate the nearest exit. The third and most important is: When Henry Gee writes something, believe it. I first encountered Henry through his book In Search of Deep Time, which covered… Read More
Freedom The problem with logic 19 Jan 201420 Jan 2014 When teaching students critical reasoning it is an article of faith that we should teach them logic. Of course, we ameliorate any benefit this might have by teaching it incomprehensibly and in artificial cases. But still, we believe logic is what is most important in philosophy and in culture generally…. Read More
Epistemology Of Interest 5 May 20235 May 2023 One of the questions that have plagued my insomniac nights over the past decade or so is what makes something interesting. There are many proposals. I was reminded of this when I recently read this in Yohan J. John’s essay on cell membranes and boundaries: We have a name for… Read More
Chris’s blog is one of my favorites, too: I typically check it right afte seeing if there is anything new on Darren Naish’s “Tetrapod Zoology.” — The (sadly debunked) story about the name “Indri” coming from a misunderstanding of a native informant’s utterance seems to be a linguistic urban myth: a story that just seems so RIGHT that it stays alive (and reproduces: note the existence of variants with different examples) despite debunking. Do you know of any genuine examples of words stemming from such misunderstandings?(*) — (*) Samuel Johnson in his dictionary included the etymology “from French coeur méchant” for ‘curmudgeon’, attributing it to an “anonymous correspondent.” I have been told be people I trust (but can’t document) that a plagiarizing dictionary publisher said ‘courmudgeon’ was “from the French ‘coeur,’ anonymous, and méchant,’ a correspondent.” The French word for a transom over a door is ‘vasistas,’ which (according to Robert) is from the German ‘Wass ist das,’ but I don’t know if this stems from genuine confusion or some attempt at humor.
All flattery is gratefully received! Allen, the Hacking paper I cited comments on the example of the French ‘vasistas’. Hacking suggests that the word does come from German and simply refers to the function of the vasistas as somewhere you can look out from to see who (or what) is there before opening the door.
The derivation of ‘vasistas’ seems quite plausible to me, given that there is a respectable type of furniture known in English as a Whatnot. (You were probably sold it as a cake stand.)