academia

Textbooks

27 January 2021 by Tom Simon 10 Comments

Textbooks can go to the devil. No book written by the third-rate mind about a first-rate mind has ever done more good than harm.

—John C. Wright

Filed Under: Quotha Tagged With: academia, john c. wright

Poetics, science, and bafflegab

31 July 2017 by Tom Simon 3 Comments

‘Poetics’, for instance, is (or, are) among these sciences, but in the absence of real languages and real poetry it becomes the kind of gummy wool and bafflegab that is taught in our universities today. Like all the other sciences it is essentially applied. If there is nothing to which it can be applied, then it is tosh some tenured fool is putting over. ‘Literary theory’ is almost all like that: done by people who could not read with attention to save their lives.

—David Warren, ‘On Science’

Filed Under: Quotha Tagged With: academia, david warren, literature, philosophy, poetics, poetry, science

Calvin and Hobbes on writing

17 September 2015 by Tom Simon 1 Comment

Hat tip to Malcolm the Cynic.

There are two kinds of people involved in this game, whether as writers, readers, or what have you: Those who agree with Calvin, and those who wish to use writing as an actual means of communication. Which is as much as to say that there are parasites, and there are hosts.

Speaking of Malcolm the Cynic, he has an interesting piece up on Superversive SF: ‘Fixing the Abrams Star Trek Movies’. Very much in the vein of what I did with elements of the Star Wars prequels in ‘Creative discomfort and Star Wars’. I like his take on the Abrams Trek reboot very much.

Filed Under: Foolishness Tagged With: academia, bill watterson, calvin and hobbes, malcolm the cynic, writing

One definition of knowledge

31 January 2015 by Tom Simon 1 Comment

The way the word knowledge is used by many intellectuals often arbitrarily limits what verified information is to be considered knowledge. This arbitrary limitation of the scope of the word was expressed in a parody verse about Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol College at Oxford University:

First come I; my name is Jowett.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am master of this college:
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

—Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

(The ‘parody verse’ is generally attributed to Henry Beeching. I have here substituted the original for Sowell’s paraphrase, because the original scans better.)

Filed Under: Quotha Tagged With: academia, balliol rhyme, benjamin jowett, henry beeching, knowledge, thomas sowell