Jul. 17th, 2006

cincinnatus_c: loon (Default)
High today, here: 32. Dewpoint then: 19. High dewpoint: 23.
High today in TO: 34. Dewpoint then: 18. High dewpoint: 22.
Low today on the balcony: 23.2. High: 32.7. Currently: 23.6.

... but still over 30 in here. Actually, over 30 again. It was 29.something and rising when I came home, having been up to 31.7 earlier in the day, then having dropped down when a thunderstorm blew in the windows, and having rebounded since as the day's heat has resumed trickling up through the building.

Spent a while this afternoon staring at the Wikipedia entry on "square root", before determining to my satisfaction that I could make no freaking sense of it. Then I read the Wikipedia entry on Hezbollah, because, you know, I've been wondering, just what the hell exactly do they want, apart from proving that they're cooler than Hamas. I determined, the other day, that Hezbollah is Shiite and Hamas, being Palestinian, and being that Palestinians are almost all Sunni, is Sunni. Also, Hezbollah is Lebanese. So, Wikipedia first confirmed for me that Hezbollah was formed to kick the Israelis out of Lebanon, which made me wonder, so, the Israelis are out of Lebanon now--so what do they want? But then I learned that Hezbollah believes, and is virtually alone in the world in believing, that Israel is not out of Lebanon, because they believe that the Shebaa Farms are part of Lebanon (whereas everyone else thinks they're part of the Golan Heights, and hence formerly part of Syria).

The other thing I have been wondering is, of course, just what the hell do the Israelis think they're going to accomplish by blowing up Lebanon, seeing as the pro-Syrian government was overthrown. Seems that, actually, the new anti-Syrian, or whatever, government (which does include some Hezbollah members in its cabinet) still thinks Hezbollah is swell, or at least pretends it thinks Hezbollah is swell, and Hezbollah is actually still mandated by the Lebanese government to act as the south Lebanese army. I had also been wondering where the hell the Lebanese army is. Well, it seems there isn't one, at least in south Lebanon; Hezbollah is it.

Moreover: seats in the Lebanese parliament are divided up according to the presumed religious composition of the country, but each of the Maronite Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites claim to be a majority, and no one wants to risk blowing the place apart by doing a new census. The Lebanese constitution stipulates that the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister must be a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament must be a Shiite.

To all of which I say: holy crap.

That nonsense out of the way, back to the Meno, and after chasing myself around in circles for a while about whether Meno's paradox is a Euthydemus-style equivocating trick, noticed that the slave-boy is given two examples, not just one, of the diagonal of a square being the base of the square's double, because Socrates carves the eight-foot square (the double of the four-foot square) out of the sixteen-foot square. So, maybe what the slave-boy is supposed to do is see what is common between the two double squares (which, according to Socrates earlier in the dialogue, would be what you'd be looking for if you wanted to say what a double square is)--they're both based on the diagonals of the squares they double. So, to be a double square is to be based on the diagonal of the doubled square. Well, you know, maybe.

Then I read an essay by Alexander Nehamas, which I'm surprised I hadn't read before, which argues that all the slave-boy is supposed to "recollect" is Socrates's demonstration at some later time when he's called on to explain why he thinks that the diagonal of a square is the base of its double. But then, more importantly, I finally got around to reading the recollection section of Roslyn Weiss's Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno, and found that practically everything I say about the slave-boy demonstration, she says, sometimes in such strikingly similar ways that if I was marking my paper and I'd read her book I'd suspect my paper was plagiarized. The important thing she adds, though, is an argument for taking Socrates to have drawn two diagonals through his original four-foot square to begin with, and not two, I dunno, she calls them "transversals", but anyway two bisecting lines starting and ending in the middle of the sides as opposed to in the corners--which is important because, if the diagonals are there all along, then the slave-boy has the answer to the question right in front of him all along, but doesn't recognize it, and so what the "demonstration" demonstrates is that Meno is right that if you don't know what you're looking for, you won't know it when you see it. In the case of geometry, fortunately, there's someone at hand who does know, i.e., Socrates, who can hammer at the boy until he agrees that the diagonal is the right answer. But in the case of virtue, there's nobody to hammer anybody into agreeing to the right answer because nobody knows, and since nobody knows, nobody will ever know.

Which is all quite fabulous and made me very afraid that she had also come up with the definition analogy, but, fortunately for me, she hadn't. So, all the more reason to cut my paper back to just that, and pretty much leave the rest--for now--to Weiss.

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