Long ago people believed the Sun revolved around the Earth.
If someone today writes a history of those times, you are supposed to understand that the author doesn't actually believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, but that they are writing a history of that time period.
> This is the standard of writing that's coming out of Princeton these days?
Well, per TFA, the author is actually Helen De Cruz [0], who is the Danforth Chair in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University.
"However" isn't a conjunction. It should be "Not many academic philosophers discuss magic. However, five centuries ago..."
Using "however" the way the author did will trip up a reader expecting correct English -- once you have "Not many philosophers discuss magic, however" you expect the sentence to end, but it doesn't and you have to go back and reinterpret.
""Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), wrote extensive treatises on the topic""
I think you'll find a lot of people would breeze past this and not debate commas and semicolons.
You are correct, by the letter of the law, according to the semicolon police this should be a semicolon.
But that is like arresting people for jay walking. Yes, it's wrong, but come on.
I agree it isn’t going to trip many up, but also agree that the standards of writing coming out of an education institution should be grammatically correct.
But this is super low bar mistake. I would bet 90%+ of general population would not know this was an error at all.
But, what is prevalent today, is to pile scorn on to educational bodies. So to take a really minor grammar error, in a rather small and niche paper, and extrapolate to a condemnation of the entire institute, is really obviously politically motivated.
The bit about science not being elitist needs a caveat: anyone can try things and make observations, but that doesn't mean other people will believe them. Being trusted as a source of observations and getting them generally accepted is a social process. Consider nutrition, exercise, anything health related. How many people were in your study?
Even then, there's no guarantee. Many papers are ignored.
I recently discovered the Weird Studies podcast (which I love), and it sent me down an interesting rabbit hole around "magic."
Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some physically measurable effect. Rather, it's more about the idea that the mindset inherent to "magical practice" - like the interpretation of omens, or making some plea to a "god" or "force" - can be a useful mindset, a sort of different lens to view the world through.
As someone who spent a lot of time in my teens and early 20s consuming various rationalistic media (science books, New Atheist tracts, skepticism podcasts, etc), my knee jerk reaction to "magic" has mostly been disdain. But it's really interesting to consider it from this different angle and recognize that "magical thinking" has been a big part of the human experience for as long as we've been around. Maybe there's a baby in the bathwater there that we're throwing away, and maybe the notion of the "practice of magic" could be approached in a way that excises the dumb while keeping the good. (I've come to similar thoughts about religion and spirituality as I've gotten older).
Plus, as a nerdy metalhead type, I have to admit to myself that some of this stuff is just cool, and so it's been kind of fun to "allow" myself to dig into some of the various literature out there on "magic". (The whole Chaos Magic thing is full of fun and wacky stuff, check out "Liber Null," for example).
I think the Weird Studies pod I mentioned does a much better job than this post outlining the ideas in SSOTBME, and they covered another book, Technic and Magic, that has some similar thinking. Highly recommend the pod if that sounds even vaguely interesting.
For example, let's say you are anxious about money, maybe you are afraid of suddenly finding yourself with no money - so, a simple exercise to face that fear could be to leave the house, for the day, with no phone and no wallet, or have someone drop you off on the next town over and have to figure out on your own how to get back home
The main concept is to create "rituals" that help you address the fears that hold you back, in a practical way
Cognitive behavioral therapy calls this exposure therapy. It uses repeated exposure and reinforcement (the same things we use to train dogs to shake a paw), tailored specifically for reducing fear and anxiety.
A theory of why Sufism is popular is that it gives its followers pleasurable feelings (spinning in circles causes pleasure). Similarly, it seems like revolutions gain followers by offering pleasurable feelings too. Forbidden fruits are a great source of pleasure. For example, being attracted to someone of the same sex used to be a forbidden fruit. Then people said that the forbidden fruit is actually OK, and that led to a revolution in civil rights. Right now we have a couple of nascent forbidden fruit revolutions. One is based around becoming stupider, basically: doing psychedelics, believing in magic. The other is based around finding the truth, basically: reading about genetic differences between populations.
Oh boy. I skimmed the beginning and end of that book, and the author presents some rather... skewed moral sensibilities around sex (See for example "The Red Rite" near the end of the book).
I guess these counter-culture esoteric/religious movements don't necessarily improve on the human flaws of Christian priests.
Yeah, please don't read my mention of that book as any kind of endorsement, more like a "wow, look at the wild shit this guy wrote."
I think a lot of the Chaos Magic stuff is written in a spirit of playfulness (though there's plenty of plain dumb stuff too), it's kind of the characteristic of that "movement" in magic to play freely with tropes from every imaginable system and mix them in weird fashions.
Much of the world apparently believed that wearing a muzzle and living like a hermit instead of outdoors, exercise, vitamins, and a normal lifestyle would prevent the common cold. Pure magic over rational science. One wonders what the next generation will think of the insanity of the past few years.
24 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadLong ago people believed the Sun revolved around the Earth.
If someone today writes a history of those times, you are supposed to understand that the author doesn't actually believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, but that they are writing a history of that time period.
Well, per TFA, the author is actually Helen De Cruz [0], who is the Danforth Chair in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University.
[0] https://helendecruz.net/
Using "however" the way the author did will trip up a reader expecting correct English -- once you have "Not many philosophers discuss magic, however" you expect the sentence to end, but it doesn't and you have to go back and reinterpret.
"Not many academic philosophers discuss magic; however, five centuries ago . . ."
In any case, I think the author really meant "although."
""Not many academic philosophers discuss magic, however, five centuries ago, prominent Renaissance philosophers, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), wrote extensive treatises on the topic""
I think you'll find a lot of people would breeze past this and not debate commas and semicolons.
You are correct, by the letter of the law, according to the semicolon police this should be a semicolon.
But that is like arresting people for jay walking. Yes, it's wrong, but come on.
But this is super low bar mistake. I would bet 90%+ of general population would not know this was an error at all.
But, what is prevalent today, is to pile scorn on to educational bodies. So to take a really minor grammar error, in a rather small and niche paper, and extrapolate to a condemnation of the entire institute, is really obviously politically motivated.
> They conceived of magic as the ability to work wonders, and as such it merited close philosophical attention.
> In Wonderstruck, I treat magic (like science and religion) as a cognitive technology that harnesses our sense of wonder.
Even then, there's no guarantee. Many papers are ignored.
For some things, cameras help.
The modern peer review process (as a way to decide which papers get "accepted" vs "rejected") began no earlier than the 1960's.
Weird Studies covered a book called "Sex Secrets of the Black Magic Experts" (title is meant to be jokey, not serious), which outlines a sort of modern approach to thinking about "Magic." It doesn't advocate for magic in the sense of literally believing that some ritual or invocation has some physically measurable effect. Rather, it's more about the idea that the mindset inherent to "magical practice" - like the interpretation of omens, or making some plea to a "god" or "force" - can be a useful mindset, a sort of different lens to view the world through.
As someone who spent a lot of time in my teens and early 20s consuming various rationalistic media (science books, New Atheist tracts, skepticism podcasts, etc), my knee jerk reaction to "magic" has mostly been disdain. But it's really interesting to consider it from this different angle and recognize that "magical thinking" has been a big part of the human experience for as long as we've been around. Maybe there's a baby in the bathwater there that we're throwing away, and maybe the notion of the "practice of magic" could be approached in a way that excises the dumb while keeping the good. (I've come to similar thoughts about religion and spirituality as I've gotten older).
Plus, as a nerdy metalhead type, I have to admit to myself that some of this stuff is just cool, and so it's been kind of fun to "allow" myself to dig into some of the various literature out there on "magic". (The whole Chaos Magic thing is full of fun and wacky stuff, check out "Liber Null," for example).
I think the Weird Studies pod I mentioned does a much better job than this post outlining the ideas in SSOTBME, and they covered another book, Technic and Magic, that has some similar thinking. Highly recommend the pod if that sounds even vaguely interesting.
Links:
SSOTBME podcast: https://www.weirdstudies.com/141
Technic and Magic podcast: https://www.weirdstudies.com/134
For example, let's say you are anxious about money, maybe you are afraid of suddenly finding yourself with no money - so, a simple exercise to face that fear could be to leave the house, for the day, with no phone and no wallet, or have someone drop you off on the next town over and have to figure out on your own how to get back home
The main concept is to create "rituals" that help you address the fears that hold you back, in a practical way
Oh boy. I skimmed the beginning and end of that book, and the author presents some rather... skewed moral sensibilities around sex (See for example "The Red Rite" near the end of the book).
I guess these counter-culture esoteric/religious movements don't necessarily improve on the human flaws of Christian priests.
I think a lot of the Chaos Magic stuff is written in a spirit of playfulness (though there's plenty of plain dumb stuff too), it's kind of the characteristic of that "movement" in magic to play freely with tropes from every imaginable system and mix them in weird fashions.