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Depending on field and author, that's downright common. French is still often untranslated in works that tend toward the literary or philosophical. Before the 7

Depending on field and author, that's downright common. French is still often untranslated in works that tend toward the literary or philosophical. Before the 70s or so, Latin (usually some unattributed quotation you were expected to recognize) was often untranslated. Before World War I, Greek was like that, too—but that's because both Greek and Latin were studied in primary school, then. In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans. In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct. You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.

irrational 4y ago
> two famous works by two famous figures being included I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus. tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.
- brimble 4y ago
  Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem. [1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
  - irrational 4y ago
    > if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist? Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
    - brimble 4y ago
      Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)
- defen 4y ago
  A double movement is when two contradictory or opposing actions/things/themes work together to produce an aesthetic effect. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis. If you haven't read Blood Meridian (you should - I'm biased, it's my favorite book, but it's widely considered one of the great American novels) it would be hard to discuss thematic double movements in detail, but one example would be scientific knowledge as a means of control vs the ultimate unknowability of fate. In the case of social media, the author appears to be arguing that on the one hand it is not some "special place" that is distinct from other communication networks - many of which have existed before man himself did. e.g. you can see a natural continuum from plants communicating with each other via airborne rhizobacteria -> animals communicating with each other with sound -> people talking -> telegraph -> telephone -> email -> social media. So in some sense it's just a continuation of an existing trend of expanding the domain of communication. On the other hand, it is not like previous methods of communication because it is subject to algorithmic amplification and perverse "attention economy" incentives. For example, the best way for Twitter or Facebook to make money is to show you things that piss you off. The best way to be popular on Instagram is to live a completely fake life. In fact, the author argues that the only way to properly engage with social media is by treating it as a game - e.g. shitposting. In that sense social media is very different from pre-existing means of communication.

irrational 4y ago

> two famous works by two famous figures being included I think we run in different circles. Despite having three university degrees and owning thousands of books that I have read, I’ve never heard of either of these books and am just slightly aware of Leibniz, though that might be explained by my never having taken a class on calculus. tLdr; I still don’t have a clue since I don’t possess enough requisite knowledge in the required domain space.

brimble 4y ago
Yeah, McCarthy's one of the (simply the, perhaps?) most famous living English-language "literary" fiction authors around (had a somewhat-popular movie made based on his The Road, even) so if you don't keep up with that sort of thing you might not know him. Leibniz' work on monads[0] would be at least passingly familiar to anyone with even a little philosophy background, but could otherwise have been missed. If it makes you feel any better, I may as well be badly afflicted by dyslexia when I try to read a mathematical statement with more than a couple simple terms. [0] I'm digging way back so this might be a little off, but fundamentally it's a solution to the Problem of Evil[1]: Leibniz puts us each in a "windowless monad" of a universe—sort of individual pocket universes—such that all the people we interact with are actually automatons of a sort. In this way, a person can do evil (i.e. sin still exists), but not actually inflict it on anyone else, if that makes sense. Meanwhile, bad things happening to you in your personal monad aren't actually evil because... I dunno, it's been a while so I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it comes down to "God works in mysterious ways". Basically, he replaces true causality with a kind of divine harmonic dance of actually-not-affecting-one-another things and people that make up what we call "reality". Nb. his actual argument is far less dumb than I'm making it seem. [1] The Problem of Evil can be summed up in the child's question: "if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil (apparently—that part will matter a ton for some people who try to address this) exist?" Lots and lots of theologians and philosophers over many centuries took a crack at the seemingly-simple question—and in fact, one of Leibniz' notions, that the world one experiences is "the best of all possible worlds", was famously parodied in Voltaire's Candide, which is another way someone with a humanities background might have become familiar with his philosophy.
- irrational 4y ago
  > if God's perfectly good, and created the universe, why does evil exist? Doesn't this depend on your definition of "created"? It seems this presupposes certain things like ex nihilo creation (matter out of nothing) and god being able to create people (i.e., people are not co-existent with god).
  - brimble 4y ago
    Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)
defen 4y ago
A double movement is when two contradictory or opposing actions/things/themes work together to produce an aesthetic effect. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis. If you haven't read Blood Meridian (you should - I'm biased, it's my favorite book, but it's widely considered one of the great American novels) it would be hard to discuss thematic double movements in detail, but one example would be scientific knowledge as a means of control vs the ultimate unknowability of fate. In the case of social media, the author appears to be arguing that on the one hand it is not some "special place" that is distinct from other communication networks - many of which have existed before man himself did. e.g. you can see a natural continuum from plants communicating with each other via airborne rhizobacteria -> animals communicating with each other with sound -> people talking -> telegraph -> telephone -> email -> social media. So in some sense it's just a continuation of an existing trend of expanding the domain of communication. On the other hand, it is not like previous methods of communication because it is subject to algorithmic amplification and perverse "attention economy" incentives. For example, the best way for Twitter or Facebook to make money is to show you things that piss you off. The best way to be popular on Instagram is to live a completely fake life. In fact, the author argues that the only way to properly engage with social media is by treating it as a game - e.g. shitposting. In that sense social media is very different from pre-existing means of communication.