Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A quote from Sayers on education, from a 1947 essay: For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. That insight was one she brought home to her readers through such personal questions as this: Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Going through my head today for no good reason is a two-sentence passage of Dorothy Sayers', in an essay explaining some of the basic concepts of medieval scholastic philosophy, including "matter" and "form." The sentence, which I'm quoting from memory, went something like this: "A cat is not simply a bunch of cat-stuff arranged in the form of a cat. Such a being exists, but its a dead cat." She goes on to say that the difference between the dead and live cat is the latter's possession of certain faculties (of perception and nutrition): a living cat recognizes the world around it and feeds itself. All of this reminds me, too, of a line in one of the Harry Potter books. One character has been killed through dark magic. The muggle police have found the body, and the coroners report that the body seems perfectly normal and healthy, excerpt for the fact that it is dead. There is some sort of fallacy in the original Sayers passage that the...

The recent death of Barbara Reynolds is worth some mention here. Barbara Reynolds was the goddaughter of Dorothy Sayers and a formidable scholar of the Italian language. For more than 30 years she was chief executive and general editor of the Cambridge Italian Dictionary. After Sayers' own untimely death in 1957 it was Reynolds who put together the available materials and finished the work on the Sayers' translation of Paradiso , the third volume of Dante's Commedia . Sayers' translation of Inferno had appeared in 1949, of Purgatorio in 1955. The Sayers/Reynolds translation of Paradiso came out in 1962. Despite huge differences in every sort of respect, I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Catholic intellects of the first half of the 20th century, the so-called "Inklings" and their circle included, and Sayers perhaps most of all in that crowd, not just for her Dante translation (and the commentaries) but for the detective fiction and the width of h...

Mystery solved! As some of you may remember, I've long been intrigued by a passage in Dorothy Sayers' introduction to her translation of Dante's Inferno. The passage, written in 1949, includes allusions to roughly 60 different people who played a part in English social history in the century or so before that date. Some she refers to by full name, most by part of a name, some by an allusive phrase. Her point is that an intelligent reader five centuries later will need help understanding a poem that makes such allusions, and she tries to provide analogous help in her notes on Dante. Roughly two thirds of a century has passed, and even for Anglophilic Americans, her prediction had been amply verified. Some of the references are obvious, some take some digging, some left me confused for a long time. But I believe I have cleared up the most confusing example. She refers to "Brown and Kennedy." Those are quite common names, so googling didn't help The arc...

I remember when I was in high school I became interested in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. (For those of you who may be curious, I was reading the Sayers/Reynolds translation, which preserves the terza rima scheme of the original verse.) This was a matter of some consternation to various kin and neighbors, who thought I could not possibly understand such a book and it could only hurt my lil' teenage mind to try. One neighbor lady (whom I will shroud in anonymity hereafter -- the initials NL shall be enough) somberly sought to discuss the book with me. The conversation went something like this: NL: What do you think the book is about? CF: (staggered a bit at the vastness of the ground a proper answer would cover): Well, Dante was writing at a time when the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor were engaged in a struggle for power. He used the three afterlife destinations to suggest his own take.... NL:   No no, you're missing the point. His point was the kind of l...

June 2013 correction: Most of what I wrote here holds up. But I was wrong about the reference to "The Claimant." Somehow the Roger Tichborne case had escaped me. Oops. ______________________________ In my now-suspended blog I wrote several entries concerning Dorothy Sayers, and some comments she made in the introduction to her 1949 translation of Dante's Inferno . Today, while we are still quite early in the history of this blog, I'd like to stitch all those entries together. This is my best answer to the question: what did her allusions mean? The allusions in question arose because Sayers was addressing the question of why contemporary readers need as much apparatus as she had attached in order to understand an early 14th century poet. "Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to vario...