Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

It was J.R.R. Tolkien who first wrote, in a reminiscence of his childhood and of an early effort at fantasy writing, that one cannot refer in English to a "green great dragon." Size must come before color. It must be a great green dragon. He also expressed his continuing puzzlement, as boy and man, about this philological fact. Recently, someone among my FB friends posted a photo of a book, author unspecified and unknown to me, which addresses the point more comprehensively. According to this unsourced book, the proper list is: opinion, size, age, shape, color,  origin, material, purpose Noun. So one could encounter a terrifying great ancient smooth-lined green demon-sired flesh-and-blood gold-guarding dragon. Then presumably edit down the adjectives to just two, keeping the order. Is this a Chomskyan thing or a Skinnerian thing? If different languages have different preferred adjective orders then we might describe this as a Skinnerian discovery. The 'proper...

The Hobbit first appeared in 1937. Yes, that's getting to be a long time ago. One of its more enthusiastic reviewers was famed medievalist, Christian apologist and science-fiction author C.S. Lewis. This was his take. There and back again Money quote, "But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children's stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien -- who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale." Happy Thanksgiving to all.

I mentioned Friedman rather tangentially in yesterday's post, so I thought that before writing this one I should check up on what David F. has been up to lately. Not much, it turns out. The last writing of his that I would describe as a contribution to the public intellectual's case for liberty was a contribution to an anthology edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics . That came out in 2005 -- eight years ago. Since then, Friedman seems to have been trying to turn himself into a novelist. His second novel, Salamander, a bit of medievalist fantasy, appeared in March 2011. If you look at that Amazon page to which I just linked you, you'll find the book description. But in case you're feeling lazy, I'll reproduce it here: Magister Coelus, the College’s young and brilliant theorist, finally has a student capable of learning theoretical magery at the level at which he can teach it. He invites her to help...