Here's something good from Justin Smith about the topic. Smith starts his story a couple centuries after the tapestry, the early date of which undermines some of his points.
That's judgemental. Maybe Phyllis and Aristotle just had a BDSM relationship.
Now we call such works "sitcoms," am I right? Hello?
Learn more at this impossible URL.
"ACLS Humanities E-Book is an online collection of books of high quality in the humanities, selected by scholars, and accessible through institutional and individual subscription. Access to the collection is restricted to faculty, students, members and staff of subscribing institutions, and to authorized individuals who have been issued a password."
Dude, part of the social contract here is that when the OP has a link, we promise to never, ever click on it.
"So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet."
Possible URL? http://www.gutenberg-e.org/lindgren/
Sorry, the paywalled text is this kind of thing, about women living in a Dominican monastery:
What kind of meanings would medieval Dominican women have found in the anti-feminist images of the tapestry and would they have found the images particularly anti-feminist? The wall hanging does portray women in all stages of life, unmarried (the woman with Virgil and the virgin with the unicorn), married (Delilah and Phyllis), and widowed (if the eighth medallion does depict Laudine). The nuns may have identified most with the unicorn-virgin, seeing in the other pairs of images the life choices that they did not make, or that they made but now as nuns renounced. It is unclear whether the women would have seen the depiction of anti-feminist stories as negative. [111] The stories may not have been viewed so much as fearful of the power of women as fearful of the secular world. Powerful women led themselves and others into sin unless they had the power of virginity--the ability to tame the unicorn.
I came to the site via an annotation of Ibn Battuta, looked at this as a pointless side-browse to see what else they had. Aristotle was likely married twice, regardless of what may have happened with Phyllis, but still wrote that men had more teeth than women. Also that tetrahedra can be packed to fill space-- not true for regular tetrahedra, easily verified.
He just wouldn't shut up, everything is like one of those badly written papers where the first draft gets submitted. Or those semiliterate chronicles from the middle ages, but at least the chroniclers usually have something to say rather than just trying to fill up the silence. Parts of the Nicomachean ethics are OK, but there's too much of it.
11 is implausible. We know you got to this site via a google search for "Sensual Encounters."
LW: "Siri: Find me sensual encounters."
Siri: "Do you mean the Akron-area massage parlor or the history of monastic women in medieval Germany?"
LW: "Yes."
This moved me to discover that the Bayeux tapestry (and I guess it's really the Bayeux embroidery) has something like 620 human figures, of which 3 are women.
It seems a little unfair to describe someone's work as being like a first draft when you're mostly just reading his notes. And the bit about the teeth comes from what amounts to a list of things people have said were true about the natural world (collected tidily up in an organized way, I guess). The tetrahedra thing might be easily verified, but I'm not convinced it can be done as easily when your mathematical tools are, for the most part, drawing things freehand and occasionally playing with blocks.
re: 15
I can't think of Bayeux now without thinking of:
http://38.media.tumblr.com/7860aa18a1086834a05942dcc486c8cc/tumblr_n218vvbOsu1so2h9go1_500.jpg
which still makes me laugh.
16. OK, sure. He had all those episodes of Deadwood to catch up on and Phyllis to hang out with, I totally see why he never got around to editing out the pointless parts of anything.
Lots of classical authors, even Greek ones writing about factual matters, exist in recognizably finished works. Euclid and Archimedes were capable of both insight and the idea of proof, generalization beyond the particular problem being wrestled with. I don't think our quadrupedal friend was methodologically hampered in calculating the angle between faces of a tetrahedron.
13. I just tried typing "sultry vixen" into the Google. Indexing sure is a hard problem.
He just wouldn't shut up, everything is like one of those badly written papers where the first draft gets submitted.
You know that the so-called writings of Aristotle we have aren't the things that he published himself, right?
Er, that would be Archimedes (roughly 287-212) and Euclid (323-283) right? I suspect Aristotle (384-322) may not have had a full grasp on their work, unless Euclid was very precocious. Also the fact that their work (and Plato's even) exist in finished works doesn't mean Aristotle didn't have finished works. He did, and they were supposedly really great and reflected a wonderful literary style or at least that's what we've heard because we don't really have any of them sitting around anymore.
Actually, I quite like Aristotle. But mostly for his political history, which I guess nobody ever reads.
regardless of what may have happened with Phyllis
Is there actually any doubt that that whole story (and the even existence of Phyllis in the first place) is purely apocryphal?
Aristotle was likely married twice, regardless of what may have happened with Phyllis, but still wrote that men had more teeth than women.
You know, I've been married fourteen years, and I've never counted my wife's teeth. Or my own for that matter.
Your wife has counted both. Women are detail oriented like that. Ask her.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ree#/image/File:Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg
I've been married fourteen years, and I've never counted my wife's teeth
Aristotle and his contemporaries (broadly taken) really didn't have in their culture "let's look and see if that's true", right? At least in their elite culture.
Maybe Aristotle meant women had less teeth, rather than fewer.
29: My understanding is that for quite a while "let's look and see if that's true" meant --lets go look through our volumes of Aristotle and see what he wrote on this topic.
At least it's a concise epistemology.
29. To some extent they did, and a large part of that extent is, well, Aristotle. (The middle ages was somewhat different, though still I think not as much as it's commonly portrayed.)
The source of the "women have fewer teeth than men" bit shows up in this context:
Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made: but the more teeth they have the more long-lived are they, as a rule, while those are short-lived in proportion that have teeth fewer in number and thinly set.
So it's hard to say that he didn't appreciate the value of observations since he's reporting on observations in a long section where he talks about general patterns of facts that you, well, observe in the world. The section in question is Part 3. Part 2 is about shedding teeth, and part 4 goes on to talk about wisdom teeth.
One good reason to think he's reporting on other people's observations as well as his own is from the immediately above part 1 where he attributes some observations to someone else (and clearly not ones he could have made himself since, well, there isn't anything like that):
No animal of these genera is provided with double rows of teeth. There is, however, an animal of the sort, if we are to believe Ctesias. He assures us that the Indian wild beast called the 'martichoras' has a triple row of teeth in both upper and lower jaw; that it is as big as a lion and equally hairy, and that its feet resemble those of the lion; that it resembles man in its face and ears; that its eyes are blue, and its colour vermilion; that its tail is like that of the land-scorpion; that it has a sting in the tail, and has the faculty of shooting off arrow-wise the spines that are attached to the tail; that the sound of its voice is a something between the sound of a pan-pipe and that of a trumpet; that it can run as swiftly as deer, and that it is savage and a man-eater.
'martichoras'
That's what give the Jedi the ability to use the force?
In a beautiful bit of irony I think this common knowledge about Aristotle comes/was popularized by Bertrand Russell who claimed that Aristotle didn't appreciate the value of observation or verifying claims. He said:
"Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Russell would, of course, have known that this was a misleading thing to say had he bothered to verify it.
I would have like the Phantom Menace a lot more if we'd seen Anakin Skywalker shooting off arrow-wise the spines that were attached to his tail.
The fact that some people have wisdom teeth and some people don't could have screwed up Aristotle's sample for tooth counting. He probably didn't think to check more than a couple people.
Ah, so the difference is more about rigor.
37: Or he only checked really young women.
The fact that he (literally immediately, as in the next sentence) goes on to talk about wisdom teeth is decent evidence for 37.
Aristotle also had a tendency (as part of his usual method of writing/thinking*) to start out by noting the relevant observations/arguments/explanations that had been made by other people before going into any solutions of his own. (A sort of lit review, basically.) I don't think he goes into any significant amount of work on teeth, or at least not in that passage, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is basically an organized list of things about animals and not an actual part of an explanation of something or other, or anything that he tries to explain. So careful verification isn't part of the goal in this bit (mantichoras!).
*Don't read Aristotle without knowing it!
1. State the problem/topic; 2. Give a list of puzzles/problems regarding it (to motivate); 3. State what the people generally believe about it; 4. State what learned people believe about it or how they explain it; 5. Give his own argument and answer; 6. Demonstrate that his own solution explains why bits (3) and (4) weren't insane to disagree with him, just wrong.
