The Magic Circle

The term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins. A fancy Backgammon set sitting all alone might be a pretty decoration on the coffee table. If this is the function that the game is serving-decoration-it doesn't really matter how the game pieces are arranged, if some of them are out of place, or even missing. However, once you sit down with a friend to play a game of Backgammon, the arrangement of the pieces suddenly bec...

 Transclusion

Now, with respect to literature, authors are frequently faced with the task of re-explaining and restating background material that has been explained well elsewhere. If you could just borrow that material, those existing good explanations, and incorporate them (with automatic credit where due), your efforts could be spent stating what is new. We introduce the concept of transclusion to separate the arrangement of a document from its content. There is an underlying shared pool of contents, an...

 The Humanities are About "Inwardness"

It is the irreducible reality of inwardness, and its autonomy as a category of understanding, over which Pinker, in his delirium of empirical research, rides roughshod. The humanities are the study of the many expressions of that inwardness. Pinker’s condescension to the humanities is endless. He proposes for the humanities “a consilience with science,” but the only apparent beneficiary of such an arrangement would be the humanities, since they have nothing much to offer the sciences, w...

 Dissecting Crystals

A casual glance at crystals may lead to the idea that they were pure sports of nature, but this is simply an elegant way of declaring one's ignorance. With a thoughtful examination of them, we discover laws of arrangement. With the help of these, calculation portrays and links up the observed results. How variable and at the same time how precise and regular are these laws! How simple they are ordinarily, without losing anything of their significance! The theory which has served to develop th...

 Aristotle on Chance in Nature

There are some who make chance responsible for this cosmos and all worlds. For they say that by chance there came about a vortex and a motion of separating out and settling into this arrangement of the whole. And this itself is in fact mightily worth 30 wondering at. For they are saying that animals and plants neither are nor come to be by fortune, but that either nature or Intellect or some other such thing is the cause (for what comes into being from each seed is not whatever falls out, but...

 The Book Wheel

Ramelli's designs were very inventive and often required precise machining that was impossible in his day. Many were successfully manufactured and sold, two or three centuries later. Ramelli designed the "book-wheel" or “reading wheel” to present volumes of text to readers in whatever position they had last placed them. The “book-wheel,” an alternative version of the revolving bookstand, is a device designed to allow one person to read a variety of heavy books in one location with e...