Philosophy and Twitter

It has occurred to me now and then to wonder how much of Spinoza's Ethics meets the 140-character limit that Twitter imposes. A couple of days away from the office, with my time partly but not entirely my own, gave me the opportunity to write a Perl script to parse the Ethics as provided by the Bibliotecha Augustana, and I found that the answer is quite a bit:

• about four fifths of the definitions of the passions
• about three fifths of the propositions
• about half of the axioms and postulates
• about two fifths of corollaries and definitions
• about a third of the lemmas
• very few of the demonstrations, explications, scholia, and recapitulations.

I should perhaps say Ethica rather than Ethics, for I used the Latin text as being more compressed than the English.