In early May 2017, a tree at 16th Street and Meridian Place NW began to sag:
This summer, I ordered a copy of Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Object by Peter Geach. I was mildly surprised to find that it was a reproduction of the edition published by Routledge, Kegan, and Paul. The back cover said, among other things, that
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
I find it odd that the writings of philosophers should somehow reach the public domain so quickly, when Disney's "Steamboat Willy" only made it into the public domain this year. I have made the same complaint of a copied edition of Quine's Word and Object. Disney died in 1966, Quine in 2000, Geach in 2013. Yet somehow Disney' works of the 1930s remain protected, while Quine's and Geach's works of the 1950s and 1960s are not.
The copy of Mental Acts also suggests objections to the attitude of those who think that quick entry to the public domain is wholly beneficial. This week I looked into the book to find its date of publication. The publishers had included a page with a little bit of library information from Osmania University, which must once have owned the copy scanned. But they had omitted whatever portion of the front matter included the publication date. The best I could do from the book was to establish a terminus a quo of 1953, the year of the last-cited publications. Wikipedia says that it appeared in 1957.
Last Monday, I discovered that my driver's license had expired on my birthday, roughly three weeks ago. It was not practical for me to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) during the week, because of the press of business.The DMV offices keep barbers' days, Tuesday through Saturday, and I decided on Saturday.
On Saturday, I considered taking the bus, given my unlicensed state. But Georgetown is within fifteen minutes by car, and could take an hour and half to reach by bus on a Saturday. I drove, which was prudent. I left a book behind, which may not have been.
An hour and ten minutes elapsed between my arrival at the reception desk and my exit with a temporary license. A book might have helped to occupy me, or might have been impossible to read, given the unceasing sound track that posted one on almost anything one might need to know about the DMV.
This office is in a small shopping mall, with a restaurant or two. The woman next to me agreed that the mall should get permission for its shops to display the readout showing the state of the queues for service. I could see the numbers for a driver's license paid for by credit card creep up from C134 to C147 (my number). Had the readout been visible in the shops or restaurants, I could have browsed the displays or sipped coffee until C144 was called.
I find that for my next license, when I will be (well) over seventy, I will need to find a physician to certify that I am sound of mind and body. The DMV calls this the "mature driver" portion of the form. I hope that I reached maturity as a driver some time ago, but it has never been certified.
(During the last few years, people have started to use the term "DMV" as designating the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. After so many years of using for a Department of Motor Vehicles--not just DC's, but Maryland's, I find this disconcerting.)
This year I did a fairly bad job of carving a jack o'lantern. I marked off the features with an indelible marker, then decided that they were too low. I carelessly cut across the top of the mouth, not outlining the teeth. As a consequence, Jack has badly applied eye-black (and mouth-black), and a couple of dental implants. Of course, in the dark that doesn't matter much.
It occurred to me, though, that I had a large, sound pumpkin, with room enough to carve another face on the back side--a Janus-faced pumpkin. One could carve contrasting faces, say masks of tragedy and comedy. Or one could just cut out a mediocre jack o'lantern face, not better or worse, nor deliberately different. Yet I wonder whether the cross-draft would burn down the candle faster. Perhaps I will carve such a jack o'lantern next year.
Metro trains stop for perhaps thirty seconds when running properly. Earlier in the month, in a fraction of that time, I found myself looking at an advertising display on the Union Station platform, where I saw at least three, and perhaps four advertisements for schools: Rochester Institute of Technology, the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, and something from George Washington University--perhaps the Elliot School of International Affairs.
The next time that I was in a Metro station, to add money to a SmartTrip card, I noticed advertising on the walls and the floor from the George Washington University College of Continuing Studies. If I occasionally forget to local thirst for credentials, I am reminded soon enough again.
The local tomato season, the period during which one can buy good, local tomatoes grown outdoors, is now over. In the Washington, DC, area, the season begins about the beginning of July and now runs until about the middle of October. Of course one can buy tomatoes in the stores all year, but they are bred for shipping rather than for eating: they will not bruise under reasonable handling; they have very little taste.
During the tomato season, my wife will come home with bags from a local farmers market. We will have a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato (BLT) sandwiches many weeks. Most Fridays we will have roasted tomatoes over fettucini. She has frozen some roasted tomatoes for a treat to be enjoyed between now and next July. The BLTs, though, are over until then.
The night this year after she first brought home bags of tomatoes, I woke in the dark hours thinking that I smelled smoke. Of course the smoke alarms are more sensitive than a nose, certainly more sensitive than mine, but that did not occur to me. After walking about the house and sniffing, I went back to bed. In the morning it occurred to me that it was the unfamiliar smell of fresh tomatoes that I had taken for smoke.
Noticed in Aquinas on Mind, by Anthony Kenny:
The ability to write philosophical prose easily comprehensible to the lay reader is a gift which Aquinas shares with Descartes, but which was denied to Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Wittgenstein did, of course, write a plain and beautiful German; the difficulty for the non-philosopher, reading his later works, is not in construing particular sentences, but in understanding the point of saying any of the things he said. With Aristotle it is the other way round; it is clear that what he is saying is of immense importance, but the problem is to discover what meaning it has, or which of the seven possible meanings is the intended one.
Well, I have read a very little bit of Wittgenstein in German, and cannot testify to the plainness or beauty of his prose. I am grateful to the translators who wrestle with the difficulties of Aristotle.
A page or so later in the book there appears
Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life.
At first glance that seems a little unfair to Russell, but is it?
