Vatic: James & RWE as Public/Professional Philosophers

[Mark Kohut]

>From the essay Ish just sent. I sat in a bookstore the other day and read
the beginning
of a new, cutely written--New Journalism kinda work (as it was once
dubbed)--- so to speak, with a very cute
self-conscious text all about calculus.....to try to make calculus
understandable palatably...

The author writes about delta t, change, change and rings some changes on
the theme, working the real world
in more than your usual calculus textbook (I imagine) which lead me to
think of the constancy of change
in life and those who felt it and wrote about it almost personally, like
Henry Adams in that classic autobiography which
we know TRP felt too.

And there is this from the good essay Ish just posted:
"During this era [ 1840s and beyond a bit] the United States was in a
constant state of change and convulsion attributable to industrialization,
immigration, class conflict, urbanization, religious controversy, the Civil
War and imperial expansion."

And my overly simplistic thought and question is: Has any other writer used
delta t as a symbolic embodiment in fiction besides TRP?
Musil?....DeLillo?..........Shakespeare would have, I say, but he hadn't
invented calculus yet.

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 7:47 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> I learn a lot of our List here, from Mark, a great deal. Recently he
> used a word I rarely use myself or see in print: vatic. Not sure of
> it, I checked its etymology and usage and I like the word much.
>
> 1620s, "poet or bard," specifically "Celtic divinely inspired poet"
> (1728), from Latin vates "sooth-sayer, prophet, seer," from a Celtic
> source akin to Old Irish faith "poet," Welsh gwawd "poem," from PIE
> root *wet- (1) "to blow; inspire, spiritually arouse" (source also of
> Old English wod "mad, frenzied," god-name Woden; see wood (adj.)).
> Hence vaticination "oracular prediction" (c. 1600).
>
> I have not moved on from Peirce and Pynchon, but I am, as Emerson
> would have it, Circling the subject.
>
> Back to James and RWE and Hinduism.
> Much has been written about James and RWE.
> Here, for those interested, is an excellent essay by Cotkin on the
> two, it treats the Vatic.
>
> Ralph Waldo Emerson & William James as Public Philosophers By GEORGE COTKIN
>
>
>
>
> https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1025&context=hist_fac
>
>
> Cheers,
> Ish
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>