Author: dig

‘Such, such were the joys.
When we all girls & boys,
In our youth-time were seen,
On the Ecchoing Green.’

The Ecchoing Green, William Blake

Cicero’s life and thought are a testament to the idea of probabilia: we should be confident in our beliefs, but never certain (Massimo Pigliucci for aeon)

The Academic Skeptics called their school the New Academy, to distinguish it from the Old one started by Plato. Arcesilaus and Carneades – the great sceptics of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE – had pushed Plato’s and Socrates’ dialogical method toward a radical conclusion: we are unlikely to achieve certainty, because human knowledge comes from our senses and from reason, both of which are fallible.

Crucially, they did not conclude that we should therefore believe nothing whatsoever. Carneades introduced the concept of the pithanon (a Greek word) – the persuasive, the plausible – as the proper standard for action. Cicero translated the word into Latin as probabile (plural probabilia, from which we get the English ‘probable’) and built his whole epistemology on it.

Cicero’s own formulation is plain. In the Academica, he separates his school from the dogmatists in a single sentence: others declare that certain things are settled and fixed, whereas ‘we hold many things to be probabilia, which we can easily follow but can scarcely affirm.’ Follow easily, affirm rarely. The entire method is encapsulated by that asymmetry.

[…]

… on a personal scale, Cicero’s epistemology is an argument against the seductions of fixed identity. The person who has ‘found their truth’ and stopped questioning is not wise; they have surrendered to what Simone de Beauvoir, in The Prime of Life (1960), called ‘that conscious venture into lunacy known as a “philosophical system”,’ from which its adherents derive an obsessional attitude endowing their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability. The well-examined life is one of continuous calibration and revision: strong-enough commitments to act with integrity, loose enough to update when the evidence changes.

Primary is pleased to present Of Ivory and Flesh, a solo exhibition by Luna Palazzolo-Daboul.

Ela Bittencourt on Thea Djordjadze (Flash Art)

“The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his seminal book The Poetics of Space (1957).[2] Bachelard’s phenomenological approach shifted the understanding of architecture away from pure physics and geometry to embodiment, perception, and psychological resonance. Despite drawing on Jung’s theory of archetypes, Bachelard believed that it was not psychology but rather poetic images that reached the deepest layers of the human unconscious. His influential theory, centered on the inner “house of dream-memory,” on space as a vehicle for poiesis (from the Greek phrase meaning “to bring into being”), established a dialogical correspondence between concrete forms and subjective experience.

Bachelard’s theory of poetic image, which, as he argued, gave form to the past’s imprint on the human psyche not by literally reproducing it but by making it reverberate anew in the body, finds a meaningful counterpart in the work of Berlin-based, Georgian-born artist Thea Djordjadze.

Takeyoshi Nishiuchi …

“We meet in the freedoms of each other” via Summer Mei Ling Lee.

“Dwelling Together: Takeyoshi Nishiuchi and the Aesthetic Imagination of The Everyday”/ ?????????????????????????? in  Forms of the Everyday—Art, Architecture, Literature, Cuisine, ??????? ?? ???????????Michiko Tsushima, Eriko Yamaguchi, eds. (Tsukuba, Japan: Tsukuba University Press, April 2023). 

Only temporary peril—another Thursday.
Blood remains primarily
inside my body. The scream of
the animal is for attention.
Abruptly my shadow reminds
me I am human, in the room,
though the darkness I make
on the walls could be mistaken for storm.
The coulisses of trees endure,
despite my failures to see them
as more than symbol.
The gray seems personal.
The news, sempiternal.
I am of and in an uncertain age.
A coolness descends. The future.

Nothing Major to Report, Leila Chatti