{"id":8740,"date":"2013-06-01T11:32:07","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T11:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/01\/pseudo-latin-french-bullshit-the-cartesian-castle\/"},"modified":"2013-06-01T11:32:07","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T11:32:07","slug":"pseudo-latin-french-bullshit-the-cartesian-castle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2013\/06\/01\/pseudo-latin-french-bullshit-the-cartesian-castle\/","title":{"rendered":"Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Misattributed to Socrates<\/a>, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression."  But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.'  And yesterday<\/a> I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Today I received from Claude Boisson<\/a> an example of a willful fabrication of a 'quotation' in pseudo-Latin:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n


\nAn anecdote on pseudo-Latin + French bullshit rolled into one.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

A rather infamous but self-satisfied French sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (yes, some of our sociologists are as bad as some of our philosophers), recently gave an interview in one of the major weeklies, L'Express<\/em>, in which he said "Everybody knows the Cartesian sentence Cogito ergo sum<\/em>, but we tend to forget the rest: Cogito ergo sum in arcem meum<\/em>."
\n[I think therefore I am in my castle.]<\/span><\/p>\n

I ferociously answered that in an article of his, available on line, he had already committed the same sin, unforgettable for a university professor, of forging a quotation ("the Latin formula in its entirety is more interesting" he had stated). And this was in a development supposed to prove that the concept of the individual is ascribable to "the beginning of modernity", since, only "collective thought" was known to the benighted thinkers of the Dark Ages.
\nI then told him<\/span><\/p>\n

(1) that the Discours de la m\u00e9thode<\/em> was written in French, and was translated into Latin seven years later by Etienne de Courcelles, so there was no real need for showing off Latin (Je pense donc je suis<\/em> being the original Cartesian French);
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

(2) that the invention in arcem meum<\/em> is, alas!, doubly mistaken since it piles a syntactic error ("in" with a local meaning must be followed by an ablative) onto a morphological error (the name "arx" is feminine), so the real Latin should read in arce mea<\/em>; no scholar would have been guilty of these atrocious mistakes in Descartes' day;
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

(3) that the metaphor of the "citadel of the soul" was known to such people as John of Salisbury (who duly wrote in arce animae<\/em>) in the 12th century, and long before him to the Stoics, including Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius;
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

(4) that for anybody desirous to meditate on "modernity", Saul Steinberg's jocular Cogito ergo Cartesius sum<\/em> was perhaps of more interest than a forged quotation.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

All this is easily accessible on the Internet.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Disgusting!  Another example of the destruction of the universities and the decline of the humanities 'thanks' to leftism, post-modernism, and scientism.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a>Misattributed to Socrates<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the 'Analysts'<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Nonsense From the Science Page of the New York Times<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Bogus Camus Quotation<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>On Diachronic or 'Emersonian' Consistency<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Misattributed to Socrates, I announced my opposition to "misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression."  But I left one out: the willful fabrication of 'quotations.'  And yesterday I warned myself and others against pseudo-Latin.  Today I received from Claude Boisson an example of … Continue reading “Pseudo-Latin French Bullshit: The Cartesian Castle”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,12,6,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-descartes","category-language-matters","category-literary-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}