Briefly…

I have been submerged lately under the impact of the Normans in southern Italy among other things. The three remaining posts on the Ford lectures will be up soon(ish).

Dan’s paradox

In Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, at any instant of time the arrow is not in motion. As there is no time “between” instants for it to move, the arrow must be motionless. In Dan’s Open Letter to Educators, the internet has reduced the “value” of any individual fact to nothing, so an education delivered by a professor  trying to fill students with facts is worthless.

There is context missing in both cases, and it is crucially important.

The 2010 Ford lectures II: the experience of empire

In the second of this year’s Ford lectures, David Bates started where he’d left off in the first one: Orderic Vitalis as a ten-year-old boy being packed off to St-Evroul to begin a new life in that monastery on the southern border of Normandy. Certainly Orderic experience uncertainly in leaving England – he did not know the French dialect spoken by the Normans – but he found kindness within the community. Bates thus cast Orderic as a ‘child of empire’ and a good person with which to begin a lecture focusing on the personal experience of empire and how this might form the basis for the exercise of power.