Werekat @werekat@mastodon.acc.sunet.se

So. This has been the most migraine-heavy summer in a few years. AND there's thesis delivery, the scheduling for which did not account for hospital visits and hands that go numb at random times. AND there's visa issues. AND there's not getting to see my family this summer because of all of this.

Sorry for disappearing on y'all, folks, but I really can't keep up at the moment. Will be back when things are at least mildly under control.

Good: once you've got a diagnosis, you can actually do something about it!

One thing most documents stress, though: don't default to thinking you're having a migraine if part of your body goes numb. Follow stroke protocol! Better safe than sorry. In case of stroke, literal minutes decide how much damage you'll escape with.

So a few days ago I learned that there's this thing called a hemiplegic migraine, which apparently imitates stroke. As in, half your body goes numb.

Bad: learned via experience.
Good: if there's something my local hospital knows, it's weird neurology. That was the fastest emergency room protocol administration I've ever seen.
Bad: super rare type of migraine - might also be why standard migraine meds didn't work for me, and why my headaches got classified as tension headaches before.

3) AND a background half-chapter on Soviet narratives of progress and the place of esotericism in those (hint: there is a place, because they hated Thomas Aquinas).

Ok. I think today is the day when I'm FINALLY done with explaining all the stuff I needed to explain in my thesis before writing about the actual primary sources texts.

I thought I'd have one background chapter on contemporary Ukraine.

The end result is:

1) A background chapter on contemporary Ukrainian esotericism and what it looks like in general in the context of Ukrainian NRMs and religious studies
2) A background chapter on the interplay between Ukrainian, Western and Russian research;

I've been entirely useless this week, so: for your viewing pleasure, some Soviet Mowgli illustrations. https://violla-la.livejournal.com/28460.html

Fair warning, I am not sure these count as SFW everywhere. Really good art, though!

From Siger of Brabant in the high Middle Ages through Nicoletto Vernia in the Renaissance to Vanini at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution, philosophers accused of Averroism or its associated errors could be pressured or silenced or killed.12"

Copenhaver 2009, p. 447-448.

By the fourteenth century, Averroism was already so prominent a target that poets and critics, not just philosophers, took aim at it—even Dante and Petrarch. The eventual result was that for malign destructive force, the term ‘Averroist’ has had no equal in the history of philosophy.11 [...]

AND THE SNAKE BITES ITS TAIL.

"The polemicizing had been going on for a long time: since the thirteenth century, philosophers who questioned the immortality of the soul, or held various other views offensive to the faith, had been called ‘Averroists,’ some-times correctly, sometimes incorrectly, sometimes for substantive reasons, sometimes vacuously—in the way that people were called ‘communists’ in the 1950s, with or without attachment to Marxist or Leninist politics. [...]

So... Soviet Aristotle is basically "meh, the man's kinda confused, but eh, he was an ancient". XD XD XD

Oh my god, if Taho-Godi is to be believed, and I see no reason not to believe her, the entire Soviet interpretation of Aristotle up to the 1960s was basically "what Lenin wrote down when he took notes on Metaphysics."

And that quote is like “Great! There’s no doubt that an external world exists. The man’s confused merely in the dialectic of the general and the specific, the notion and the sensation etc., the essence and the phenomenon etc.” (Lenin PSS ed. 5, vol. 29, par. 327)

Glad Midsommar to you all in Scandinavia, the pagans, and those that celebrate the wheel of the year - and a lovely Green Holidays to the Ukrainian folks.

It's always amused me to no end that the Ukrainian Days of the Dead are at the height of summer. One decorates the house with greenery and then goes to the fields and has picnics on the graves of one's family! Also, one tries not to run afoul of the undead spirits who will tickle you to death.

Yup, it's, the cadre of Stalinist philosophers. It's creepy. Not even a small bio anywhere. Who were these folks?

https://fil.wikireading.ru/h58BldbVgn

Also - even though these two were responsible for a good few publications and edits... I can't for the life of me find biographical information on them quickly. They mostly published in Party-related editions, so I'm guessing they're vydvyzhentsy? Don't quote me on that, though.

I, uh, I honestly can't tell without further research if this 5-page lit review of Western historians was the standard "quote the shit out of people you like and criticize them from Marxist viewpoints just to get them in print" or whether the authors really thought that. It's 1936, though - I'm leaning towards the latter.

“Olschki mainly falsifies Bruno’s philosophy to look like popovschina, turns his philosophy into fantasy and religious faith. […] Under the banner of academic study, Olschki continues the line of his class, which in our era is a purely reactionary class, and looks upon every revolutionary expression with terror. As the ideologue of a class which denies its own revolutionary past—even though it never was and could never be consistently revolutionary—Olschki distorts history. [Ibid., p. 40-41.]”

Same people, same target: “Bourgeois historians of philosophy fakes Giordano Bruno out to be an idealist and a mystic, eroding the materialist character of his philosophy.[Ibid., p. 38.]”