A Place to Study - User contributions [en]

Why.Disclosing-the-commons

2026-04-28T21:50:29Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Why}} <h1>Disclosing the commons</h1> <p>During the modern era, material means of production and consumption worked best using principles of enclosure, figuratively and literally fencing people, places, and things off to exploit their potentialities in a concentrated, well-organized manner. A post-modern era is beginning in which digital means to realize our hopes and purposes are complementing the familiar material ones with different constraints..."

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{{Setup|tick=Why}}
<h1>Disclosing the commons</h1>
<p>During the modern era, material means of production and consumption worked best using principles of enclosure, figuratively and literally fencing people, places, and things off to exploit their potentialities in a concentrated, well-organized manner. A post-modern era is beginning in which digital means to realize our hopes and purposes are complementing the familiar material ones with different constraints and possibilities.</p>

<p>Digital systems function best as networks that are logically unbounded and inclusive in which dis-closure supplants en-closure as the optimal path for development. Everyone, everywhere, witting or unwitting, like it or not, are participating in the early emergence of the digital commons, as we slowly work out the optimal ways to put information technologies in the service of our aspirations, fully human and deeply humane.

<p>Creating, recording, storing, retrieving, transmitting, and organizing cultural resources has always required material media, expensive to produce and awkward to use. Only privileged elites and specialists could employ them fully. Most people ''learned about'' primary cultural resources secondhand, and rarely gained experience ''working with'' them. Electronic media have different affordances and constraints, which still we neither understand nor exploit well. [[Why/Let's change that|<u>Let's change that</u>]].</p>

<p>On ''A Place to Study'' we can enable ourselves and others to work as ordinary people to employ extensive cultural resources directly, when, where, and with whom we like, for purposes that we choose. Our challenge — setting up and maintaining a full, well-organized, easily used collection of important cultural resources and making it freely available to ourselves and everyone else for creative use by anyone, anytime, anywhere — will help to bring major historic possibilities to fruition.</p>

<div class="brbox wide numsoff"><div class="inbox" style="clear:right; border: 1px solid #732626; border-radius: 4px; padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 0.5em; height: 20em; overflow: auto;"><h3 class="cent und">Resources on the commons</h3>
<div class="s1">{{Resources on the Commons}}<hr></div></div></div>

* Tools—catalogs, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, collections, chronologies, programs, and much more—empower the work of intellect. Online, the powerful ones are usually as easy or easier to use that the simple ones!
* We include attention to language, especially to the verbs with which we speak about our actions, and to our concepts with which we shape our powers of perception, action, and control.
* We assemble, read, and assess masterwork, diverse creative achievements that set a bar of excellence for aspiration, judgment, and taste.
* We single out diverse persons, enigmas of virtue and vice, and hone our understanding of human possibility by contemplating their strengths and weaknesses as evident in their efforts to cope with their life circumstances.
* We explore places, mentalities, junctures, and styles to uncover how people have formed them and themselves in interaction with them.
<hr>
<div style="margin: 0 10% 0 10%; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;"><h3 style="text-decoration: underline;">Jacques Barzun on intellect as a commons<ref>Jacques Barzun, ''The House of Intellect'' (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 1959, 2020) pp. 4-5.</ref></h3><p>Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. . . . Intellect is community property and can be handed down. . . . And though Intellect neither implies nor precludes intelligence, two of its uses are—to make up for the lack of intelligence and to amplify the force of it by giving it quick recognition and apt embodiment. . . . Intellect is . . . a product of social effort and an acquirement.</div>

Why.Forming ourselves

2026-04-28T21:48:13Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Why}} <h1>To form ourselves</h1> <p>On {{apts}}, what do we mean by <i>to form ourselves</i>? We all pretty much grow up in similar ways. We develop, start to toddle and talk, play, go to school and learn similar stuff, better or worse. At a certain point, we decide our parents didn't know everything and then soon enough learn that we don't either. It all seems to happen in a flow of experience that mostly comes to us by surprise. Suddenly we've go..."

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{{Setup|tick=Why}}
<h1>To form ourselves</h1>
<p>On {{apts}}, what do we mean by <i>to form ourselves</i>? We all pretty much grow up in similar ways. We develop, start to toddle and talk, play, go to school and learn similar stuff, better or worse. At a certain point, we decide our parents didn't know everything and then soon enough learn that we don't either. It all seems to happen in a flow of experience that mostly comes to us by surprise. Suddenly we've gotten formed in the school of life. But let's not objectify ourselves excessively.</p>

<p>Stuff does happen this way, more or less as we look at it through the portal of the fictitious observer, but our lives take place as our lived experience, which is the seat of our seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, judging, doing, suffering, and enjoying — for each, the locus of life. Much of what takes place in my lived experience takes place independent of my conscious perception, will, or control, but that is not reason for me to think that it is not part of my lived experience, belonging instead to some abstract developmental process. All of it sustains the lives we live. Somehow we have to form the whole of it.</p>

<p><i>Know thyself</i> puts a difficult imperative to us, for it requires that we take into account not only the parts of ourselves we know in conscious awareness, but also those we do not know, or know poorly, or even know deceptively, parts we cannot know directly, however much we feel and experience with and through them. And <i>know thyself</i> requires further that we anticipate how this complex, unknowable self will react to forces and actions impinging on us from without, about which we are ignorant and confused. We can't simply say, "Oy! This is too much!" For in its fullness, we live this life, which we suffer and enjoy, for worse or for better, in and through our full subjectivity.</p>

<p>By <i>to form ourselves</i>, we do not expect that we will make all the hidden uncertainties and complexities fully clear and docile, bringing all junctures to a positive conclusion. Self-ignorance and circumstantial complications will always bedevil us as integral parts of our full selves, and no omnipotent onlooker will, by a stroke of science or belief, render them transparent in reflection or action. We can, however, through our study, work to strengthen our judgment, to recognize and anticipate difficulties we would otherwise blunder into. Assessing better the sources of uncontrolled difficulties, we can marginally improve the situation of our complete selves and achieve fuller, more meaningful lives as we direct ourselves in interacting with our actual circumstances. By <i>to form ourselves</i>, we mean trying to do all that to the best of our powers.</p>

Template:LinksWhy

2026-04-28T21:46:37Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="lt"> <div class="L3 cent">Hello. . . .</div> * To form ourselves * To learn liberally * To disclose the commons </div>"

<div class="lt">
<div class="L3 cent">Hello. . . .</div>
* [[Why.Forming ourselves | To form ourselves]]
* [[Why.Learning-liberally | To learn liberally]]
* [[Why.Disclosing-the-commons | To disclose the commons]]
</div>

Why

2026-04-28T21:46:07Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Why}} <h1><i>Why?</i> directs and motivates effort</h1> {{AR}} <p>Asking why we study engages us in thinking, but we too easily short-circuit the thinking asking why in the form of <i>Why bother?</i>, why should we take the trouble to study when we feel so busy, so pressed by many cares, just wanting some relaxation, escape, a "good time." </p> <p><i>Why bother?</i> preempts <i>asking why</i>. It pretends that we don't do these activities and may..."

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{{Setup|tick=Why}}
<h1><i>Why?</i> directs and motivates effort</h1>
{{AR}}
<p>Asking why we study engages us in thinking, but we too easily short-circuit the thinking asking why in the form of <i>Why bother?</i>, why should we take the trouble to study when we feel so busy, so pressed by many cares, just wanting some relaxation, escape, a "good time." </p>

<p><i>Why bother?</i> preempts <i>asking why</i>. It pretends that we don't do these activities and maybe we'll start if we can find a good reason to do so. But in actuality, we began studying long ago. In the course of living our lives, we have been all along forming ourselves, learning liberally, and disclosing the commons. The question is not when to start, but to become more aware why we do these things we've been doing all along. Throughout our work on {{apts}}, let's pay attention to why we do study, sharpening our sense of purpose as we form ourselves, learn liberally and disclose the commons.</p>

<p>We find it difficult to attend to our purposes in studying because they are activities deeply embedded in our lives. They are not a great new idea for which we need a grab-you elevator pitch. They emerge from our infantile beginnings, from our primal ignorance, from our solitary vulnerability. Let's take a moment to contemplate initial conditions to see how they stick with us as key motivators throughout our lives.</p>

<p>What can a fertilized egg do? It can grow, absorbing nutrition according to a metabolism, which is complicated from the get-go compared to dead molecular processes, but simple compared to its emerging metabolic systems. It's all programmed, we say. But is it actually? completely? just in what sense? There are decision points, balances maintained, developmental forks all turning on flows of information with sensitive feedback patterns triggering actions that have significant formative consequences. All these unfold throughout our lives, throughout the lives of all living organisms, and only a miniscule fraction of the decision points in them enter into our conscious lives. But those that do enter into our awareness have substantial significance for the course and quality of our lives and we concern ourselves for them as problems of self-formation.<sup>[[Talk:Why#Problems_of_self-formation%3A_Der_Bildungstrieb|Anno]]</sup></p>

<p>Likewise, we face an imperative, embedded deeply in how we must live our lives, to learn liberally. At birth, we find ourselves knowing nothing, thrown into the world. Each newly born life faces a big puzzle — how do we find out what can happen in it? We don't know enough yet to respond slavishly according to a careful utilitarian calculus. We explore, probe, try this and that, follow our curiosity. Watch an infant, newly seated in a high chair. What does it do? It drops things, over and over, a supremely useless achievement. It spills things and watches liquid flow. It stomps on a puddle and wonders why is splashes. Wet feet? That doesn't matter. Let mother make her fuss! Why?</p>

<p>Ah! Exactly, it's because — Why? The question matters! Will the spoon drop? Why does it fall? Why doesn't it just stay put, there in the air, in the place where I pushed it? It took humanity many generations to answer that question well, but to the infant the question seems natural, an obvious first starting point — poke life and its world and all at once ask who-why-what-how-where. Look. That happened! Hunh? Knowing begins in wonder, the urge to learn liberally.</p>

<p>And then there is the commons. How does the civic space of the infant or child appear to it?<sup>[[Talk:Why#Rousseau's strength|Anno]]</sup> The infant quickly and forcefully expresses its vulnerability crying out its disquiet for all to hear. It is not a cowering expression of fear, but one of vulnerability, insufficiency, an expectant call for help. It is not a possessive self-assertion, but more a reaching out to the altruism of others. As the infant becomes a child, with growing independence, it quite naturally acquires and expresses that independence within the sphere of common usages, and we all largely go on to conduct our lives within the frameworks set by the common law.</p>

<p>Those who would claim for the practices of possessive individualism a exclusive grounding in natural law have much explaining still to do. A kind of selfish altruism seems a more natural basis for human sociability — each feels less vulnerable and more likely to achieve fulfillment by grounding their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on their commonalities with the rest of humanity. The common law of intellectual property clearly states that it all belongs to humanity in common and that exceptions subjecting parts of it to private ownership occur expressly to create incentives to facilitate the advance of intellectual activity for the benefit of all. Efforts to disclose the intellectual commons insofar as possible independent of the incentives created by privatization are entirely consonant with prevailing practices.</p></div>

Where/Library listing

2026-04-28T21:44:35Z

Robbie:

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{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Library listings</h1>
<p>As our library listings grow, this page will morph to remain useful.</p>

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<div style="text-align: center;">
<p style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large; font-weight: 700;text-indent:0; letter-spacing: 2.32em;">[[#A|A]][[#B|B]][[#C|C]][[#D|D]][[#E|E]][[#F|F]][[#G|G]]</p>
<p style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large; font-weight: 700;text-indent:0; letter-spacing: 2.32em;">[[#H|H]][[#I|I]][[#J|J]][[#K|K]][[#L|L]][[#M|M]][[#N|N]]</p>
<p style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large; font-weight: 700;text-indent:0; letter-spacing: 2.32em;">[[#O|O]][[#P|P]][[#Q|Q]][[#R|R]][[#S|S]][[#T|T]][[#U|U]]</p>
<p style="font-family: monospace; font-size: large; font-weight: 700;text-indent:0; letter-spacing: 2.32em;">[[#V|V]][[#W|W]][[#X|X]][[#Y|Y]][[#Z|Z]]</p></div>

<hr>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">Our library — by author</h2>

<h3 id="A" style="text-align: center;">A</h3>
* Henry Adams (1838-1918) • [[StudyPage/Henry Adams]] • [[:Wikipedia:Henry Adams|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Adams/Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres | Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres]] (1904)
** [[Texts:Adams/The Education of Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams]] (1907, 1918)
* Aesop (c. 620–564 BCE) • [[StudyPage/Aesop's Fables]] • [[:Wikipedia:Aesop's Fables|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Aesop/Fables | Aesop's fables ]] (1912)
* Matthew Arnold {1822-1888) • [[StudyPage/Matthew Arnold]] • [[:Wikipedia:Matthew_Arnold|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Arnold/Culture and anarchy | Culture and anarchy]] (1869)
<h3 id="B" style="text-align: center;">B</h3>
* Bible • [[StudyPage/Bible]] • [[:Wikipedia:Bible|Wikipedia]] • [[:Wikipedia:King_James_Version|Wikipedia on King_James_Version]]
** [[Texts:Bible|King James version of the Bible]]
<h3 id="C" style="text-align: center;">C</h3>
* Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) • [[StudyPage/Carlyle]] • [[:Wikipedia:Thomas Carlyle | Wikipedia]]
** About: [[Texts:Nichol/Carlyle |Thomas Carlyle ]] (1904)
<h3 id="D" style="text-align: center;">D</h3>
<h3 id="E" style="text-align: center;">E</h3>
* Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) • [[StudyPage/Emerson]] • [[:Wikipedia:Ralph Waldo Emerson | Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Emerson/Essays1 | Essays, first series]] (1841)
** [[Texts:Emerson/Essays2 | Essays, second series]] (1844)
** [[Texts:Emerson/Nature | Nature]] (1849)
** [[Texts:Emerson/Representative | Representative men: seven lectures ]] (1850)
** [[Texts:Emerson/Conduct | The conduct of life ]] (1871)
<h3 id="F" style="text-align: center;">F</h3>
<h3 id="G" style="text-align: center;">G</h3>
* Mahatma Gandhi {1869-1948) • [[StudyPage/Mahatma Gandhi]] • [[:Wikipedia:Mahatma Gandhi|Wikipedia]]
** About: [[Texts:Rolland/Mahatma Gandhi | Mahatma Gandhi]] {1924)
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) • [[StudyPage/Goethe]] • [[:Wikipedia:Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Goethe/Werther | The Sorrows of Young Werther ]] (1774)
** [[Texts:Goethe/Wilhelm-Meister-1 | Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship ]] (1796)
** [[Texts:Goethe/Maxims | Maxims and reflections]] (1833)

<h3 id="H" style="text-align: center;">H</h3>
<h3 id="I" style="text-align: center;">I</h3>
<h3 id="J" style="text-align: center;">J</h3>
<h3 id="K" style="text-align: center;">K</h3>
<h3 id="L" style="text-align: center;">L</h3>
* François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) • [[StudyPage/La Rochefoucauld]] • [[:Wikipedia:François_de_La_Rochefoucauld_(writer)|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:La Rochefoucauld/Maxims |Reflections, Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims]]
* John Locke (1632-1704) • [[StudyPage/Locke]] • [[:Wikipedia:John Locke|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Locke/Understanding | Of the conduct of the Understanding]] (1706)
<h3 id="M" style="text-align: center;">M</h3>

* <span id="Montaigne"></span>Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) • [[StudyPage/Montaigne]] • [[:Wikipedia:Michel de Montaigne|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Montaigne/Essays|Essays of Michel de Montaigne]] (1580, 1877)
*** [[Texts:Montaigne/Essays/0 | Preface & Life]] • [[Texts:Montaigne/Essays/1 | Book one]] • [[Texts:Montaigne/Essays/2 | Book two]] • [[Texts:Montaigne/Essays/3 | Book three]]
** About: [[Texts:St. John/Montaigne | Montaigne the essayist]] 1858
<h3 id="N" style="text-align: center;">N</h3>
<h3 id="O" style="text-align: center;">O</h3>
<h3 id="P" style="text-align: center;">P</h3>
* <span id="Plato"></span>Plato (429?–347BC) • [[StudyPage/Plato]] • [[:Wikipedia:Plato|Wikipedia]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ SEP - Plato]
** [[Texts:Plato/Apology | Apology ]]
** [[Texts:Crito | Crito ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Euthyphro | Euthyphro ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Charmides | Charmides ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Laches | Laches, or courage ]]

** [[Texts:Plato/Euthydemus |Euthydemus]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Protagoras |Protagoras ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-shorter/ SEP - Plato's Shorter Ethical Works]
** [[Texts:Plato/Cratylus| Cratylus]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-cratylus/ SEP - Plato’s Cratylus]
** [[Texts:Plato/Symposium |Symposium]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-friendship/ SEP - Plato on Friendship and Eros]
** [[Texts:Plato/Ion |Ion]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/ SEP - Plato’s Aesthetics]
** [[Texts:Plato/Gorgias |Gorgias]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Phaedrus |Phaedrus]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/ SEP - Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry]
** [[Texts:Plato/Meno |Meno]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Phaedo |Phaedo]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/ SEP - Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology]
** [[Texts:Plato/Lysis |Lysis]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Republic |The Republic ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/ SEP-The Republic]
** [[Texts:Plato/Critias| Critias ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Timaeus| Timaeus ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-myths/ SEP - Plato's Myths]
** [[Texts:Plato/Menexenus| Menexenus ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Parmenides| Parmenides ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-parmenides/ SEP - Plato’s <i>Parmenides</i>]
** [[Texts:Plato/Theaetetus| Theaetetus ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-theaetetus/ SEP - Plato on Knowledge in the <i>Theaetetus</i>]
** [[Texts:Plato/Sophist| Sophist ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Statesman| Statesman ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-sophstate/ SEP - Method and Metaphysics in Plato’s <i>Sophist</i> and <i>Statesman</i>]
** [[Texts:Plato/Philebus| Philebus ]]
** [[Texts:Plato/Laws| Laws ]] • [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-utopia/ SEP - <i>Laws</i>]
* <span id="Plutarch"></span>Plutarch (46-119) • [[StudyPage/Plutarch]] • [[:Wikipedia:Plutarch|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Plutarch/Lives1 | Lives, vol1]]
** [[Texts:Plutarch/Lives2 | Lives, vol2]]
** [[Texts:Plutarch/Lives3 | Lives, vol3]]
** [[Texts:Plutarch/Lives4 | Lives, vol4]]
** [[Texts:Plutarch/Morals | Morals]]
* Thomas Platter
** [[Texts:Platter/Autobiography | Autobiography ]]

<h3 id="Q" style="text-align: center;">Q</h3>
<h3 id="R" style="text-align: center;">R</h3>
* François Rabelais (1483-1553) • [[StudyPage/François Rabelais]] • [[:Wikipedia:François Rabelais|Wikipedia]]
** Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux (1653 & 1708)<br>[[Texts:Rabelais/Gargantua/Introduction | Introduction]] • [[Rabelais/Gargantua/Book1 | Book 1]] • [[Texts:Rabelais/Gargantua/Book 2 | Book 2]] • [[Rabelais/Gargantua/Book 3 | Book 3]] • [[Texts:Rabelais/Gargantua/Book 4 | Book 4]] • [[Rabelais/Gargantua/Book 5 | Book 5]]
* Romain Rolland (1866-1944) • [[StudyPage/Romain Rolland]] • [[:Wikipedia:Romain Rolland|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Rolland/Mahatma Gandhi | Mahatma Gandhi]] {1924)
* <span id="Rousseau"></span>Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) • [[StudyPage/Rousseau]] • [[:Wikipedia:Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Rousseau/Emile-en | Emile, or On Education]] (1762)
** [[Texts:Rousseau/Emile-fr | Emile, ou de l'éducation]] (1762)
* <span id="Ruskin"></span>John Ruskin (1819-1900) • [[StudyPage/Ruskin]] • [[:Wikipedia:John Ruskin|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Ruskin/Unto | Unto this last, and other essays]] (1862)
<h3 id="S" style="text-align: center;">S</h3>
* <span id="Shakespeare"></span>William Shakespeare (1564-1616) • [[StudyPage/Shakespeare]] • [[:Wikipedia:William Shakespeare|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Shakespeare | The complete works of Shakespeare ]] (1623)
<h3 id="T" style="text-align: center;">T</h3>
<h3 id="U" style="text-align: center;">U</h3>
<h3 id="V" style="text-align: center;">V</h3>
<h3 id="W" style="text-align: center;">W</h3>
* <span id="Wollstonecraft"></span>Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) • [[StudyPage/Wollstonecraft]] • [[:Wikipedia:Mary Wollstonecraft|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Wollstonecraft/Vindication | Vindication of the rights of woman]] (1792)
* <span id="Wollstonecraft"></span>Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) • [[StudyPage/Virginia Woolf]] • [[:Wikipedia:Virginia Woolf|Wikipedia]]
** [[Texts:Woolf/Common reader | The common reader ]] (1925)
<h3 id="X" style="text-align: center;">X</h3>
<h3 id="Y" style="text-align: center;">Y</h3>
<h3 id="Z" style="text-align: center;">Z</h3>

Where/Library listing

2026-04-28T21:43:49Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Our library</h1> <p>{{apts}} is not a library, but we have one. It contains many of the resources with which we study. Currently it holds a sparse, initial collection as part of developing our prototype. It lacks lots that should be there, includes perhaps some things that should not be there, and what's there tilts perilously towards the work of dead, white, Western males. And further, we've been acquiri..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Our library</h1>
<p>{{apts}} is not a library, but [[Where_—_Library listings|we have one]]. It contains many of the resources with which we study. Currently it holds a sparse, initial collection as part of developing our prototype. It lacks lots that should be there, includes perhaps some things that should not be there, and what's there tilts perilously towards the work of dead, white, Western males. And further, we've been acquiring resources for the library in textual media faster than audio and visual media. With time, we will right these imbalances, less by getting rid of what's over weighted, but by building up what's underweight. All that is as it is: the caterpillar does not look like the butterfly.</p>

<p>We follow our principle: To begin, BEGIN. We start adding materials to our library, believing they may have special value to those seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. As we do that, we start to manifest our ignorance. Does what we have included really have that special value? What further resources, which may have that value, should we include? With these further beginnings, we reiterate the questions, and by proceeding to develop our library, we do not settle those question, we renew and deepen them through our new additions and subtractions to the collection, furthering its beginnings.</p>

<div style="float: right; width: 40%; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;"><hr><p style="text-indent: 0;">We don't fully transcend ignorance or reach completion, hence it's long been said, the road is better than the inn.</p><hr></div>

<p>Thus study is always beginning in ignorance; its resources always growing in incompletion. Acknowledging that infinite regress, students — residents and stewards — have a special responsibility in maintaining and developing {{apts}}. We cannot simply outgrow our biases. We need to cope with our ignorance and to set potential criteria for inclusion and exclusion for a library supporting self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons.</p>

<p>In summing how he had sought to study culture and communication, Richard Hoggart enunciated some basic rights, which can serve us well building our library — a commitment to <i>"the right of each of us to speak about how we see life, the world; and so the right to have access to the means by which that capacity to speak may be gained. The right, also, to try to reach out and speak to others, not to have that impulse inhibited by social barriers..., the right of wider access to higher education,... for wider access also to the arts as the most scrupulous explorations we can make of our personalities and relationships, and of the nature of our societies, and, as a support to all this, the best uses of mass communications."</i><ref>Richard Hoggart, <i>An imagined life: Life and Times, 1959-1991</i> (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 26.</ref></p>

<p>Now some will say, "Wait! Don't we all have those rights? Look at social media 2.0. Nearly everyone is using it. Its affordances give us the capacity to speak about life and the world, to reach out and speak to others. We enjoy greatly widened access to higher education and to the arts in all their forms, and to voluble talk of cultural, social, and political events, all through unparalleled systems of communication that Hoggart did not live long enough to witness." As a statement of the current situation, this assertion may seem factually true, speaking very generally, but it does not establish that this situation indicates the limits of our capabilities in the digital commons.</p>

Where/Our library

2026-04-28T21:42:58Z

Where/Studios

2026-04-28T21:41:50Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Studios</h1> <!-- <h2>Notes for introductory page</h2> <p class="V">An encyclopedia compiles impersonal knowledge about many topics. Hence, readers want a sense of authority in its treatments, which gets established through the frequent citation of sound sources. ''A Place to Study'' is NOT and encyclopedia.</p> <p class="R">''A Place to Study'' fosters the autonomous judgment , especially about self-formation and liberal learning, by i..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Studios</h1>

<p>On ''A Place to Study'' we participate, not in the website, not in an organization or corporate enterprise. We participate, as in a sport, in a widely shared activity—that of forming human selves, instances of humanity. This is not a zero-sum game. We play, not to win, but to participate, to take part as fully as we can—that is the life each leads. Each does so contingently, for life itself comes to each of us, as a gift. Nevertheless, we participate definitively, for each lives a cumulative set of irrevocable actions for ourselves and for others. We live our lives squeezing inchoate possibility through the constraints of here and now into the receding expanse of lived experience. ''A Place to Study'' exists as possibility, one which we can try to bring to life by striving to actualize what it can and should become—a real resource freely available to all as they pursue self-directed activities in the human commons, the wonderful diversity of human lives.</p>

<p>In the shared activity of forming human lives, participating through ''A Place to Study'' is contingent and incidental, one possibility among many others. To call ''A Place to Study'' a possibility recognizes that it is not yet an actuality. As a possibility one participates in it by striving to instantiate the idea. Hence, participating in ''A Place to Study'' at this point involves trying to instantiate it by acting ''in loco parentis'' towards it, concentrating on actions that will actualize the possibility as a reality available to all. We can do that by being careful to create initial content for the site that will effectively illustrate the purposes and spirit of it. That willingness to participate from the beginning in ways consistent with the purposes and spirit of the effort is key to self-directed activities in the human commons.</p>
<hr>

Where/Study skills

2026-04-28T21:40:59Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Study skills</h1> <p>Let's concentrate on the basics, the study skills that each and all have acquired. We can speak. We read and write. We use our senses, especially seeing and hearing, to perceive what's around us. Why should we stop now to study these? We've used them to come this far. Why not keep at matters where we're more thoroughly ignorant?</p> <p>Life takes place 24/7. We are not born with an empty slate, so many blank spaces..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Study skills</h1>
<p>Let's concentrate on the basics, the study skills that each and all have acquired. We can speak. We read and write. We use our senses, especially seeing and hearing, to perceive what's around us. Why should we stop now to study these? We've used them to come this far. Why not keep at matters where we're more thoroughly ignorant?</p>

<p>Life takes place 24/7. We are not born with an empty slate, so many blank spaces that we then fill in one by one with this or that — "Here's some empty time! I'll put study into it." That's a prescription for an <i>if-only</i> sense of life. We don't <i>have time for</i> something, or even <i>find time for</i> it; we <b>take time to do</b> something, and in taking time to study something we are basically taking time to improve doing it through recursive repetition. Let's study this proposition.</p>

<p>By taking time to do something, we mean bringing fuller attention to bear upon it, in this case attending to who, what, how, where_—_when, and why we are doing something in order to improve our doing it recursively. A degree of familiarity with what we are doing does not stand as a reason against studying it, but rather it serves as a necessary condition for studying it. That's why we have to say, to begin, begin. Our basic skills enabling our cultural activity are prime matters for study because we are using them throughout our lives and they provide ubiquitous opportunities for recursive repetition.</p>

<p>{{apts}} offers opportunities to apply our powers of judgment to out basic cultural skills. People often worry whether what they or someone else is saying is ethical or moral, asking whether it measures up to some abstract standard. Often we would do better to ask ourselves whether we would feel it appropriate, sound, or just to say it to any and all persons rather than to some special subset of people. . . .</p>

Where/Montaigne1

2026-04-28T21:40:08Z

Robbie:

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1> </h1>
<p>'''Talk teasers:'''<p><h1 style="text-align: center;">from Montaigne's study</h1>

<p style="padding-right: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "Eh....," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, great! and if you have a little time, others may be interested if you explain it in the comment box.</p>
<hr>
<h3>Maxims Montaigne painted on the rafters</h3>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">[I] Remain poised in the balance…<br>Undecided… <br>One thing being no more than another, <br>[I am] without inclination.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I do not understand.<br>I stop. <br>I examine. <br>[I take for my guide] the ways of the world and the experiences of the senses.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">One lives but a little, shelter yourself from evil.</p><p class="source">(Theognis, from Joannes Stobaeus, Greek anthologist of the 5th Century AD)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The ultimate wisdom of man is to consider things as good, and for the rest to be untroubled.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Autonomy is the only just pleasure.</p><p class="source">(Sotades, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God gave to man the desire for knowledge for the sake of tormenting him.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Happy is he who has fortunes and reason.</p><p class="source">(Menander–Mon. 340, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">As the wind puffs out empty wineskins, so pride of opinion, foolish men.</p><p class="source">(Socrates in Stobaeus–Florilgium: Of Arrogance)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Never say that marriage brings more joys than tears.</p><p class="source">(Euripides–Alcestis 147, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Everything under the sun follows the same law and the same destiny.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 9.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is no more in this way than in that, or in neither.</p><p class="source">(Aulus Gellius, via Henricius Stephanus’ 1562 annotated edition of Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is hard!; but that which we are not permitted to correct is rendered lighter by patience.</p><p class="source">(Horace–Odes 1.24.19)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The notion of everything, large and small, of all the innumerable creatures of God, is to be found within us.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 3[.1]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">For I see that we are but phantoms,<br>all we who live, or fleeting shadows.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles–Ajax, 125-6)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts! in what darkness of life and in how great dangers is passed this term of life whatever its duration.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum: II.14)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To not think at all is the softest life,<br>Because not thinking is the most painless evil.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">What man will account himself great,<br>Whom a chance occasion destroys utterly?</p><p class="source">(Euripides, in Stobaeus- Of Arrogance)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">All things, together with heaven and earth and sea, are nothing to the sum of the universal sum.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum, VI.678-9)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The fool has more hope of wisdom than the man who calls himself wise.</p><p class="source">Proverbs 26<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.</p><p class="source"><comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">No new delight may be forged by living on.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God’s works.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11[.5]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is possible and it is not possible.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus–Hypotyposes)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The good is admirable.</p><p class="source">(Plato, via Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">A man of clay.</p><p class="source">(Saint Paul, via Erasmus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Impiety follows pride like a dog. [lit.: 'like a father is followed’]</p><p class="source">(Socrates, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be not wise in your own conceits.</p><p class="source">(Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12.)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Neither fear nor desire [your] last day.</p><p class="source">(Martial–Epigrams, X.47)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God permits no one but Himself to magnify Himself.</p><p class="source">(Herodotus–VII.10, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I shelter where the storm drives me.</p><p class="source">(Horace–Epistles I.i.14)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">You are unaware if your interest is here rather than there, or if they are alike in value.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes, 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me.</p><p class="source">(Terence–'The Self-Tormentor’)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be not overwise lest you become senseless.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 7[.16].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">If any man thinks he knows anything, he knows nothing.</p><p class="source">First letter of Paul to the Corinthians, 8[.2].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">If any man thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.</p><p class="source">Letter of Paul to the Galatians, 6[.3].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be no wiser than is necessary, but be wise in moderation.</p><p class="source">Letter of Paul to the Romans, 12[.3].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">No one has ever known the truth and no one will know it.</p><p class="source">(Xenophanes, in Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Who knows whether that which we call dying is living,and living is dying?</p><p class="source">(Euripides–fragment of the Phrixus, from Stobaeus- Of the Praise of Death)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Nothing is more beautiful than being just, but nothing is more pleasant than being healthy.</p><p class="source">(Theognis, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">All things are too difficult for man to understand them.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Wide is the range of man’s speech, this way and that.</p><p class="source">(Homer–Iliad 20.249, from Diogenes Laertius)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">The whole race of man has overgreedy ears.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum IV.598)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">How great is the worthlessness of things.</p><p class="source">(Persius, I.1)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">All is vanity.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To keep within due measure and hold fast the end and follow nature.</p><p class="source">(Lucan–Pharsalia II.381-2)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">Earth and ashes, wherefrom your pride?</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 10<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes.</p><p class="source">Isaiah 5[.21]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Character is fate. [lit. 'To each the destiny his character makes.’]</p><p class="source">(Cornelius Nepos, from Erasmus- Adages)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Enjoy pleasantly present things, others are beyond thee.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 3[.22]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To every opinion an opinion of equal weight is opposed.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus–Hypotyposes)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Our mind wanders in darkness, and, blind, cannot discern the truth.</p><p class="source">(Michel de l’Hôpital–Poem: ‘Ad Margaritam, Regis sororem’ )<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God has made man like a shadow, of which who shall judge after the setting of the sun?</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 7.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The only certainty is that nothing is certain, and that nothing is less noble or more proud than man.</p><p class="source">(Pliny–Naturalis Historia II.5)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Of all the works of God nothing is more unknown to any man than the track of the wind.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Each has his own tastes, Gods and men alike.</p><p class="source">(Euripides–Hippolytus 104, from Erasmus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin, you who think yourself to be somebody.</p><p class="source">(Menander)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">That which worries men are not things but that which they think about them.</p><p class="source">(Epictetus–Enchiridion, from Stobaeus- Of Death)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is fitting for a mortal to have thoughts appropriate to men.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles–fragment from The Colchians)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Why with designs for the far future do you weary a mind that is unequal to them?</p><p class="source">(Horace–Carmina II.11)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">As you are ignorant of the way of the spirit, so you do not know the works of God.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The judgments of the Lord are as a great deep.</p><p class="source">Psalm 35<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I determine in nothing.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
-->

<hr>

<h4>Source</h4>
<div style="font-size: small;">
https://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/1599204509/a-catalog-of-montaignes-beam-inscriptions. This site gives the original Greek and Latin along with some more information about the sources. We use here the translations and the minimal citations as Montaingne gave them.
</div>

Where/Montaigne1

2026-04-28T21:39:54Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1> </h1> <p>'''Talk teasers:'''<p><h1 style="text-align: center;">from Montaigne's study</h1> <p style="padding-right: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "Eh....," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many..."

__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1> </h1>
<p>'''Talk teasers:'''<p><h1 style="text-align: center;">from Montaigne's study</h1>

<p style="padding-right: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "Eh....," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, great! and if you have a little time, others may be interested if you explain it in the comment box.</p>
<hr>
<h3>Maxims Montaigne painted on the rafters</h3>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">[I] Remain poised in the balance…<br>Undecided… <br>One thing being no more than another, <br>[I am] without inclination.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I do not understand.<br>I stop. <br>I examine. <br>[I take for my guide] the ways of the world and the experiences of the senses.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">One lives but a little, shelter yourself from evil.</p><p class="source">(Theognis, from Joannes Stobaeus, Greek anthologist of the 5th Century AD)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The ultimate wisdom of man is to consider things as good, and for the rest to be untroubled.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Autonomy is the only just pleasure.</p><p class="source">(Sotades, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God gave to man the desire for knowledge for the sake of tormenting him.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Happy is he who has fortunes and reason.</p><p class="source">(Menander–Mon. 340, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">As the wind puffs out empty wineskins, so pride of opinion, foolish men.</p><p class="source">(Socrates in Stobaeus–Florilgium: Of Arrogance)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Never say that marriage brings more joys than tears.</p><p class="source">(Euripides–Alcestis 147, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Everything under the sun follows the same law and the same destiny.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 9.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is no more in this way than in that, or in neither.</p><p class="source">(Aulus Gellius, via Henricius Stephanus’ 1562 annotated edition of Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is hard!; but that which we are not permitted to correct is rendered lighter by patience.</p><p class="source">(Horace–Odes 1.24.19)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The notion of everything, large and small, of all the innumerable creatures of God, is to be found within us.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 3[.1]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">For I see that we are but phantoms,<br>all we who live, or fleeting shadows.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles–Ajax, 125-6)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts! in what darkness of life and in how great dangers is passed this term of life whatever its duration.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum: II.14)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To not think at all is the softest life,<br>Because not thinking is the most painless evil.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">What man will account himself great,<br>Whom a chance occasion destroys utterly?</p><p class="source">(Euripides, in Stobaeus- Of Arrogance)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">All things, together with heaven and earth and sea, are nothing to the sum of the universal sum.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum, VI.678-9)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The fool has more hope of wisdom than the man who calls himself wise.</p><p class="source">Proverbs 26<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.</p><p class="source"><comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">No new delight may be forged by living on.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">You who know nothing of how the soul marries the body, you therefore know nothing of God’s works.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11[.5]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is possible and it is not possible.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus–Hypotyposes)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The good is admirable.</p><p class="source">(Plato, via Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">A man of clay.</p><p class="source">(Saint Paul, via Erasmus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Impiety follows pride like a dog. [lit.: 'like a father is followed’]</p><p class="source">(Socrates, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be not wise in your own conceits.</p><p class="source">(Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12.)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Neither fear nor desire [your] last day.</p><p class="source">(Martial–Epigrams, X.47)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God permits no one but Himself to magnify Himself.</p><p class="source">(Herodotus–VII.10, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I shelter where the storm drives me.</p><p class="source">(Horace–Epistles I.i.14)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">You are unaware if your interest is here rather than there, or if they are alike in value.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes, 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me.</p><p class="source">(Terence–'The Self-Tormentor’)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be not overwise lest you become senseless.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 7[.16].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">If any man thinks he knows anything, he knows nothing.</p><p class="source">First letter of Paul to the Corinthians, 8[.2].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">If any man thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.</p><p class="source">Letter of Paul to the Galatians, 6[.3].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Be no wiser than is necessary, but be wise in moderation.</p><p class="source">Letter of Paul to the Romans, 12[.3].<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">No one has ever known the truth and no one will know it.</p><p class="source">(Xenophanes, in Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Who knows whether that which we call dying is living,and living is dying?</p><p class="source">(Euripides–fragment of the Phrixus, from Stobaeus- Of the Praise of Death)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Nothing is more beautiful than being just, but nothing is more pleasant than being healthy.</p><p class="source">(Theognis, from Stobaeus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">All things are too difficult for man to understand them.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Wide is the range of man’s speech, this way and that.</p><p class="source">(Homer–Iliad 20.249, from Diogenes Laertius)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">The whole race of man has overgreedy ears.</p><p class="source">(Lucretius–De Natura Rerum IV.598)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">How great is the worthlessness of things.</p><p class="source">(Persius, I.1)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">All is vanity.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 1.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To keep within due measure and hold fast the end and follow nature.</p><p class="source">(Lucan–Pharsalia II.381-2)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>

<p class="maxim">Earth and ashes, wherefrom your pride?</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 10<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes.</p><p class="source">Isaiah 5[.21]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Character is fate. [lit. 'To each the destiny his character makes.’]</p><p class="source">(Cornelius Nepos, from Erasmus- Adages)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Enjoy pleasantly present things, others are beyond thee.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 3[.22]<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">To every opinion an opinion of equal weight is opposed.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus–Hypotyposes)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Our mind wanders in darkness, and, blind, cannot discern the truth.</p><p class="source">(Michel de l’Hôpital–Poem: ‘Ad Margaritam, Regis sororem’ )<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">God has made man like a shadow, of which who shall judge after the setting of the sun?</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 7.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The only certainty is that nothing is certain, and that nothing is less noble or more proud than man.</p><p class="source">(Pliny–Naturalis Historia II.5)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Of all the works of God nothing is more unknown to any man than the track of the wind.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Each has his own tastes, Gods and men alike.</p><p class="source">(Euripides–Hippolytus 104, from Erasmus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">That on which you so pride yourself will be your ruin, you who think yourself to be somebody.</p><p class="source">(Menander)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">That which worries men are not things but that which they think about them.</p><p class="source">(Epictetus–Enchiridion, from Stobaeus- Of Death)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">It is fitting for a mortal to have thoughts appropriate to men.</p><p class="source">(Sophocles–fragment from The Colchians)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">Why with designs for the far future do you weary a mind that is unequal to them?</p><p class="source">(Horace–Carmina II.11)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">As you are ignorant of the way of the spirit, so you do not know the works of God.</p><p class="source">Ecclesiastes 11.<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">The judgments of the Lord are as a great deep.</p><p class="source">Psalm 35<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
<hr>
<p class="maxim">I determine in nothing.</p><p class="source">(Sextus Empiricus)<comment-streams id="G8" /></p>
-->

<hr>

<h4>Source</h4>
<div style="font-size: small;">
https://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/1599204509/a-catalog-of-montaignes-beam-inscriptions. This site gives the original Greek and Latin along with some more information about the sources. We use here the translations and the minimal citations as Montaingne gave them.
</div>

Where/Goethe

2026-04-28T21:38:48Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <p>Quick thoughts:</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;">Goethe said,....</i></h1> <p style="padding: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "meh...," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, gr..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<p>Quick thoughts:</p>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">Goethe said,....</i></h1>
<p style="padding: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "meh...," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, great! and if you have a little time, others may be interested if you explain it in the comment box.</p>
<hr><comment-streams id=" " />
<h3>What do you think?</h3>

<p class="maxim">This beauty? ― one thought then ― its all very well, but is it mine? And is the truth that I am getting to know my truth? The goals, the voices, the reality, the seduction of it all, luring and leading one on, all that one follows and plunges into ― is it the actual actuality or does one still get no more than a hint of the actual, a breath hovering intangibly on the surface of the actuality one is offered? What one so perceptibly mistrusts is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made forms it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the prefabrications passed down by generation after generation, the stock language, not only the words it mouths, but also in its perceptions and emotions.<span style="font-size: small;">Robert Musil, <i>The man without qualities</i>, v1,ch34.<ref>Translation based on Robert Musil, <i>The man without qualities</i> (Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, trans., London: Picador, 1975) Vol 1, 149.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Musil1" />
<p class="maxim">More than anything else I would like my role in the world to be to educate others to feel more and more for themselves and less and less according to the dynamic law of the collectivity. To educate others in that spiritual asceticism, which would preclude the contagion of vulgarity, seems to be the highest destiny of the teacher of the inner life that I would like to be. <span style="font-size: small;">Fernando Pessoa, <i>The book of disquiet</i>, p. 103<ref>Fernando Pessoa, <i>The book of disquiet</i> (Margaret Jull Costa, trans., New York: New Directions, 2017) p. 103.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Pessoa1" />
<p class="maxim">...that which is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the intellect is the best and the pleasantest life for man, inasmuch as the intellect more than anything else is man; therefore this life will be the happiest."<span style="font-size: small;">Aristotle, <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>, X, vii, 9.</span><ref>Aristotle, <i>The nicomachean ethics</i> (H. Rackham, trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) p.619.</ref></p><comment-streams id="AristotleNEX7" />
<p class="maxim">This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials. <span style="font-size: small; font-variant: none;">Seneca, <i>Epistles</i>. LXXXVIII</span><ref>Seneca, <i>Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (Richard M. Gummere, trans., Cambriddge: Harvard University Press, 1962) vol. 2, pp. 371 & 373.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Seneca EM58" />

Where/Key quotes

2026-04-28T21:37:25Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <p>Quick thoughts:</p> <h1 style="text-align: center;">Quotations to ponder</i></h1> <p style="padding: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "meh...," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<p>Quick thoughts:</p>
<h1 style="text-align: center;">Quotations to ponder</i></h1>
<p style="padding: 1em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "meh...," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, great! and if you have a little time, others may be interested if you explain it in the comment box.</p>
<hr><comment-streams id=" " />
<h3>What do you think?</h3>

<p class="maxim">This beauty? ― one thought then ― its all very well, but is it mine? And is the truth that I am getting to know my truth? The goals, the voices, the reality, the seduction of it all, luring and leading one on, all that one follows and plunges into ― is it the actual actuality or does one still get no more than a hint of the actual, a breath hovering intangibly on the surface of the actuality one is offered? What one so perceptibly mistrusts is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made forms it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the prefabrications passed down by generation after generation, the stock language, not only the words it mouths, but also in its perceptions and emotions.<span style="font-size: small;">Robert Musil, <i>The man without qualities</i>, v1,ch34.<ref>Translation based on Robert Musil, <i>The man without qualities</i> (Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, trans., London: Picador, 1975) Vol 1, 149.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Musil1" />
<p class="maxim">More than anything else I would like my role in the world to be to educate others to feel more and more for themselves and less and less according to the dynamic law of the collectivity. To educate others in that spiritual asceticism, which would preclude the contagion of vulgarity, seems to be the highest destiny of the teacher of the inner life that I would like to be. <span style="font-size: small;">Fernando Pessoa, <i>The book of disquiet</i>, p. 103<ref>Fernando Pessoa, <i>The book of disquiet</i> (Margaret Jull Costa, trans., New York: New Directions, 2017) p. 103.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Pessoa1" />
<p class="maxim">...that which is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the intellect is the best and the pleasantest life for man, inasmuch as the intellect more than anything else is man; therefore this life will be the happiest."<span style="font-size: small;">Aristotle, <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>, X, vii, 9.</span><ref>Aristotle, <i>The nicomachean ethics</i> (H. Rackham, trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) p.619.</ref></p><comment-streams id="AristotleNEX7" />
<p class="maxim">This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials. <span style="font-size: small; font-variant: none;">Seneca, <i>Epistles</i>. LXXXVIII</span><ref>Seneca, <i>Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (Richard M. Gummere, trans., Cambriddge: Harvard University Press, 1962) vol. 2, pp. 371 & 373.</ref></p><comment-streams id="Seneca EM58" />

Where/Quick study

2026-04-28T21:36:26Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Quick thoughts</h1> <p style="margin: 0 0 0 10%; padding-right: 10em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Yes, we take things seriously. But time's short. Here's some quick thoughts to grab on the run. What's your response? </p> <hr> * Quotations to ponder * Goethe said.... * Maxims from Montaigne's study "

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Quick thoughts</h1>
<p style="margin: 0 0 0 10%; padding-right: 10em; font-weight: 700; text-indent: 0;">Yes, we take things seriously. But time's short. Here's some quick thoughts to grab on the run. What's your response? </p>
<hr>
* [[Where/Key quotes | Quotations to ponder ]]
* [[Where/Goethe | Goethe said.... ]]
* [[Where/Montaigne1 | Maxims from Montaigne's study ]]

Where/Study pages

2026-04-28T21:34:31Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Study pages</h1> <blockquote>Critics obsessed with [Milton's] great reputation and great scholarship tend to look exclusively to literary sources for his ideas. . . . My not very daring suggestion is that Milton got his ideas not only from books but also by talking to his contemporaries.<ref>Christopher Hill. <i>Milton and the English Reolution</i> (New York: The Viking Press, 1977) p. 5.</ref></blockquote> <p>We use <i>study pages</i..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Study pages</h1>
<blockquote>Critics obsessed with [Milton's] great reputation and great scholarship tend to look exclusively to literary sources for his ideas. . . . My not very daring suggestion is that Milton got his ideas not only from books but also by talking to his contemporaries.<ref>Christopher Hill. <i>Milton and the English Reolution</i> (New York: The Viking Press, 1977) p. 5.</ref></blockquote>

<p>We use <i>study pages</i> to help us inform and orient our diverse inquiries. Neither lessons nor assignments, study pages somewhat resemble good travel guides, ones that strengthen their users' agency in doing what they intend to do. Both travel guides and study guides help users make discerning choices for themselves. They provide information about what's where and notices about why people generally go to see this or that, what importance they have attached to it historically, esthetically, or in some register of fun and adventure. Like the traveler's guide book, study pages inform a student's choice, particularly the initial choices to attend first to this and not to that.</p>

<div style="float: right; width: 30%; margin-left: 1em; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;border: 1px solid #732626; border-radius: 4px; padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 0.5em; "><h2>Study Pages</h2><p class="noind" style="padding-left: 1em;">* [[Study_pages/Persons|Persons]]<br>* [[Study_pages/Events|Events]]<br>* [[Study_pages/Concepts|Concepts]]<br>* [[Study_pages/Places|Places]]<br>* [[Study_pages/Periods|Periods]]</p></div>

<p>As we begin, study pages on {{apts}} are sparse and short for the simple reason that volunteers create {{apts}} and only a few have been doing so for a short time. We trust that the number and scope of study pages will increase, but they should remain in character <i>study pages</i>, neither syllabi nor packaged tours. On {{apts}} let's hold dear that quip, oft attributed to Cervantes, "the road is better than the inn." Study pages serve persons who are finding their own way, deciding on what roads they will take and making sense of their experiences along the way. </p>

<p>In working with study pages, we should develop guidelines that clearly differentiate them from encyclopedia entries. The two forms overlap to some degree, but the encyclopedia addresses the current state of knowledge about the materials it covers whereas the study page informs the choices a student will likely encounter in advancing self-formation and liberal learning by self-directed engagement with the topic. The two forms differ because each serves a different intent, to know something through the encyclopedia and to do something through the study pages. The latter intent seems vague because we have much less experience with it than we do with the intent of acquiring knowledge about something through an encyclopedia.</p>

<p>Let's start drafting and using study pages, developing our understanding of what will make them effective by continually reflecting our our experience with them. To start, we can group them under various headings such as persons, events, concepts, places, periods, and so on. What are we doing when we contemplate a work, achievement, or example of another in a self-formative way? What happens when we read or watch or hear something moving or meaningful when we do it freely, without ulterior purpose, autonomously? How can we support such experiences taking place?</p>
<div style="float: right; width: 30%; margin-left: 1em; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;border: 1px solid #732626; border-radius: 4px; padding: 0.25em 0.5em 0.25em 0.5em;">It is not wise to think that we can't; but avoiding that thought leaves us a long ways from understanding that we can. We study to traverse that distance.</div>
<p>Let's hypothesize that throughout historical time and across cultures many creative persons wanted to communicate to other persons through the work they crafted things that each had found meaningful in their self-formation and liberal learning. For instance, perhaps Michel de Montaigne did not write his essay, <i>"De l'institution des enfans,"</i> to propound his pedagogical principles as they might be applied in educational praxis, but rather to communicate to Madame Diane de Foix, Contesse de Gutson, and others like her, the range of what would come to his mind when he thought freely and considered self-formation in the context <i>de l'institution des enfans</i>.<ref>I leave Montaigne's title of the essay in his French to suggest that we might open up its potential meanings as part of our hypothesis. He could have written <i>de l'éducation</i>, or <i>de l'instruction</i>, or <i>de l'enseignement</i>, but chose <i>de l'institution</i>, which now primarily means an institution or establishment, but certainly in the 16th century and on into the 19th, it meant not only the organization (e.g. the Royal Institution of Great Britain), but the process of establishing or instituting something. Let's study Montaigne's essay, <i>De l'institution des enfans"</i>, as if it is an essay about the process by which children form, and let's do so as part of our instituting {{apts}}.</ref> Let's try during summer 2021 [now winter 2022] to organize a small working group to <i>study</i> Montaigne's essay as if he wrote it with this intent, taking all the matters to which he refers, not as digressive ornament, but as integral to the cumulative substance of what he wanted to bring to mind.</p>

Where/Study groups

2026-04-28T03:10:23Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Study groups</h1> <blockquote><i>We start with a proposal for a study group on Michel de Montaigne as an initial write-up of an effort to prototype a study group on {{apts}}. As we gain experience with such prototypes, we will draft a general discussion about forming our study groups.<br>Montaigne study group 01/17/2022 to 03/21/2022.</span></i></blockquote> <p>Study groups occur often in instructional setting..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Where}}
<h1>Study groups</h1>

<blockquote><i>We start with a proposal for a study group on Michel de Montaigne as an initial write-up of an effort to prototype a study group on {{apts}}. As we gain experience with such prototypes, we will draft a general discussion about forming our study groups.<br>[[Where — Montaigne1|Montaigne study group]] 01/17/2022 to 03/21/2022.</span></i></blockquote>

<p>Study groups occur often in instructional settings. There powerful incentives drive them, significant examples arise as we engage in studying for the test. <i>[[wikipedia:The_Paper_Chase_(film)|The Paper Chase]]</i>, an excellent film, depicted the power and pathologies of such study groups well. On {{apts}} we have the task of redesigning study groups as a context for spurring study without relying on external motivators.</p>

<p>Let's begin by noting how powerfully the external motivators determine how we perceive what a study group does, how it works, and what to expect in one. External motivators do not simply explain why students form one; they determine what the students forming one seek to do through it, how they organize it, and what they do in it. The motivators move us to do much more than prepare for this or that exam, mere visible bits of a great frozen mass beneath. It's Harvard Law, and all the other meritocratic contexts. They mark everyone, some as those who made it, the rest as those who did not. With luck and hard work, we all run through sequential competitions, each test compounding prior consequences, each working to categorize and sort the further, prospective tracks, better and worse ones, which lead, with further luck and more hard work, to expectations about power and wealth — deficiencies for many, for some limited, some sufficient, and for those marked most able, immense. These pressures have been in effect from childhood, almost universally, for many generations. Might they be a croc?</p>

<p>To categorize, sort, and rank, the meritocratic systems of instruction group aspirants, require them to master a difficult mass of conventional materials, and measure their relative performance on peremptory exams driven by weighty incentives. By suspending incentives on {{apts}}, the <i>raison d'être</i> for all that disappears. What possibilities can then emerge? Let's imagine what happens, in our hopes, at least, with a small dinner party, 6 or 8 friends in conversation, diverse in experience, interested broadly in intersecting concerns, relaxed, both boss and mother-in-law not among the present company. At once attentive and spontaneous, everyone interacts, drawing on their diversity and commonality of experience and interest. One asks a provocative question, another tells a memorable story, someone flirts, another kids about it, the youngest asks for some advice, which sets off a volley of conflicting suggestions. The participants experience different feelings, think different thoughts, but share a satisfying pleasure, until — How late! — the guests depart with a sense of completion, fulfilling and meaningful. It's conviviality — the art of living together.</p>

<p>Of course, most dinner parties don't live up to that ideal, and further, a dowdy study group, even on {{apts}}, won't have the ease and insouciance of that ideal. But for the study group here, the absence of external incentives break the constraints on the participants' agency. Each can be more authentic, spontaneous, trusting, inquiring, reflective — actually, there's nothing to lose. Members of a study group should avoid atavism. Each can and should rely on their own agency and respect and support the agency of the other members. Let's configure the group to create the space where the personal agency of its members will flourish. For that, the object of study defining the group should be expansive and fuzzy — <u>not</u>, for instance, "the theme of death in Montaigne's essays," but <u>rather</u> "the life and work of Montaigne and the universe of its significance for us." Such a topic — let's call it a "quasi general topic" — creates a broad ground of shared inquiry that will require each to construe it meaningfully for herself.</p>

<div style="float: right; width: 50%; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;"><h3 style="margin: 0;">"to construe it meaningfully"</h3><p>Let's keep in mind how easy it has become to say things that we do not[[Where — Against decadence| construe meaningfully]]. Let's avoid constructions that simply signify forms of public allegiance, devoid of personally considered meaning.</p><hr></div>

<p>Our topic — <i>The life and work of Montaigne and the universe of its significance for us</i> — might enable diverse persons to find reasons to join in its study, but it will not be adequate, in and of itself, to define the particular, personal concern on which any one of them will concentrate. As the first contribution to the study group, each participant can and should introduce themselves to the other members, making their personal interest in the topic clear and beginning to focus that interest into an initial interests of study. Let's face it. Many of us, perhaps almost all of us, find it difficult to open up in this way in most settings, especially educational settings. Let's suck it up and get over it.</p>

<p>From early on, in home, in school, in work, most everywhere, we find ourselves subject to countless assessment regimes. These engender a deep spirit of distrust. Guardedness becomes engrained, a façade for every situation. We learn to work in little enclosures, hidden spaces. We can overcome all that. In actuality, each and every one gets born thoroughly ignorant, and damn stupid, too. In that, we are all peers. Let's take it from there. Culture, the actuality of what humans make of ourselves, is a commons, achievements of, for, and by all. We share and nurture that by being open about what we can and want to do. What draws us to study, in this instance, the life and work of Montaigne and the universe of its significance for us? That's the question that constitutes the study group, the question that each tries to answer [[Dialog/Recursing|recursively]] over time in interactions with the other members of the group.</p>

<p>This recursive mode of interaction over the life of the study group sets it apart from the test driven model, which drives towards a given telos, acing the test — map it out, spill it back, and move on. Let's call our groups <i>recursive study groups</i>, for they should nurture recursive development along distinctive paths occasioned by congenial feedback to one or more instantiations of the studying each member pursues. At this stage, we have miniscule experience with recursive groups on a place to study. Consequently, organization of preliminary trials rests largely on intuitions about how they might work informed by a sense of possibility based on experience with group study in instructional settings.</p>

<p>Let's start out with a small group, say 4 participants, reasonably heterogeneous in background and interests. Let's start with a short, initial period in which the participants introduce themselves to each other and rapidly survey Montaigne's life and work, each thinking about their own self-formation and liberal learning and significance that Montaigne might have for that. Let's try culminating this start with a short statement of intent, extending and deepening the initial reflections, to which the other participants should briefly respond in a [[Where — Sympathetic response|sympathetic spirit]]. Then let's do two cycles in which each participant pursues their agenda of study</p>

<p>Tentative Calendar, about 10 weeks duration</p>

<table class="wikitable msgtbl small">
<tr><td ID="c1">Mon 01/17: </td><td ID="c2">Montaigne study group convenes; MSG participants introduce their interests, backgrounds, and goals.</td>
<tr><td ID="c1">Tue 01/18 thru Thu 01/20: </td><td ID="c2">Each MSG participant plans an initial study agenda through an intensive orientation in the universe of Montaigne.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Fri 01/21: </td><td ID="c2">MSG participants present their initial study agendas.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Fri 01/21 thru Mon 01/24: </td><td ID="c2">Each MSG participant responds sympathetically to the other participants' initial agendas.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Mon 01/24 thru Thu 02/10: </td><td ID="c2">MSG participants study according to their revised agendas, adapting them according to their best judgment.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Fri 02/11: </td><td ID="c2">Each MSG participant posts her reflections on her work and her ideas and their rationale for extending it.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Fri 02/11 thru Mon 02/14: </td><td ID="c2">Each MSG participant responds sympathetically and posts it to the self-assessments by the other participants.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Mon 02/14 thru Thu 03/10: </td><td ID="c2">MSG participants study according to their further agendas, developing ideas for their contributions to a [[Where — Study pages|study page]] on Montaigne.</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Fri 03/11: </td><td ID="c2">MSG participants present a summation of their work on Montaigne and their initial ideas for a study page on him.
</td></tr>
<tr><td ID="c1">Sat 03/12 thru Mon 03/21</td><td ID="c2">MSG participants complete and post a personal account of their study and a group work to complete and post a study page for Montaigne.
</td></tr>

</table>

<h3>A note on sources</h3>

<p>The best translation is a well-read one, and you have four reasonable choices. If you want a print edition, you have two fine choices: <i>The complete works: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters</i> by Michel de Montaigne (Donald M. Frame, trans., Everyman Library, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) and <i>The complete essays</i> by Michel de Montaigne (M. A, Scheech, trans,. New York: Penguin Books, 1993). If you already have one or the other, good — use it well. If you are going to buy one, in my opinion, the hardback Everyman edition of Donald Frame's translation, currently at $28.49 on Amazon, is slightly the better buy than the Penguin paperback of Screed's translation at $24.99. Both are fine, contemporary translations, but commentators generally use Frame as the standard in references and its quality of book production is higher.</p>

<p>You can get complete editions of Montaigne's <i>Essays</i> online for free in the widely used translation of Charles Cotton (1685), edited by William Carew Hazlitt (1877) in [[Montaigne/Essays|Our library]] and in Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.
Cotton and then Cotton Hazlitt have been deeply embedded historically in commentary on Montaigne in English, and this translation is well-worth study. Additionally, you can find online an older translation of [https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/766/montaigne.pdf?sequence=1 the <i>Essays</i> by John Florio] in the <i>Renascence Editions</i> at the University of Oregon.</p>

<p>Our purpose is to study with Montaigne as our interlocutor and for this we can largely bypass the secondary literature. You may want a little orientation, however. For that purpose, you will find that the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Marc Foglia, substantively revised by Emiliano Ferrari, gives an excellent overview and appreciation of Montaigne's cultural significance. Even more, in 1941, Stefan Zweig wrote a short survey of Montaigne's experience and achievements, <i>Montaigne</i> (London: Pushkin Press, 2015), to celebrate the importance of his humanistic sensibility for Western culture at a time of immanent danger to it. And there's been lots and lots written about Montaigne, and now we can say that the newest is the best: <i>Montaigne: A Life</i> by the French authority, Philippe Desan, originally published in French in 2014 and quickly translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).</p>

<h3>A note on reading</h3>

<p>Our agendas of study will draw from these and other resources, but the actual substance of the study each of us undertakes draws on all our life experience as that motivates and constrains our reading, reflection, and writing. In contemporary intellectual life, we suffer from a viscous circle between reading and writing, short-circuiting its ground in our experience. Scholars, journalists, and literary figures generate a vast over-production of writing. We speed through it; we all read far too superficially, grabbing this meme and that buzzword much too quickly, without integrating it into our inner lifeworld. Instead it becomes an "approach," something short of a coherent set of ideas, and eagerly we turn the approach into vacuous grist for the writerly mills. And back and forth, it gets worse and worse. Can we break the cycle?</p>

<p>Let's try here to occasion slower, more thoughtful reading with a tighter relation between writer and reader. In studying, we do not need to cover a set syllabus. . . . </p>

<p>Many of us have been schooled to avoid first-person expressions in our writing. Disemboweled discourse seems so much more objective! But in studying we pursue a first-person endeavor, thinking consciously and with our deeper powers. And to actualize our efforts, we communicate what we have to say to ourselves and others. That's how study becomes shared reciprocally, a fully human activity of persons interacting with one another. To pretend the <i>I</i> and the <i>we</i> are not involved dehumanizes thinking into objective knowledge, impersonal thought stripped of its thinkers.</p>

<p>Montaigne's charm, his power, his presence after 450 years, arises from his mastery of the first-person essay. The very term, essay — an attempt, an assay, a testing — entails the active agent as its author. Let's write that way in responding to Montaigne and to each other.</p>

<p>But, we wonder. Can we make just what "that way" means more vividly clear? We easily use the first-person, singular or plural. We can talk about attempts — "Yesterday, I tried a new way home from work and got into bad traffic," but that doesn't hack it. It is not the fact of having gotten into bad traffic, but what we think and feel and want to do in reflection on our experience of bad traffic that we write about to communicate to others.</p>

<p>"Bad traffic" may be a bit more mundane than most of the things that occasioned Montaigne's reflections. But Montaigne anchored his reflections with facts of common experience, and he communicated to readers what he felt and thought in reflection on them and what he learned about himself in reflecting on those reflections. To join him, to enter into the cycles of reflection, we need to consider facts of experience in our lives analogous to those that triggered Montaigne's writing.

<p>Biographically, Montaigne wrote the bulk of his essays between 1570 and 1580, starting at the age of 38. Prior to that, he had been an up-and-coming politico in the city of Bordeaux and the surrounding areas, hotspots of life-threatening interaction between French Protestants and Catholics, a high-stakes, transactional situation. Montaigne withdrew to read, reflect, and write in his study, the top-floor of a squat tower adjacent to the Château de Montaigne, seat of a small seigneurie acquired by Montaigne's great-grand-father, some 60 kilometers from Bordeaux.</p>

[[File:Montaigne's-tower.png|center|Montaigne's tower]]

<p>. . . . </p>

<p>Jacques Barzun on <i>[[Where — Barzun conversation|conversation]]</i></p>

<hr>
<h3><i>Previous Study groups</i></h3>

* Study group 1 — 4 readings, 4 participants, interacting for 4 weeks (7/19/2021 - 8/15/2021).
** [[Study group 1/Proposal | Proposal]] • [[Study group 1/Agenda | Agenda]] • [[Study group 1/Commentary | Commentary]]
<br>

Where/Study nodes

2026-04-28T03:09:36Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Study Nodes</h1>"

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<h1>Study Nodes</h1>

Where/Our landmarks

2026-04-28T03:08:10Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1>Our landmarks</h1> <div style="float: left; max-width: 200px; margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;">200px<p class="s1 noind>"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she / With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"<re..."

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<div style="float: left; max-width: 200px; margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;">[[File:Statue-of-Liberty-Landmarks.png|200px]]<p class="s1 noind>"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she / With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"<ref>Concluding lines from "[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus The New Colossus]" by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the [[:wikipedia:Statue_of_Liberty|Statue of Liberty]] in New York harbor.</ref></p></div>

<div style="text-indent: 2em;">
<p>To get around {{apts}} well, imagine an actual place, one that's large and complex, like the city we love, one with a populace dedicated to the free growth of mind. We live, we think and act, in a world comprising actualities, near and far. We can recognize the digital commons as an emerging ''virtual'' actuality within the world in which we live, understanding ''virtual'' in its root Latin meaning, "with functional excellence or power." People catch on to programs in the virtual world, their world of functional excellence or power, when they see something mimic usefully the way things work in their physical world.</p>

<p>For instance, Facebook tied itself to a pretty superficial, real-world analog, "a directory containing photographs and biographical details of students (esp. incoming freshman) at a university or college, published at the start of the academic year to facilitate contact between students" (OED). The concept of a facebook immediately suggests to people how they should use the program, connecting names with faces and building little networks of mutual interest and admiration. It has worked; people immediately see a use for it in their lifeworld, but the superficiality of that use has imposed limitations on Facebook that have become increasingly dysfunctional for both persons and the public as the program commands more and more attention.</p>

<p>For Wikipedia, the real-world analog has worked in culturally more constructive ways. Most people basically know on first encounter how to work with Wikipedia, for we have sufficient prior experience with encyclopedias and other alphabetical materials to know what we need to do to search for the information we seek. With Wikipedia, we are like foals who seem to know almost at birth how to stand up and walk. This immediate transparency in how to use it undoubtedly contributed to the rapidity and reach with which Wikipedia caught on.</p>

<p>With {{apts}}, the real-world analog is less intuitive and more complex. At first, visitors to {{apts}} will think that it is another instance of an encyclopedic type program, after all, it runs on MediaWiki, the public domain program designed and developed for Wikipedia and its sister projects. And indeed, at times searching by keyword on {{apts}} will work, for visitors can access much on it in that way. But {{apts}} does not serve primarily as a means of retrieving information about a range of named topics. With {{apts}} we need to ask consciously, what serves as a real-world analog to it, to a place where persons can work with cultural resources in extended, open-ended efforts to advance their self-formation and liberal learning?</p>

<p>We might liken it to a university, which is similar in the scope of cultural resources and the depth with which people engage with them. But {{apts}} does not have the functional features characterizing universities — no formal programs leading to degrees, no admissions requirements, neither "the faculty" nor "the student body." The websites of colleges and universities all look and work more or less alike and they do not look and work at all like {{apts}}. What then?</p>

<p>We can leave that question open, as we do with many questions here. However, we loosely take the city, urban life, as the analog to the material world that helps organize {{apts}}. An old medieval phrase — "<i>Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag,</i>" city air makes one free after a year and a day" — suggests two things about {{apts}}. First that a prolonged engagement our urban way of study may have something to do with our actualizing our autonomy,<ref>The medieval phrase referred to customary law, according to which a serf from the countryside who managed to live for a year and a day as a free person in a free city, one independent of the prevailing feudal regimes, would be considered free of any prior obligations as a serf. Let's hypothesize that behind the legal formality there was a formative aspect: the lord of the manor knew that recovering a serf who had grown accustomed to autonomous life in the city would no longer be suitably servile and more trouble than his labor would be worth.</ref> and second, that it won't happen overnight. Let's now step out of the past towards the future: globalization spreads <i>Stadtluft</i>, city air, everywhere as cities 'round the world look and work alike and as digital communications ensnare everyone, everywhere, in reliance on urban resources to conduct themselves in an urban style of life. </p>

Template:LinksWhere

2026-04-28T03:06:39Z

Robbie: Created page with "<p class="b2"><b>Where</b></p> * Our landmarks * Study nodes * Study groups * Study pages * Quick study * Study skills * Our library * (Book list) * Studios"

Where

2026-04-28T03:04:47Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Where}} <h1><i>Where?</i> situates lived experience</h1> {{AR}} <p>Actually, <i>Where?</i> includes <i>When?</i> and <i>When?</i> includes <i>Where?</i> Combined, they situate lived experience, what was, is, or will be taking place. Verbs of actualizing — to <i>happen</i>, to <i>take place</i>, to <i>become</i>, and all their synonyms — have greater significance for thinking and acting than the verbs of being — to <i>be</i> — however overus..."

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<h1><i>Where?</i> situates lived experience</h1>
{{AR}}
<p>Actually, <i>Where?</i> includes <i>When?</i> and <i>When?</i> includes <i>Where?</i> Combined, they situate lived experience, what was, is, or will be taking place. Verbs of actualizing — to <i>happen</i>, to <i>take place</i>, to <i>become</i>, and all their synonyms — have greater significance for thinking and acting than the verbs of being — to <i>be</i> — however overused we may find verbs of <i>being</i> in current speech. To say that <i>X is Y</i> establishes nothing substantive; it merely recognizes an identity between a conceptual subject and a conceptual object. To express <i>where and when</i> taking place, we situate it in lived experience, the stuff of life.</p>

<p>As a lived experience, study starts as we sense our ignorance or incapacity, as we wonder about some mystery, or as we intuit some possibility, and study emerges as we apply intelligent effort to what might assuage, satisfy, or realize the condition we experience. As complex humans, we experience much to occasion our study, many situations to engage us in it, many resources to sustain and further it. If occasions for study pervade our lived experience, why should we build a special place for it? If each person can and should study for themselves, why should we concentrate attention on it here, our own attention and that of anyone else who might become interested? What takes place <i>here</i>, where and when we visit or reside in {{apts}}, beyond the possibilities that arise in any here and now in which study might occur?</p>

<p>To answer these questions, observe how, for many generations, people the world around have established special places within the school of life where instruction can take place through the concentrated practice of teaching. A place of instruction is a place where the art of teaching takes place. What is it that connects to study, as teaching connects to instruction? Let's respond:</p>

<h6 class="center"><b><i>To incite</i> stands to study, as <i>to teach</i> stands to instruction.</b></h6>

<p>On a place to study, we incite study; we urge or spur it on; we stir it up, we animate, instigate, stimulate it. A place to study is a place where we abet, arouse, encourage, excite, exhort, foment, goad, induce, inflame, inspire, motivate, prompt, provoke, rouse, spur, and urge ourselves and others as active agents of study. It behooves us to design the situations — where and when — to incite all this activity and effort to take place with care, commitment, and art.</p>

* [[Where_—_Study nodes | Study nodes]] — This page will be added soon.
* [[Where_—_Study groups | Study groups]] — A group will incite the self-formation and liberal learning of its members by supporting their distinctive, personal efforts as each expresses her own ideas and aspirations, tries to transcend her habitual routines, and develops her chosen possibilities.
* [[Where_—_Study pages | Study pages]] — Like the traveler's guide book, study pages inform a student's choice, particularly the initial choices to attend first to this and not to that..
* [[Where_—_Study skills | Study skills]] — Study requires intellectual skills, the roots of culture — speech, reading, writing, symbol and sign. Like well-used scythes, these need recurrent honing.
* [[Where_—_Quick study | Quick study]] — We construct lived experience with a diversity of timescales, and a lively mind will find food for thought in short bits — a quick observation, a powerful aphorism, a passing example, or some words of wit.
* [[Where_—_Our library | Our library]] — A Place to Study is not a library, but we have one, starting small and imbalanced, to which we add materials, believing they may have special value to those seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons, eventually approximating a collection adequate to our purposes. Our [[Where_—_Library listings|current list]].
* [[Where_—_Studios | Studios]] — Each resident on {{apts}} has a personal work area to support their study, self-formation, and liberal learning. These work areas are important components of A Place to Study as a whole, spaces in which residents can develop and present their views about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

How/We speak

2026-04-28T03:02:20Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We speak and write</h1>"

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How/We speculate

2026-04-28T03:01:35Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We speculate and wonder</h1>"

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<h1>We speculate and wonder</h1>

How/We concentrate

2026-04-28T03:00:25Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We concentrate</h1> <p>When I contemplate the digital commons, I see a pullulating growth of initiatives, many commercial, many institutional, many governmental, and some autonomous, growing for their own sake. The situation creates a great clamor for attention. We take a first step in developing our ability to concentrate by ignoring all that.</p> <p>As an an unenclosed initiative in the digital commons, {{apts}} has no need to grow a..."

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<p>When I contemplate the digital commons, I see a pullulating growth of initiatives, many commercial, many institutional, many governmental, and some autonomous, growing for their own sake. The situation creates a great clamor for attention. We take a first step in developing our ability to concentrate by ignoring all that.</p>

<p>As an an unenclosed initiative in the digital commons, {{apts}} has no need to grow a user base rapidly

How/We associate

2026-04-28T02:59:31Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We associate</h1> <p>In much of life, we habitually project boundaries onto the world and our lives in it and stuff objects and our experience with them into these containers. Similarities and identities then become what matters. These take on various auras of valence and significance. It all serves as an economical way to respond to the complexities of experience. Economical, but not necessarily conducive to clear thinking and judging.</..."

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<h1>We associate</h1>
<p>In much of life, we habitually project boundaries onto the world and our lives in it and stuff objects and our experience with them into these containers. Similarities and identities then become what matters. These take on various auras of valence and significance. It all serves as an economical way to respond to the complexities of experience. Economical, but not necessarily conducive to clear thinking and judging.</p>

<p>Actually cognition relies on extensive networks of interconnected nodes with the connections for many rather sparse and for some quite concentrated. Cognitive researchers have made some progress in describing the operation of these networks at the cellular level, but the means of observation do not penetrate with sufficient precision and dynamism to inventory operations at the molecular and atomic levels to chart what, if anything, is taking place there. Where do these observations leave us?</p>

<p>I think it is fair to say that associative think emerges in the processes of study in a productive, meaningful sense. Yet, we do not, and cannot within the foreseeable future, initiate or control that emergence predictably. Instead we need to hold ourselves in active readiness to note and follow up its emergence. For this purpose, we do well to attend closely to wise observers stating conviction fully aware of its uncertainty—what they believe, via reflection or intuition, must be the case despite the grounds for it being beyond the scope of what they recognize as securely knowable. Life is ripe with evident matters that must be, or have been, or will be, despite our inability to know them. It is neither irrational nor unwarranted to take them into account, cautiously as best we can. </p>

*-- to be concluded soon. . . .

How/We select

2026-04-28T02:58:29Z

Robbie:

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<h1>We curate & organize</h1>
<p>If reaping gathers and preps cultural resources for for effective use, curating assesses and presents those resources to their potential users, promoting discrimination and efficiency in their use. </p>

<p>Curating creates a stream of commentary by diverse persons—others, yet like ourselves—to inform, orient, and inspire how we engage with our culture. Good curating should not tell others what to think about a work, nor merely impart information to them about the work. Rather it should help others situate the work in a context meaningful to them so that they can decide how they want to engage with the work and experience it firmly and fully.</p>

<p>On {{apts}} we seek to promote engagement with the resources of our cultures in and through the digital commons. To do so well, we need to think clearly about how engaging cultural resources takes place in the context of the digital commons. The challenges there may differ significantly from those encountered historically in contexts where material objects embody the cultural resources.</p>

<p>Let's leave moot, for now at least, the question whether people can more productively create cultural resources by using material or digital tools -- in both cases the human will and mind may be the constant limiting factor. Once a work has been created, it gains its cultural power and significance as others reproduce, store, transmit, retrieve, apply it in shaping their lives. The capacities and limitations of these functions in the material marketplace and the digital commons differ radically, at the root, which creates profound problems for understanding how to curate cultural resources in the digital commons. How can and should we curate cultural resources to promote their fulfilling use through the digital commons? On {{apts}}, we should make that question a central concern.</p>

How/We select

2026-04-28T02:56:52Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1>We browse & we reap</h1> <p>OK, ask it—why say we browse in discussing how we study? Isn't browsing sort of casual; studying really serious. According to Google, to browse means to "survey goods for sale in a leisurely and casual way" and to study means to "devote time and attention to acquiring knowledge on (an academic subject), especially by means of books," and somewhat more generally to "look at closely in order to observe or read..."

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{{Setup|tick=How}}
<h1>We browse & we reap</h1>
<p>OK, ask it—why say we browse in discussing how we study? Isn't browsing sort of casual; studying really serious. According to Google, to browse means to "survey goods for sale in a leisurely and casual way" and to study means to "devote time and attention to acquiring knowledge on (an academic subject), especially by means of books," and somewhat more generally to "look at closely in order to observe or read."</p>

<p>Google gives us good, ordinary usage, meanings conditioned by current, everyday life. We might wonder why Google thinks that browsing primarily involves goods for sale, but let's skip over that and note how it links study to acquiring knowledge on academic subjects through books. Indeed, most of us encounter study as something that happened, or should have happened but maybe didn't, in our schooling. Even when we did it well, study in schools often seems heavy, a bit oppressive, a chore, something we did because we had to do it, something some times, even often, we wouldn't do because having to do it made little sense to us, relative to other possibilities. Why does the ordinary meaning of study have all these implications?</p>

<p>Think back. Those academic subjects, how did we encounter them? Through our lessons, our assignments, the textbook; prepare this Monday, that Tuesday, the quiz will follow. That's how we, <b>billions</b> of persons, have encountered what it means to study. Let's ask whether that encounter has something unusual, incomplete or limiting in it. In the rest of life, many will continue having to study in much the same way whenever our boss requires a full report tomorrow on whatever his boss requires of him. School sometimes does prepare for the prevailing modes of work. Is that the sum of possibility?</p>

<p>On occasion, a person will get interested in studying something, not prompted by some assignment, but drawn to it out of curiosity, interest, taking it up freely, for its own sake. If we compare that to the typical form of study in schooling, we see that the latter short-circuits much in the process of study. When directed by assignments, study becomes predictable, constrained, orderly, and testable. Our schooling habituates us to bypass the foreplay of study, to limit its passion, to mandate and modulate our engagement in it, to convert it into fungible units that publicly aggregate into an education or career.</p>

<p>In the fullness of life, a person does not spontaneously know to devote time and attention to studying this or that, especially through books. In the fullness of life, one commits time, and directs attention, and acquires books and other cultural resources, through extensive activities that constitute integral parts of a place to study in our lives. It encompasses browsing in a leisurely and casual way, surveying not merely goods for sale, but the possibilities of life. Study, examining life lived for its own sake, starts with browsing -- with surfing the waters of the world, learning to judge the swell, to catch the wave. In real life, lived well, browsing, feeling at ease, slowly getting serious about this or that and having a sense of what comes next: all is essential to good studying.</p>

<p>And the person who browses will find it preparing her to reap. In browsing, we attend lightly to many things, registering possibilities. Rarely do we see a full and fix purpose at first sight. Purpose emerges as we perceive nuances and stake out what's sustainable among alternative paths. All that, browsing makes possible and as purpose firms our prior scoping out the field of possibility then enables us to make choices directing our attention with conviction and verity. Having browsed well, we we reap richly.

How/We browse

2026-04-28T02:55:43Z

Template:LinksHow

2026-04-28T02:54:34Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="lt"> <div class="L3 cent">How?</div> * We browse & reap * We curate & organize * We associate & interpret * We concentrate & understand * We speculate & wonder * We speak & write </div>"

<div class="lt">
<div class="L3 cent">How?</div>
* [[How/We browse |We browse & reap]]
* [[How/We select |We curate & organize]]
* [[How/We associate | We associate & interpret]]
* [[How/We concentrate |We concentrate & understand]]
* [[How/We speculate | We speculate & wonder]]
* [[How/We speak|We speak & write]]
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How

2026-04-28T02:53:53Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=How}} <h1><i>How?</i> joins thinking and acting</h1> {{AR}} * <i>What?</i> leads to the universe of concepts, nouns; * <i>How?</i> describes the working of action, verbs.</p> <p>In this district, we start with the question, <i>How do we study?</i> That leads us to consider a range of activities important in the work of study to which we locate with links to the right. What's unusual about them? In most instructional situations, the question <i>How?..."

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<h1><i>How?</i> joins thinking and acting</h1>
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* <i>What?</i> leads to the universe of concepts, nouns;
* <i>How?</i> describes the working of action, verbs.</p>
<p>In this district, we start with the question, <i>How do we study?</i> That leads us to consider a range of activities important in the work of study to which we locate with links to the right. What's unusual about them? In most instructional situations, the question <i>How?</i> merges with <i>What?</i> and we get a topical listing, lots of courses, subjects, indicating <i>what students can study</i>.</p>

<p>On {{apts}} we don't want our inquiry programmed for us in this way. There's lots and lots of resources here from which each can and should extract concepts, topics for study. But we don't study in a monochromatic manner, teeth clenched and eyes squinched, in response to some imperative, "Study this!" In its fullness, we study in a highly variegated manner, many different modes of acting, which with reflection we can mix and match to control our movement towards a dynamic purpose. What's key is not piling up a mound of topics, but keeping the sense of purpose dynamic, imbuing life with a continuous sense of purpose.</p>
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Who/Visitors

2026-04-28T00:29:21Z

Robbie:

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<p>Everyone begins on {{apts}} as a visitor. The place is an open city inviting you to study through it. As a visitor, you can go where you like — {{apts}} has no private spaces. There's a lot to take in to really know your way around. The place is a place to study in the virtual world, and the actual world doesn't offer too many places to study these days to clue us in about finding our way on our own.</p>

<p>A first-time visitor may see {{apts}} as a big city without all the people, strangely deserted with nothing taking place within it. The life of a city, and of {{apts}}, begins to emerge as one starts doing things in it. As in a city, on {{apts}} visitors have a more circumscribed range of interaction than residents, but visitors can they can do a lot by using the means available to all, thoughtfully commenting wherever they see an <i><b>Add comment</b></i> link.</p>

<p>Don't be bashful. {{apts}} exists as a place for persons to develop and express their <i>thinking</i>, not to proclaim their ready-made opinions, choosing one from A to D, or rejoining the old Roman populace giving a thumbs up of thumbs down. Speak as you think, not as social convention suggests. Yeah, flip and plain dumb comments will quickly disappear. But thoughtful, genuine ones, expressed in the spirit of open-ended study, will last as contributions to the work of the place.</p>
{{The activity of study}}
<p>We value questions, naïve ones and sophisticated ones. We think admitting ignorance, sharing doubts, and understanding disagreements help to spur fruitful study. We are still a long way from the condition in which everyone, everywhere has immediate access, anytime, anyplace, to the whole of human culture to support their life-long study. But the development of digital communications brings very large numbers of persons significantly closer to a reasonable approximation of it. Visitors participate in that emerging world.</p>

<p>In this historically unprecedented juncture, the idea that we should follow a more or less single, more or less sequential path in a life of learning makes no sense. Beginners and experts all find their own paths, crossing frequently, and wouldn't you know it — beginners in one thing are experts in another, and vice versa. Let each share their questions and share what they think. We are all ignorant; we all doubt putative certainties; and we all must live together despite countless disagreements. These are realities in the midst of which we begin each day. In the midst of that, all of us must exercise our judgment as best we can. In study, we continually use our judgment to form our judgment. The stakes in it are high, the opportunity for it at hand.</p>

Template:LinksWhat

2026-04-28T00:19:37Z

Robbie:

Template:LinksWhat

2026-04-28T00:18:20Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=What}} <h1>Anticipation</h1> <p>In this section, we will deal with the primary forms of human communication as we shape and use them in the course of our activities. </p> Here, let us set aside some common assumptions about the role of thinking in the course of acting. We do not think out a sequential course of action, issuing from it a set of instructions about what to do to guide the progression from start to finish. Rather we anticipate the res..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=What}}

<h1>Anticipation</h1>
<p>In this section, we will deal with the primary forms of human communication as we shape and use them in the course of our activities. </p>
Here, let us set aside some common assumptions about the role of thinking in the course of acting. We do not think out a sequential course of action, issuing from it a set of instructions about what to do to guide the progression from start to finish. Rather we anticipate the result, which defines a hypothetical path between the origin and the destination, and then we improvise, to the best we can, and we adjust our movement, always minimizing our perceived deviation from the hypothetical path.</p>

<p>Consciousness does not represent to us surrounding reality so that we can fixate something in awareness and issue the sequence of instructions enabling us to affect a part of it. Rather consciousness enables us to construct, evaluate, and choose among anticipations of what we might do, and to judge and react to deviations from the paths to the anticipations we set in motion.</p>

<p>Systems for communicating culturally enable human consciousness to cooperate with others in anticipating what can and should take place and to correct for deviations from that path leading to their anticipations.</p>

[* To be clarified and continued. *]

What

2026-04-28T00:14:29Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=What}} <h1>What do we seek by asking <i>What?</i></h1> <div class="outbox"><div class="inbox compact">06/25: Before revising this further, it is important to substantially draft the section on Lifeworlds. Without having drafted it, judging what to deal with in this section (and others as well) will be difficult.</div></div> <p>In asking <i>What?</i>, we seek, not a thing, we seek a concept to enhance our power to think about experience.</p> <..."

__NOTOC__
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<h1>What do we seek by asking <i>What?</i></h1>
<div class="outbox"><div class="inbox compact">06/25: Before revising this further, it is important to substantially draft the section on [[Lifeworlds]]. Without having drafted it, judging what to deal with in this section (and others as well) will be difficult.</div></div>

<p>In asking <i>What?</i>, we seek, not a thing, we seek a concept to enhance our power to think about experience.</p>

<p>Let's take an instance. A small child points to a flat, black, shiny object on her mother's desk and says, "What's that?" Her mother answers, "That's my cell phone. You see me making phone calls to others with it." What was the child seeking in asking, "What's that?" Mother's answer gives the child, not the physical object, but the name of the concept that we connect in intellection, not only to mother's particular cell phone, but to a whole class of things we call "cell phones" of which mother's flat, black, shiny object is an instance.</p>

<p>Instead of asking, "What's that?", the child could have just grabbed her mother's cell phone, as she undoubtedly does on occasion. But in asking "What's that?", she didn't want the object, she was asking for the concept that signifies the object in thought. At that point in her thinking, the concept was little more than a name for a nearly empty concept she might associate with a peculiar pattern of mother's behavior. Interested in the activity that seems to go with the concept, she will pick the phone up and mumble into it, mimicking activity suggested by the concept, but not really getting what "making phone calls to others with it." She'll keep trying from time to time, and bit by bit she'll recognize more features, really affordances, what she needs to do in order to actualize what the concept means, which she doesn't at first grasp or understand.</p>

<div class="outbox righty wide compact numsoff" style="margin-right: -280px;"><div class="inbox compact">Let's note that at their root, concepts have intentional meaning. They concern, not identity, but perceiving and effecting stuff. If the mother answered, "It's a Google Pixel 4, IMEI 3567...622, she'd have given the identity but the child would shoot back, "What's a Google Pixel 4?" Adults will often answer a child's question with a simple factoid, an identifying name, say, "the moon", and the child will reply asking "What's the moon?", and the exchange can go on and on, branching out to other interrogatives as long as the adult sticks to factual responses that don't have meaning within the child's intentional world, her lifeworld. Here's a better Q&A — <br>
:C:"How far away is the moon?" . . . <br>
:A: "Unh. I think about 240,000 miles, but that doesn't mean much does it? If you walked all day, every day until you got to be older than your granddad, you'd still have a ways to go." . . . <br>
:C: "Wow! That'd be pretty hard. I wonder how those astro somethings did it?" . . . <br>
:A: "I think in a rocket, but all I know about rockets is that they can go very far, very fast, but even so it took them three days to get there." . . . <br>
:C: "Hmm. Someday, maybe, I'll figure out more about them."</div></div>

<p>In asking <i>What?</i> we are seeking concepts that we institute with meaning and import in our lifeworld, the world in and with which we intentionally interact, perceiving and effecting it purposefully. In the life course of the person, and in that of human collectivities, people come to perceive the possibility and recognize the value of constructing various intellectual worlds to perceive and act within, with vital interests abstracted away to substantial degrees. Multiple modes of abstraction build up collectively, and each person acquires a unique subset of these modes in the course of their educational formation.</p>

<p>These abstract worlds function as dynamic constructions within our lifeworld according to the way we abstract out our agency from them, even though we will keep that agency existentially present through the value and use we attach to the various systems of abstraction. And as we institute diverse forms of abstract thinking into our personal intellectual lives, maintaining our sense of agency becomes a continuing challenge.</p>

<p>Concepts, like notions, exist in thought. Even more strongly, conscious thinking takes place by means of concepts. We use them cognitively to construct and manage our lifeworld and our experience within it. By asking <i>What?</i> we are trying to expand our capacity to think consciously about what takes place in the world in which we live by mentally associating concepts to what does or might take place in experience. Thus children, on getting hold of some powerful, new concepts quickly see splendid possibilities with them, not yet having much experience of how the devil lies in the details.</p>

<p>Asking <i>What?</i> in the course of study leads us to form and grasp the power of concepts. Asking <i>What?</i> here on {{apts}} leads us to reflect on what concepts empower us to do in living our lives and to contemplate what enables us to recognize concepts in action from the flux of experience. As a start in building {{apts}}, let's concentrate on 4 ways concepts empower our living (conceptual empowerment) and 4 experiential sources from which we can extract vitally important concepts (conceptual exemplarity). These are by no means exhaustive, but broadly set a start. In this way, we anchor conceptual study, not in the various branches of knowledge, but in the challenges and opportunities of lives well lived.</p>

* Conceptual empowerment — Here we consider four vital matters, four ways concepts enable overlapping modes of acting.
** [[What/Anticipation |Anticipation]] conceptually postulates a goal or <i>telos</i> with reference to which we can activate and guide the capacities we need in order to seek or avoid the <i>telos</i>.
** [[What/Concern |Concern]] defines and assesses our capabilities with reference to our goals so that we can use them optimally in the effort to actualize our anticipations.
** [[What/Predicament |Predicament]] takes account of the interlocking causalities in the circumstances bearing on our effort to use our capabilities to effect our anticipations.
** [[What/Possibility |Possibility]] recognizes and tests the limits established on anticipation in light of our concerns and our predicaments.

* Conceptual exemplarity — Here we concentrate on four domains of experience from which we can extract vitally important concepts.
** [[What/The-lore-of-life |The lore of life]] consists of the cultural ideas that people, around the world and across the generations, have formed in ordinary experience and pass on through it to their progeny. We mine and refine this lore, the ore of cultural thinking.
** [[What/Hidden lives |Hidden lives]] compose the great tidal flats of human culture, which buffer stormy forces and stream rich nutrients that nurture the wondrous diversity of human achievement in through historical life. '''Each life matters.''' Each person merits the fullest possible resources for achieving fulfillment for themselves to share joyously with others.
** [[What/Exemplars |Exemplars]] result from the power each and every person possesses to feel moved by an exceptionality intimated by what appears unusual, noteworthy, in their lifeworlds. We identify and empower our exemplars, good and bad, who in and for themselves lead human lives as you or I are doing, and thus we lead our human lives with inspired self-direction.
** [[What/Masterworkers |Masterworkers]] rise above exemplarity to define a sphere of common endeavor through the corpus of their work and its power to evoke further aspiration, effort, nuance, meaning, and achievement by others. Masterworkers establish styles, shape tastes, define craft, and set norms through the capacity of their peers to recognize excellence.

 . . . . .



</div></div>

Template:The activity of study

2026-04-28T00:12:37Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="outbox wide"><div class="navbar compact">Through the activity of study, every person seeks to cope with their primal ignorance by making sense of circumstances, forming intentions, and exerting effort with the goal of realizing their possibilities in their lifeworld. Our place pages present diverse contexts for reflecting on the process and our study pages provide an occasion to initiate in word and action they aspire to fulfill. Let's take care to use our cu..."

<div class="outbox wide"><div class="navbar compact">Through the activity of study, every person seeks to cope with their primal ignorance by making sense of circumstances, forming intentions, and exerting effort with the goal of realizing their possibilities in their lifeworld. Our place pages present diverse contexts for reflecting on the process and our study pages provide an occasion to initiate in word and action they aspire to fulfill. Let's take care to use our cultural resources with self-possession and an expansive spirit of cooperation.</div></div>

Who/Visitors

2026-04-28T00:11:28Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Clues}} <h1>Visitors</h1> <p>Everyone begins on {{apts}} as a visitor. The place is an open city inviting you to study through it. As a visitor, you can go where you like — {{apts}} has no private spaces. There's a lot to take in to really know your way around. The place is a place to study in the virtual world, and the actual world doesn't offer too many places to study these days to clue us in about finding our way on our own.</p> <p>A first-..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Clues}}
<h1>Visitors</h1>
<p>Everyone begins on {{apts}} as a visitor. The place is an open city inviting you to study through it. As a visitor, you can go where you like — {{apts}} has no private spaces. There's a lot to take in to really know your way around. The place is a place to study in the virtual world, and the actual world doesn't offer too many places to study these days to clue us in about finding our way on our own.</p>

<p>A first-time visitor may see {{apts}} as a big city without all the people, strangely deserted with nothing taking place within it. The life of a city, and of {{apts}}, begins to emerge as one starts doing things in it. As in a city, on {{apts}} visitors have a more circumscribed range of interaction than residents, but visitors can they can do a lot by using the means available to all, thoughtfully commenting wherever they see an <i><b>Add comment</b></i> link.</p>

<p>Don't be bashful. {{apts}} exists as a place for persons to develop and express their <i>thinking</i>, not to proclaim their ready-made opinions, choosing one from A to D, or rejoining the old Roman populace giving a thumbs up of thumbs down. Speak as you think, not as social convention suggests. Yeah, flip and plain dumb comments will quickly disappear. But thoughtful, genuine ones, expressed in the spirit of open-ended study, will last as contributions to the work of the place.</p>
{{The activity of study}}
<p>We value questions, naïve ones and sophisticated ones. We think admitting ignorance, sharing doubts, and understanding disagreements help to spur fruitful study. We are still a long way from the condition in which everyone, everywhere has immediate access, anytime, anyplace, to the whole of human culture to support their life-long study. But the development of digital communications brings very large numbers of persons significantly closer to a reasonable approximation of it. Visitors participate in that emerging world.</p>

<p>In this historically unprecedented juncture, the idea that we should follow a more or less single, more or less sequential path in a life of learning makes no sense. Beginners and experts all find their own paths, crossing frequently, and wouldn't you know it — beginners in one thing are experts in another, and vice versa. Let each share their questions and share what they think. We are all ignorant; we all doubt putative certainties; and we all must live together despite countless disagreements. These are realities in the midst of which we begin each day. In the midst of that, all of us must exercise our judgment as best we can. In study, we continually use our judgment to form our judgment. The stakes in it are high, the opportunity for it at hand.</p>

Who/Residents

2026-04-28T00:10:42Z

Robbie:

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
{{Numsoff}}
<h1>Residents</h1>

<p>Anyone can ask for a free account [once the site opens] and become a resident on {{apts}}. Although free and unencumbered, it comes with rights and responsibilities. Volunteers, that is its residents, construct and maintain {{apts}} and they do so by working collaboratively, among themselves and with visitors, in the spirit of the place, to form themselves and learn liberally within the digital commons they work to create. An account provides residents with tools and capabilities to add and revise resources on the place and to develop their questions, concerns, and ideas in their resident studios. </p>

<h3>Resident List</h3>

* [[User:Robbie McClintock|Robbie McClintock]]
* [[User:Vik Joshi|Vik Joshi]]
* [[User:Tucker Harding|Tucker Harding]]

Who/Residents

2026-04-28T00:10:12Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} {{Numsoff}} <h1>Residents</h1> <p>Anyone can ask for a free account [once the site opens] and become a resident on {{apts}}. Although free and unencumbered, it comes with rights and responsibilities. Volunteers, that is its residents, construct and maintain {{apts}} and they do so by working collaboratively, among themselves and with visitors, in the spirit of the place, to form themselves and learn liberally within the digital c..."

__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
{{Numsoff}}
<h1>Residents</h1>

<p>Anyone can ask for a free account [once the site opens] and become a resident on {{apts}}. Although free and unencumbered, it comes with rights and responsibilities. Volunteers, that is its residents, construct and maintain {{apts}} and they do so by working collaboratively, among themselves and with visitors, in the spirit of the place, to form themselves and learn liberally within the digital commons they work to create. An account provides residents with tools and capabilities to add and revise resources on the place and to develop their questions, concerns, and ideas in their resident studios. </p>

<h3>Resident List</h3>

* [[User:Robbie McClintock|Robbie McClintock]]
* [[User:Vik Joshi|Vik Joshi]]
* [[User:Tucker Harding|Tucker Harding]]

Who/Masterworkers

2026-04-28T00:09:27Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} <h1>Masterworkers</h1>"

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
<h1>Masterworkers</h1>

Who/Exemplars

2026-04-28T00:08:29Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} <h1>Exemplars</h1> [** A draft to be developed. **] <p>An ''exemplar''—a person who has completed life—receives attention from other persons who are now engaged in their own self-formation. We extract from the life of the exemplar insight, understanding, and inspiration in shaping our own. An exemplar stands before us, not as an object lesson instructing us about some unattainable principle or ideal, but as a complex person o..."

__NOTOC__ __NOTITLE__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
<h1>Exemplars</h1>
[** A draft to be developed. **]

<p>An ''exemplar''—a person who has completed life—receives attention from other persons who are now engaged in their own self-formation. We extract from the life of the exemplar insight, understanding, and inspiration in shaping our own. An exemplar stands before us, not as an object lesson instructing us about some unattainable principle or ideal, but as a complex person of achieved significance, worthy of study, reflection, inward contemplation. Exemplars have importance, less for our public selves and our outward lives, but for the inner person who lives the life that each of us lives, generating our public selves as part of our vital presence in the world. The exemplar works, not through imitation by our public selves, but as a chosen presence with whom one inwardly communes, whose thoughts, experience, and fates one examines with curiosity, respect, and honesty in the course of framing one's own.</p>

<p>We, as living persons, identify others as our exemplars and project an aura of exemplarity onto them. Thus, ''exemplars'' indicates an open, inclusive set arising from the concrete judgments that we make, investing an exemplar's life and work with special significance for our shaping our own lives.</p>

<div style="float: right; width: 40%; padding-left: 2em; text-indent: 0; font-weight: 700;"><hr><h3 style="margin: 0;">Some examples</h3>
* [[Exemplars/Heine|Heine]]<br>
* [[Exemplars/Nietzsche|Nietzsche]]<br>
* [[Exemplars/Rousseau|Rousseau]]
<hr></div>
<div style="text-indent:2em;">

<p>Through our work here, we identify predecessors we judge to be our exemplars and present their lives and work for study, relative to our concerns and predicaments. Although we all often have living exemplars, here we restrict our attention to persons who have completed their lives. That leaves us much to do, and it lessens the distortions that celebrity and notoriety can induce in the assessment of exemplarity.</p>

<p class="ind">Exemplarity has a lot to do with our giving ourselves positive and negative feedback in forming and carrying out aspirations. Hence we resist the temptation to see exemplars as only the good guys, the positive models. We can and should project exemplars that help us define formative possibilities that we can and should resist as well as those we can and should pursue. Judgments of exemplarity need to be nuanced and many-sided. ''Novelas ejemplares'' by Miguel de Cervantes helps greatly in grasping the subtleties of the concept.<ref>''The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes'' (William K. Kelly, trans., London: George Bell & Sons, 1881), </ref> </p>
</div>

Who/Hidden lives

2026-04-28T00:07:32Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} <h1>Hidden lives</h1> <p>At consequential risk, we all rely on celebrity to ease and enliven the burden of judgment. But <i>Fortuna</i> casts celebrity on the wise and the merely fashionable alike, and on others of all sorts: apparatchiks just following orders, provincial political hacks, professional athletic stars rising unpredictably from draft pools.... It brings to power accidental arbiters of truth and justice who can be dangerously arb..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
<h1>Hidden lives</h1>
<p>At consequential risk, we all rely on celebrity to ease and enliven the burden of judgment. But <i>Fortuna</i> casts celebrity on the wise and the merely fashionable alike, and on others of all sorts: apparatchiks just following orders, provincial political hacks, professional athletic stars rising unpredictably from draft pools.... It brings to power accidental arbiters of truth and justice who can be dangerously arbitrary in coping with unexpected instabilities.</p>

<p>Whatever effects their acts of commission the rule of celebrities may bring, its greatest impact is due to omissions, which obscure, devalue and foreclose manifold possibilities of ordinary lives. These possibilities are the great tidal flats of human culture that absorb destructive forces of storms and effluents (vast would-be superfund sites...), which could nurture wondrous diversity of human achievement in bright, sunny times. '''Each life matters.''' Each person merits the fullest possible resources for achieving fulfillment for themselves joyously to share with others.</p>

<p>That is the message of George Eliot's complex novel, <i>Middlemarch</i>, an important depiction of how the middle marches — many intertwined lives, each trying, however dimly, blindly, desperately, to maintain a path towards an inchoate telos, all needing the support of their peers — family, friends, and strangers. The heroes in that great march are singularly unheroic, Dorotheas all, but heroic all the same and needful, like the great, of all possible support and facilitation. Eliot concluded with a reminder for all times:</p>

<blockquote class="noind">Our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature . . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.<ref>George Eliot, <i>Middlemarch</i> (concluding paragraph).</ref></blockquote>

Bertolt Brecht wrote:
<blockquote class="noind">
Student: "Happy the land that breeds a hero."<br style="align:left;">
Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs a hero."
</blockquote>
Let us contemplate and build upon the accomplishments of these un-honored but honorable giants whose bodies may lie in unmarked graves.
<br> 
<hr style="width:40%;text-align:left;margin-left:0">
<div class="sm">
* [[:wikipedia:George Eliot|George Eliot]]
* [[:wikipedia:Middlemarch|<i>Middlemarch</i>]]
* [[:wikipedia:Bertolt Brecht|Bertolt Brecht]] quotation from <i>The Life of Galileo</i>, Scene 13.</div>

Who/For persons

2026-04-28T00:06:32Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} <h1>For persons</h1> <p>Everyone begins on {{apts}} as a visitor. The place is an open city inviting you to study through it. As a visitor, you can go where you like — {{apts}} has no private spaces. There's a lot to take in to really know your way around. The place is a place to study in the virtual world, and the actual world doesn't offer too many places to study these days to clue us in about finding our way on our own.</p> <p>A first-..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
<h1>For persons</h1>
<p>Everyone begins on {{apts}} as a visitor. The place is an open city inviting you to study through it. As a visitor, you can go where you like — {{apts}} has no private spaces. There's a lot to take in to really know your way around. The place is a place to study in the virtual world, and the actual world doesn't offer too many places to study these days to clue us in about finding our way on our own.</p>

<p>A first-time visitor may see {{apts}} as big city without all the people, strangely deserted with nothing taking place within it. The life of a city, and of {{apts}}, begins to emerge as one starts doing things in it. As in a city, on {{apts}} visitors have a more circumscribed range of interaction than residents, but visitors can they can do a lot by using the means available to all, thoughtfully commenting wherever they see an <i><b>Add comment</b></i> link.</p>

<p>Don't be bashful. {{apts}} exists as a place for persons to develop and express their <i>thinking</i>, not to proclaim their ready-made opinions, choosing one from A to D, or rejoining the old Roman populace giving a thumbs up of thumbs down. Speak as you think, not as social convention suggests. Yeah, flip and plain dumb comments will quickly disappear. But thoughtful, genuine ones, expressed in the spirit of open-ended study, will last as contributions to the work of the place.</p>
{{The activity of study}}
<p>We value questions, naïve ones and sophisticated ones. We think admitting ignorance, sharing doubts, and understanding disagreements help to spur fruitful study. We are still a long way from the condition in which everyone, everywhere has immediate access, anytime, anyplace, to the whole of human culture to support their life-long study. But the development of digital communications brings very large numbers of persons significantly closer to a reasonable approximation of it. Visitors participate in that emerging world.</p>

<p>In this historically unprecedented juncture, the idea that we should follow a more or less single, more or less sequential path in a life of learning makes no sense. Beginners and experts all find their own paths, crossing frequently, and wouldn't you know it — beginners in one thing are experts in another, and vice versa. Let each share their questions and share what they think. We are all ignorant; we all doubt putative certainties; and we all must live together despite countless disagreements. These are realities in the midst of which we begin each day. In the midst of that, all of us must exercise our judgment as best we can. In study, we continually use our judgment to form our judgment. The stakes in it are high, the opportunity for it at hand.</p>

Template:LinksWho

2026-04-28T00:05:45Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="lt"> <div class="L3 cent">Who?</div> * For persons * Hidden lives * Exemplars * Masterworkers * Residents * Visitors </div>"

Who

2026-04-28T00:00:47Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Who}} <h1><i>Who?</i> seeks the agent at work</h1> <div class="outbox lefty thin"><div class="inbox compact"> 190px<br><small>Jacob spoke first. "I want to know if my hair is just like yours," he told Mr. Obama.... Mr. Obama replied, "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?" He lowered his head, level with Ja..."

__NOTOC__
{{Setup|tick=Who}}
<h1><i>Who?</i> seeks the agent at work</h1>
<div class="outbox lefty thin"><div class="inbox compact">
[[File:United States President Barack Obama bends down to allow the son of a White House staff member to touch his head (cropped).jpg|190px]]<br><small>Jacob spoke first. "I want to know if my hair is just like yours," he told Mr. Obama.... Mr. Obama replied, "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?" He lowered his head, level with Jacob, who hesitated. "Touch it, dude!" Mr. Obama said.... "So, what do you think?" Mr. Obama asked. "Yes, it does feel the same," Jacob said.</small><ref>[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_President_Barack_Obama_bends_down_to_allow_the_son_of_a_White_House_staff_member_to_touch_his_head_(cropped).jpg Wikipedia Commons]</ref></p></div></div>

<p>Here on {{apts}}, we ask <i>who?</i> — for instance, "Who studies here?" — not to inventory the identifying characteristics shared by members of a group, but to perceive and recognize others as persons, intentional agents, interacting with us in our experience, as a presence in some way palpable to us. . . . . .</p>

<p>Even Presidents are persons, like all of us. Let's not forget it. We construct and use {{apts}} as a work of persons, for persons, and by persons. Let's think and act with persons in mind. That's not always so easy, for we live in a world populated by many roles — student, teacher, employee, manager, cashier, police officer, doctor or lawyer, pastor, sergeant, sailor, reporter, and many more, Presidents, too. Much of our education, formal and informal, teaches us to embody the various roles that circumstances thrust upon us. But our <i>inner-I</i> thinks and feels as the person that lives — not our behaviors, but our lives.</p>

<p>Persons live, or have lived, or will live; we have inner lives, we feel appetites and drives, we have emotions, we perceive, act, and direct ourselves as best we can, coping imperfectly with real constraints. Persons think and reason, we experience our world, we each suffer, enjoy, fear, and hope. We can understand ourselves and other persons because they and us, because we, all of us, are living or have lived, concrete personal lives.</p>

<p>A person lives an historical, existential actuality, as an “I” that inextricably includes both her “I” and her “circumstances.” I cannot abstract my life from the circumstances within which my life takes place, within which I try to conduct it as best I can. Rarely can I do just what I please; freedom arises as we act uncertain about our abilities and the conditions we will meet through the use of them. </p>

<div class="outbox rt thin"><div class="inbox compact">We form ourselves and learn liberally by asking questions when we do not know what we are looking for. We do not answer those questions, but explore how they can clarify our intentions and sense of meaning.</div></div>

<p>Let's speak infrequently about the <i>individual</i>, which best denotes an abstract construction that exists only in thought as a means to group various descriptors together. In contrast to the person, the abstract “individual” <i>is</i>; it is a conceptual doll, bearing properties, decked out in various outfits like Barbie or Ken, each named with its qualities classified and counted by careful observers, who predict how the stick figures will behave in a world of statistical abstraction, rigidly motivated by a compound causality, the parts of which aggregate to 100%.</p>

<hr>

<p>Persons come to {{apts}} as persons studying, <i>a student</i> in the very simple sense of the term, a person studying. Literally, we come here studying because we come here, unsure what we come here for. This is to say that everyone interacting on {{apts}} does so as a <i>student</i>, a person studying, and among persons studying, there are no fixed hierarchies, for all are seeking to cope with their ignorance. We meet and interact as peers who interact recognizing our shared intention to clarify our respective sense of agency.</p>

<p>Persons studying can do a lot with {{apts}} simply by using their computer, tablet, or smart phone to interact with the resources here and other persons on it. That's what all of us will be doing most of the time.</p>

<p>To begin with, any student coming to {{apts}} will do so as a <i>[[Who/Visitors|visitor]]</i>, someone visiting the Place temporarily, perhaps one time only, or recurrently ― occasionally or frequently, perhaps even for an intensive or prolonged stay. Visitors can go wherever they want on the Place, copy and download stuff, and interact through the <i><b>Add comment</b></i> links. Visitors can come and go as they please to partake in the purposes and activities of {{apts}}.

<p>For some visitors, their time and engagement with the Place may build, and they may come to think of themselves as <i>[[Who/Residents|residents]]</i> here. In that frame of mind, anyone <s>can</s> [currently, will be able to] request a free account, which will give them some additional powers of interaction, and responsibilities too, roughly equivalent to those of <i>editors</i> on Wikipedia. With those powers, they can start new pages, add resources to our collections, and work voluntarily to maintain and develop the Place and organize activities through it.</p>

<p>Among residents, students living and working on the Place, some will become reflexively engaged with it, a resident student whom we might identify as a <i>[[Who/Stewards|steward]]</i>, a person taking special care for the potential flourishing of {{apts}}. By procedures to be developed, the stewards will direct the {{cll}} and implement the consensus goals and policies that the residents at {{apts}} set to guide its long-term development as a place to support self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons.</p>

<p class="head3">[[Who.Who are you?|An Interlude, if you wish]]</p>
<p>But if you want to be strictly Open Source, don't click. Do 5 minutes of calisthenics, instead, or just move on as you like.</p></div>

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2026-04-27T23:57:32Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="L3 cent">Lifeworlds</div> * Lifeworld Activity * Oneworld & Lifeworlds * Ignorance & Recognition *World View & Life World  <hr> * Lifeworlds 1st draft * Lifeworlds 2nd draft * Lifeworlds 3rd dr..."

<div class="L3 cent">Lifeworlds</div>
* [[Lifeworld Activity ]]
* [[Oneworld & Lifeworlds]]
* [[Ignorance & Recognition]]
*[[World View & Life World]]

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* [[Lifeworlds 1st draft | Lifeworlds 1st draft ]]
* [[Lifeworlds 2nd draft | Lifeworlds 2nd draft ]]
* [[Lifeworlds 3rd draft | Lifeworlds_3rd_draft ]]
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Lifeworlds

2026-04-27T23:55:42Z

Robbie: Created page with "__NOTOC__ {{Setup|tick=Lifeworlds}} <h1> </h1> <div class="outbox" style="max-width:400px; margin: 1px auto 1px auto;"><div class="inbox compact">Please note: As a concept, <i>Lifeworld</i> has great importance for the design and development of {{apts}}. We need to put the project in motion, however, in order to work out the modes of interaction between actual persons living and working in different lifeworlds and the resources accessible to them through {{apts}}. This..."

__NOTOC__
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<h1> </h1>
<div class="outbox" style="max-width:400px; margin: 1px auto 1px auto;"><div class="inbox compact">Please note: As a concept, <i>Lifeworld</i> has great importance for the design and development of {{apts}}. We need to put the project in motion, however, in order to work out the modes of interaction between actual persons living and working in different lifeworlds and the resources accessible to them through {{apts}}. This process of emergent design may result in significant changes in the structure and function of {{apts}}.</div></div>
<h1>Lifeworlds</h1>

<blockquote class="numsoff">A Lifeworld indicates the activities of a living agent, as that agent lives them, not as an external observer views them. We speak of a lifeworld as seating, instituting, and rendering the actuality of phenomenal experience. A life takes place in its lifeworld; lived lives happen in and through its lifeworld.</blockquote>

<p>Why don't we just speak about <i>the world</i>, plain and simple, without qualifying it as <i>the lifeworld</i>? Isn't the world always there, waiting for us with look and listen? But as soon as we start to think about the presence of the world, we recognize that the greatest proportion of it is clearly, always, out of sight, far beyond ear shot. And even what's right here before my eyes, looks very different to you, before your eyes over there. At the very least, the world right there before us brings many relativities and obscurities with it.</p>

<p>Through much of cultural life, context served to make sense of many perspectives on the world. And clever thinkers sent ingenious effort to find precisely what was common to all the appearances.

Hello/We've begun!

2026-04-27T23:49:45Z

Robbie:

__NOTOC__
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<h1>We've begun!</h1>
<h6><b>What's next? That's always the question, an occasion for judgment.</b></h6>
<hr>

<p>Here's an overview for first-timers of <i>what-happens-where</i>, and for many-timers, too. What we do on {{apts}} differs from what usually happens on websites. We use a clickable map to keep the whole place in mind. Use it to get about and choose where your active study might take place. We describe the main districts here, but if you prefer to just look and see, skip the descriptions and use the schema to go exploring. Whenever wherever, clicking the top elliptical link [[File:APlace.png|150px|link=Hello.We've_begun!]] will bring you back here.</p>

<hr>

<p>Remember our intent: to provide free, unencumbered, comprehensive <i>resources</i> to persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. Treat each <i> Place</i> page as a resource. Check it out and take it in, the actual study that takes place depends on what we then do, contributing what we have to say to the <i>Study</i> page or simply thinking a passing thought while moving on. </p>

<p>In the world of instruction, knowledge has a scope and a sequence; in contrast, study has a situation and an occasion. <i>A Place</i> situates it; our choice <i>to study</i> occasions it. We don't think of our schema as an ordered list to be followed from top to bottom. It's a visual composition, each part serving with the others to comprise a whole, each part distinctively significant within the whole.</p>

<p>Our schema has an upper and a lower part and the content of the lower part will vary, depending on what component of the upper part we activate. A circle of circles makes up the core of the upper part. The five outer circles link to our places of substantive activity — the museums, monuments, stadia, parks, schools, churches, offices, and fancy stores, so to speak. The inner circle links to enabling functions — the streets, the buses and subways, the sewers and conduits, warehouses and workshops, and the smarts that enable a complex infrastructure to never let our city sleep. Two reflective discourses frame all this activity, a set of dialogs and a discussion of lifeworlds, which may serve to institute the flow of diverse activities with a sustained sense of direction and coherence.</p>

<h6>To elaborate . . .</h6>

<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Lifeworlds.png|bottom|link=Lifeworlds]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">Through {{apts}}, we explore the spiritual aspirations that move us, personally and in common, in the course of life.<ref>On {{apts}}, we are unabashed about taking <i>spirit</i> seriously as the generative attribute of life, distinct from force and matter alone. Spirit is that mysterious capacity with which life functions, as a natural phenomenon by which it counters the 2nd law of thermodynamics, to construct ordered activity in the universe in non-random ways. Each living instance of life will succumb to the 2nd law, but so far, since its advent, life as a natural wonder has lived counter to entropy for nigh an eon. We define spirit as living agency. It works to create a cosmos from the chaos.</ref> We do not live in <b>the world</b>, one world the same for all. Each vital agent <b>lives</b> in a unique world, inner and outer, that each constitutes as the circumstantial correlate to our intentions and capacities. Our lifeworlds comprise the significance, meaning, and worth that we institute as self-directing agents in, for, and around ourselves as we seek to actualize intentions in living our lives. We study these matters in our lifeworlds to better inform our powers of judgment, taste, and understanding. These works of the spirit provide the experiential context of our studying.</p>

<div style="float: left; margin: 1em 1em 0 0;">[[File:Question.png|Top]]<br></div>
<p style="text-indent: 0;">With intended action, living action, the outcome is always contingent, unclear, potentially ironic. As doubts, concerns, and possibilities of import to us take place, we inquire into them: ''Who?'', ''What?'', ''How?'', ''Where?'', and ''Why?''. Hence our assemblage of circles, which indicate major modes of concentrating our attention on what we do not fully fathom and therefore want to study. By posing these questions to orselves, we reflect discursively on key forms of the primordial ignorance that moves us to study here. They are places where we study <i>study</i>, so to speak. Here's a quick bit on each. They work together, so don't hole up in only one of them.</p>

<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Who_n.png|60px|bottom|link=Who]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;"><i>Who studies?</i> — here on {{apts}}? Here "study" is an active verb. As an active verb, it sounds awkward when used in the passive voice; <i>study</i> calls for an agent as its subject, a person or a polity, an actor that forms, performs, and pursues purposes. Here we study agency as agents, as persons, but persons deciding what they, personally and as members of collectivities, can and should choose to try to do.</p>
<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:What_n.png|60px|bottom|link=What]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">What sorts of resources repay study by persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons? Here, and in the district for How?, we substantively engage what the verb, <i>to study</i>, indicates by reflecting on the cultural resources with which we study (<i>the what</i>) and then on the active capacities we employ in doing so (i>the how</i>).
<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:How_n.png|60px|bottom|link=How]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">How will we, as persons, engage in studying our cultural resources; how will we employ our capacities in doing so? That, too, calls for reflection, which we pursue in this district and then orchestrate as shared activities in the district that follows.
<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Where_n.png|60px|bottom|link=When]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">Where? That's where the action is, where persons [<i>Who</i>] intentionally seek to form themselves and learn liberally in the digital commons [<i>Why</i>], studying resources of human culture [<i>What</i>] in the various ways suiting the complex conditions of human life[<i>How</i>]. Here we put in practice what we are thinking.
<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Why_n.png|60px|bottom|link=Why]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">In engaging the complexities of life, why might persons pay particular attention to forming themselves and learning liberally in the digital commons? Responses to this question, framed <i>by each person</i>, not <i>for each or everyone</i>, have much to do with shaping the cultural import of what we can and should do here.

<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Enablers.png|bottom]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">These are our places of public activity — the museums, monuments, stadia, parks, schools, churches, offices, and fancy stores. In addition, we have the streets, the buses and subways, the sewers and conduits, warehouses and workshops, a complex infrastructure that never lets our city sleep. All that is here too, and many visitors will get to feel at home in it. You'll see in the center of our schema three of them.</p>
<div style="float: left; margin: 0 1em 0 0;">[[File:Tools_n.png|60px|bottom|link=Tools]]</div> <p style="text-indent: 0;">Everyone shapes themselves by gearing up, by selecting and using tools of various sorts to advance their purposes. Here's the heart of {{apts}} as a democratic effort: in a fully developed digital culture, everyone can, should, and will have full access and use of the most effective, powerful tools for creative cultural activity. That is becoming feasible in a fully developed cultural commons and it stands here as the compelling goal of democratic aspiration.
</p>

<div style="float: left; margin: 1em 1em 0 0;">[[File:Dialogs.png|Top|link=Dialogs]]<br></div>
<p style="text-indent: 0;"><i>Dialogs</i> groups short instances of a literary form, not a special topic. It includes a set of conversations about aspects of {{apts}} and the sort of activities that can and should take place on the site. They're like street corner conversations about the why and the wherefore of {{apts}}, and its place in the larger world. These are important for sensing the distinctive character of study as our effort to form our agency, purpose, and meaning in all the many domains of our life activity.</p>

<p>That's it. All these represent common foci of attention, loci jumbled up in the processes of life. They don't form a sequence and bouncing around among them continues through life as we form and focus judgment on the ever-changing vicissitudes of life. Explore as you wish, free to go as you want, and to come back when you will — as the spirit moves you. We hope that'll be often, in active, intermittent residence — study takes place best in the company of others over extended time. But it's your choice — the incentives come from within.</p>

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2026-04-27T23:48:10Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="brbox wide"><div class="navbar compact numsoff">{{{Outer}}}</div></div>"

<div class="brbox wide"><div class="navbar compact numsoff">{{{Outer}}}</div></div>

Template:For those who

2026-04-27T23:45:03Z

Robbie: Created page with "<h2 class="cent">{{apts}} serves those who. . . .</h2> <div class="b0">. . . those who study as persons seeking to form ourselves and learn liberally in the digital commons. We work through our first-person awareness of life, as we respond aspirationally with the ever-diversifying self-awareness of the seeker finding a way through life. In this sense, "Who are we?" evokes many responses, among them. . . .<br> . . . those who, through good fortune and hard effort, have be..."

<h2 class="cent">{{apts}} serves those who. . . .</h2>
<div class="b0">. . . those who study as persons seeking to form ourselves and learn liberally in the digital commons. We work through our first-person awareness of life, as we respond aspirationally with the ever-diversifying self-awareness of the seeker finding a way through life. In this sense, "Who are we?" evokes many responses, among them. . . .<br>
. . . those who, through good fortune and hard effort, have benefited highly from formal instruction and enriching experience.<br>
. . . those who, through adversity and inadvertence, have not benefited from formal instruction and enriching experience.<br>
. . . those, advanced in age, having enjoyed the perks of the system, who worry that it can no longer nurture the values and abilities that drew us to it.<br>
. . . those who feel consumed by the stresses of high consumption, and wish to assert, "Enough!"<br>
. . . those who prefer the examined life to the packaged life, and those who want to start examining packaged lives that are failing to deliver on their promise.<br>
. . . those who are young in years or spirit and who want to sustain consistent, meaningful purpose through the complexity of circumstance.<br>
. . . those who see the admission of ignorance as the threshold of wisdom.<br>
. . . those who recognize ourselves as spanning both advantages and adversities and work to realize our possibilities without taking pride in the advantages or feeling resentment at the adversities.<br>
. . . those who see ourselves as unique variations on a common theme and wish to realize that uniqueness for the benefit of all.</div>

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2026-04-27T21:58:56Z

Robbie: Created page with "<div class="outbox"><div class="inbox numsoff">{{{boy}}}</div></div>"

Hello/It's not

2026-04-27T21:52:09Z

Robbie:

__NOTOC__
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[[File:Not-sign.png|150px|center|What we are not]]
<h1>{{apts}} is NOT . . . .</i></h1>
* <i>NOT an encyclopedic project</i>. Like an encyclopedia, {{apts}} consists in part in an extensive collection of culturally valuable assets. But people interact with its collection, not to acquire impersonal knowledge, but to further their self-formation and liberal learning, aspiring to a personal understanding of themselves and their circumstances.
* <i>NOT a formal educational institution</i>. We grant no certificates, diplomas, or degrees; we charge no tuition or fees; we have no instructors or professors; we set no curriculum, prerequisites, or admission requirements. People come to study on their own initiative, striving towards their own fulfillment. All are welcome — novice, expert, and everyone in between.

* <i>NOT a collection of on-line courses or test prep</i>. We do NOT provide tutoring or a trot correlated to typical courses or curricula, high school or college, and we do not charge subscription fees to students, families, teachers, schools, or organizations. Persons come here, not to jump through the hoops of advancement, but to find and fulfill their unique capacities measured as each sees fit.

* <i>NOT a library</i> or <i>a museum</i>, in the ordinary sense. Here we build collections of text, documents, and other things, and provide an online workspace, but with a somewhat different spirit — less to avail our collection to a general public and more to facilitate its collaborative use advancing self-formation and liberal learning among interested persons.

* <i>NOT a self-help or how-to site</i>. We are <b>NOT</b> a resource for finding specific answers to explicit questions or help in acquiring specific skills, although we provide a listing of [[Help:Self-help | Self-help & how-to sites]]. One comes here to expand, diversify, deepen, and control the questions, to figure out what it is that one does not know.

* <i>NOT a subordinate to a sponsoring organization</i>. We don't generate revenue for corporate owners. We don't cater to a special demographic, we broker no commercial exchanges, and we hype neither celebrities nor influencers. We are an autonomous, collaborative community of peers seeking to find and fulfill our humane purposes and and meaning. </ul>
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<div class="outbox"><div class="inbox">{{For those who}}</div></div>