The Musing Tapestry

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Pity, Sympathy, Empathy

Pity, Sympathy, and Empathy are similar forces that move us to compassion, but they are not the same and have their own unique characteristics. In the medical profession these elements are tied to bedside manner and in philosophy they can often be viewed as a part of ethics. Let us look briefly at the distinction: Pity is a compassionate action that always contains an element of superiority. It is often spontaneous and isolated. An example of this as a person giving money or food to a homeless person, even if overall they find homeless people to be an annoyance or a burden. Pity doesn't make one a bad person by any means, but it is the least lasting and involved of the three and most likely the least one a person would not want in their physician or policy makers. Sympathy is an intellectual understanding of a situation. If we continue with our example, someone who is sympathetic the the homeless would have a good understanding of the economic, racial, and mental health issues...

The danger of copy/pasting historical quotes

There are two aspects of a quote: its meaning and its context. In many cases, the meaning is the goal and can stand on its own. However, there is also context to these quotes which, if you just grab them for their meaning, may net you some strange results. I am fully aware that many people won't really care if the context makes the quote not quite work, but all the same, a little research for something important can save you from some smirks, snark, and side eye down the road. I will look at two examples from our present day. When the 9/11 memorial museum chose a quotation to emblazon their wall, they chose a line from Book IX of Vergil's Aeneid: Nulla dies uuquam memori vos eximet aevo. Which means "No day shall erase you from the memory of time." This is a quite beautiful sentiment, and it is understandable why the meaning of this line would be chosen for such a monument. However, the troubling aspect of the context is that the "you" in that quot...

A Brief Essay on the Origin of Agriculture

Cicero once said that to be ignorant of what has come before was to remain a child, and our world today we face many challenges as documentaries like Mission Blue and Racing Extinction illustrate: climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and the like which points towards a grim Malthusian outcome. However these documentaries always hold out hope that it can change with adaptations made to prevent this outcome, and as can be seen with the meeting of world powers in Paris there is an effort to make those changes. Yet without a full understanding of the process behind these effects, the driving cause cannot be addressed. To understand the origin of agriculture is to find those factors which led to that adaptation and the forming of our modern world system. To achieve a unified theory for the origin of agriculture differing theories need to be considered. For th...

Deafness in the Ancient World

Have you ever been curious about where the expression 'deaf and dumb' came from? Did you know that Deaf people have their own culture? This paper I wrote when studying ancient medicine explores the roots of western Deaf culture and attempts, as much as possible for a hearing person to do, to view the subject from a Deaf perspective. The Hippocratic view of deafness in the ancient world is based on a philosophical foundation rather than a physiological understanding. In the extant texts there is a clear linking of the function of intelligence to the ability to speak which placed a stigma on the deaf, particularly those deaf prelingually. The scholarship in this area to date has focused on the issue from a hearing perspective; that of deafness as a disability. I argue that the nature of the discussion needs to be changed to one of the roots of Deaf [i] culture in western civilization. The inability of Hippocratic medicine to understand dea...