Marion Allan Wright Papers - Accession 197

The Marion Allan Wright Papers consist of correspondence, a journal, autobiographical writings, bibliographies, biographical data, essays, speeches, book reviews, short stories, poems, letters to the editor, oral history transcripts and other papers. Subjects include the death penalty, the civil rights movement, civil liberties, libraries in South Carolina and politics. Correspondents include R. Beverly Herbert, L. Mendel Rivers, J, William Fulbright, Sam Ervin, Jr., Reverend James P. Dees, Preston Wright (Wright\u27s brother) and other relatives. See Acc 48 for an earlier accession of Wright papers and the oral history collection for recorded interviews with Wright.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/manuscriptcollection_findingaids/1083/thumbnail.jp

Wittgenstein's Attitudes

What's wrong with modalities in (Wittgenstein 1922)? In (Suszko 1968), the writer argued that "Wittgenstein was somewhat confused and wrong in certain points. For example, he did not see the clear-cut distinction between language (theory) and metalanguage (metatheory): a confusion between use and mention of expressions". Furthermore, a modal logic was proposed in (von Wright 1986) as depicting Wittgenstein's bipolarity thesis in a S5 frame. The aim of the present paper is to deal with the specific case of epistemic modal logic: such a logic of propositional attitudes assumes a philosophy of language that would violate Wittgenstein's two main assumptions

Understanding of Actions: Some Problems

An action is understood by us iff we see the action as being the conclusion of an appropriate practical syllogism. With this starting point of von Wright's Explanation and Understanding (1971) several other proposals are compared and more or less identified with, namely understanding as (i) knowing of the intention with which the action was done, as (ii) knowing the reasons for which it is or was rational to perform the action, and as (iii) knowing the subjective meaning of the action. Relative to these different versions of "understanding of an action", I summarise some differences between von Wright and myself

Genealogies in Expanding Populations

The goal of this paper is to prove rigorous results for the behavior of genealogies in a one-dimensional long range biased voter model introduced by Hallatschek and Nelson [25]. The first step, which is easily accomplished using results of Mueller and Tribe [38], is to show that when space and time are rescaled correctly, our biased voter model converges to a Wright-Fisher SPDE. A simple extension of a result of Durrett and Restrepo [18] then shows that the dual branching coalescing random walk converges to a branching Brownian motion in which particles coalesce after an exponentially distributed amount of intersection local time. Brunet et al. [8] have conjectured that genealogies in models of this type are described by the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent, see [39]. However, in the model we study there are no simultaneous coalescences. Our third and most significant result concerns "tracer dynamics" in which some of the initial particles in the biased voter model are labeled. We show that the joint distribution of the labeled and unlabeled particles converges to the solution of a system of stochastic partial differential equations. A new duality equation that generalizes the one Shiga [44] developed for the Wright-Fisher SPDE is the key to the proof of that result.Comment: 40 pages, 1 figur

Wittgenstein, Modern Music, and the Myth of Progress

Georg Henrik von Wright was not only the first interpreter of Wittgenstein, who argued that Spengler’s work had reinforced and helped Wittgenstein to articulate his view of life, but also the first to consider seriously that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his times makes him unique among the great philosophers, that the philosophical problems which Wittgenstein was struggling, indeed his view of the nature of philosophy, were somehow connected with features of our culture or civilization. In this paper I draw inspiration and courage from Von Wright’s insistence that trying to understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times is a philosophic task in its own right in order to probe into a relatively obscure region in Wittgenstein’s thought: his relation to the music of his times. It is a topic, on which Von Wright, and most other prominent Wittgenstein scholars, have said very little, but it is also one, which Wittgenstein himself attested was so important to him that he felt without it he was sure to be misunderstood. I offer textual and historical evidence in support of my claim that, parallel to Wittgenstein’s exposure to Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1930, he was also introduced to the music theory of Heinrich Schenker, which helped him to articulate, partly by way of critique, a complex and unique position concerning the modern music of his times, which exhibits his rejection of what Von Wright later dubbed ‘the myth of progress’. As Von Wright observed in other regions of Wittgenstein’s work, he believed also with regards to the arts and to music in particular, neither in a brilliant future nor in the good old days. I argue that Wittgenstein actually made a distinction between three kinds of modern music: (a) bad modern music, which is clearly a case of confusing means for ends, the hallmark of the myth of progress, as Von Wright observed; (b) vacuous modern music, which embodies some sort of diffidence, a difficulty to see through the omnipresence of what Von Wright called (following Habermas) a ‘colonialization’ of reified measures of progress; (c) good modern music, a paradoxical notion for Wittgenstein, which betokens the unlikely yet possible striving to penetrate through what appears as dissolution of the resemblances which unite this culture’s ways of life by rendering this condition as expressible and intransitively understandable. In the context of this third category, I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s complex remarks on the music of Gustav Mahler, which palpably show that the problem of good modern music and the problem of philosophizing in the time of civilization were one and the same in Wittgenstein’s mind. I conclude that, with regards to Von Wright’s own critical view of the modern myth of progress, we can learn from Wittgenstein that progress in the realm of art is closely aligned with the ideal of the perfection of man, yet transcending a social or political context. It is the ideal of cultural cohesion: affinity that the arts show to other human practices and cultural artifacts of its period. Wittgenstein’s tentative notion of good modern music (and its circumscription by his notion of the music of the future) may show its true colors when viewed in the context of Von Wright’s plea not to abandon work for progress as a critical task

Shelter Sense Volume 07, Number 08

Choosing liability insurance: what you see is not always what you get (Roger Kindler) Advice on ways to inform and influence local officials (Debbie Reed) Society, festival officials prevent pet problems November adoption workshop Warning about cats and clothes dryers Group recognized for educational efforts Coalition to infiltrate humane groups (John McArdle) Computer Talk: An introduction to computer terminology – Part 1: Here’s to hardware! (Kay Smart) Reproducible – Proper wildlife handling can prevent rabies exposure (Donald Ford, D.V.M.) Just Wright: Lost pets mean work for pet owners and you (Phyllis Wright