Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 January 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 20

Philosophy

Saw this humorous post about philosophy & social media on the internet, but didn't get most of them - could someone explain them?

A Brief History of Philosophy

1. Socrates deletes his account,
2. Plato posts screenshots of Socrates,
3. Aristotle unfollows Plato,
4. Aquinas retweets Jesus,
5. Descartes mutes Aquinas,
6. Locke mutes Descartes,
7. Kant unfollows Locke and Descartes,
8. Hegel subtweets Kant,
9. Schopenhauer blocks Hegel,
10. Marx likes Hegel,
11. Nietzsche gets hacked,
12. Heidegger DMs Arnedt,
13. Adorno reports Heidegger,
14. Derrida gets verified,
15. Heidegger gets banned,
16. Wittgenstein only does instagram

Ecolchester (talk) 00:49, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I've converted your numbering to MediaWiki numbering, so each item's on its own line. Nyttend (talk) 01:52, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Socrates offed himself, Plato carried on his teachings, Aristotle took a different direction than Plato and had conflicting ideas.

Descartes didn't ascribe to the arguments for God's existance as laid out by Aquinas, and had his own, simpler argumuments.

Locke didn't believe that there is certain knowledge. He believed that all ideas come from sensation and reflection and that all knowledge is founded on experience.

The difference between Kant and Locke is summarized here. https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/33269/how-does-lockes-realism-differ-from-kants-realism déhanchements (talk) 01:43, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

See Trial of Socrates for "offed himself". Also see Rabbit-duck illusion, an image made famous by Wittgenstein. Nyttend (talk) 01:52, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

More on Wittgenstein and the "Instagram" allusion: See Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, especially proposition 2.1 and following, called his Picture theory of language. Martin Heidegger's most famous student was probably Hannah Arendt, she had an affair with him at one point, and continued to expand on his philosophy. --Jayron32 16:26, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

See also Bruces' Philosophers Song. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:35, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

As for Derrida, his philosophy of deconstruction was basically that nothing was verifiable. --Viennese Waltz 08:08, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia might have driven him crazy. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:30, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Strangling the courts by stripping them of funding

My question is about the good ol' USA, and the current government shutdown.

My understanding is that the shutdown has affected the courts too, forcing them to stall cases, or in some cases, to shut down.

Now, under the constitution, my understanding is that the courts (or at least the Supreme Courts) are a co-equal branch of government, and take a dim view of the other branches of government telling them how to run their affairs? But at the same time, they rely on the other branches to fund their operations.

So what happens when (due to a shutdown, like now), the U.S. Supreme court is stripped of funds, and is forced to (at least temporarily) shut down? What does constitutional law or precedent have to say about this state of affairs? Is the court's budget (implicitly or explicitly) guaranteed by the constitution? I mean the court as a whole, not just the salaries of the individual justices. (The court would almost certainly find it impossible to function without support staff and a building, and that all costs money).

As a "side" question, what if congress made a wilful decision to cut the Supreme court's budget, either as an act of spite against court decisions, or simply for budgetary reasons? Does anything in the constitution imply that the Supreme court must be "adequately funded"? (I know that in criminal cases, the constitution guarantees a "speedy trial". Is there anything similar implying that, in "constitutional litigation", courts must be adequately resourced?) Eliyohub (talk) 12:41, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Concerns over court funding are nothing new, see e.g. [1] [2] [3]. If you're interested in state courts, see also [4] [5]. As mentioned there, even if the courts continue operating, it doesn't mean they aren't affected. Nil Einne (talk) 15:18, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Judge Dredd gets an origin story? --Error (talk) 19:31, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

• To directly answer the question... the Constitution does discuss regular payment for the Justices themselves... but says nothing about the broader court system (clerks, stenographers, building staff, etc) that supports them. Blueboar (talk) 20:06, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

  This has some discussion of the case law history surrounding the constitutional clause dealing with their compensation [6]. Our article Article Three of the United States Constitution mentions it, but no case law. Nil Einne (talk) 05:23, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

• Much appreciated, I will look into those links. (I have read some of them already). As to adding info about the case law to our article, somebody / anybody ought to take up the challenge and do so. Eliyohub (talk) 12:21, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Infantry frontal attack - WW1 vs. WW2

In WW1 frontal infantry attacks proved useless. Even nearly hundred thousand soldiers (the 1st day of the battle of the Somme) were slaughtered before trenched machine guns.

But in WW2 in the Normandy invasion, a frontal infantry attack worked.

What made the difference? אילן שמעוני (talk) 22:59, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

Cf.: Enfilade —2606:A000:1126:28D:20D1:2886:5F71:22E5 (talk) 23:41, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the Normandy invasion is the most useful example for comparison, but in general the main reason why WW2 fighting didn't usually end up being like WW1 static trench warfare was probably the much greater military effectiveness of planes and tanks. Better radio communication may have also had something to do with it -- in WW1, communications between military HQs and front-line units in the trenches depended on telephones (whose wires were often cut by enemy artillery barrages) and couriers who physically delivered messages (Hitler was such a message-deliverer in WW1), so attack plans had to be worked out in detail in advance, and couldn't be quickly readjusted on the fly in response to unfolding events... AnonMoos (talk) 00:01, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Agree with AnonMoos above, but a couple of further points:

In the First World War, the Western Allies were in full contact with the main German force for four years continuously. In the Second, the brunt of the fighting was done by the Soviets, who incurred immense casualties. Allied campaigns in North Africa and even Italy only engaged a small proportion of German strength. Although casualties on D-Day itself may seem moderate, by 24 July there were 120,000 Allied casualties in the Normandy Campaign, a scale approaching the casualty rate in the previous war.

It's a misconception that frontal assaults in the First war were "useless", the German front line was often breached, even on the First day on the Somme, the problem was holding the breach against counter-attacks. Using the rail network, the Germans could rush huge reserves to snuff out any incursion, resulting in no overall gain for a particular action. The British death toll for 1 July 1916 on the Somme was 19,240.

Alansplodge (talk) 14:09, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

• Mechanised assault. For the Germans at first (and later copied), this meant an integrated assault by armoured mobile artillery, and infantry who were often brought very close to the assault by mechanised transport. In WWI, the difficulty in assault was primarily the heavy machine gun, in a dug-in position. The rest of WWI trench warfare was really just there to protect those MG firing positions and to delay an assault for long enough to be cut down by them. This was enormously costly to assault by infantry alone, but in WWII they could be dispatched by a handful of HE shells from assault artillery, giving direct fire in response to either orders from platoon level commanders, or even identifying their own nearby targets. The WWI artillery barrage in contrast could only address a large area, and so was incredibly wasteful of resources, never concentrated where it was most needed, and so was largely wasted.

Successful breaches of the front line in WWI were rare, although not unknown, but it was very rare for them to be either held or exploited by advances beyond. The troops who had breached the line were exhausted and without further orders. It was so slow to request or bring up replacements that the counter-attack often happened first. In WWII, motorised transport could be controlled by radio and arrive in little time. Some commanders also followed the front line closely themselves, having mobile, armoured command vehicles with good radios (Rommel being the best known, but not unusual, example).

The full Blitzkrieg concept was greater than this, and included the integration of tanks and aircraft, especially ground-attack aircraft, to deal with other threats, such as tank formations and heavy artillery. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:39, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

The Normandy invasion worked on the beachhead as a "frontal assault" because it was conducted by full-strength, well-trained, fully-equipped ("Category A" in former-Soviet parlance) Allied infantry divisions supported by combined arms, air and sea bombardment, aerial envelopment, etc. against second- or third-line, static German coastal-defence divisions of older, poorly-trained or questionably-motivated troops without sufficient reinforcement, mobility or equipment. This is the advantage of the attacker — they have the choice of time and place to initiate combat, and it is not possible to defend all points equally or adequately.

Of course, the Oberkommando knew that such static divisions could not resist a determined amphibious assault for long, and they were not intended to do so. Rather, they were meant to hold the line long enough for well-equipped, armoured mobile reserves to arrive at the point of attack. But equally, SHAEF knew this as well, and thus emphasized measures to interdict German supply lines, transport networks and reserve depots; also, deception measures were designed to convince the Germans to place those reserves in the wrong place.

A frontal assault of first-line Allied infantry divisions against first-line Wehrmacht infantry divisions would have been a far different battle. But that's not what happened in Normandy. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 20:29, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Great question, btw. And terrific answers. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 15:40, 23 January 2019 (UTC)