Gene Coyle wrote:
None of these problems existed when we all did our analysis in Latin.
McGoun, Elton G. 1995. "Machomatics in Egonomics." International Review of
Financial Analysis, 4: 2/3, pp. 185-199. 185: "It has been suggested that
Learned Latin effects even greater objectivity by establishing knowledge in a
medium insulated from the emotion-charged depths of one's mother tongue, thus
reducing interference from the human lifeworld and making possible the
exquisitely, abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new
mathematical modern science which followed the scholastic experience. Without
Learned Latin, it appears that modern science would have got underway with
greater difficulty, if it had got underway at all. Modern science grew in Latin
soil, for philosophers and scientists through the time of Sir Isaac Newton
commonly both wrote and did their abstract thinking in Latin." Ong, W.J. 1982.
Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen): p. 114.
186: "Studies of the matter are nonexistent, but one could argue as an initial
hypothesis that the modern intellectual world and the modern state of
consciousness could never have come into without Learned Latin or something like
it Modern science and technology need even greater large-scale abstraction
than Plato imagined, a strongly developed feel for highly artificial
intellectual constructs ... [Such a written] language would appear to reduce to
a minimum connections with sound and thereby connections with the intimated
human lifeworld in its interiority and darkness." Ong, W. J. 1977. Interfaces of
the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press): p. 36.
186: "Into the twentieth century, the requirement of Latin, in however
attenuated a form, marked the schools which trained boys and young men not for
business, but for academic or public life, for taking positions on issues and
fighting them through, for diplomacy and other verbal jousting. The vernacular
schools, by contrast, trained boys, and somewhat later, girls for managing the
economy, commercial or household, and for other practical, noncombative uses of
literacy The older rhetorical Latin tradition stood for a committed,
agnostic approach to leaning and to life." Ong 1977, p. 216.
187: "Medieval scholars relied on a process of formal lectures and disputations
regarding classic texts. At its beginnings in the 13th century, scholasticism
was "led by sharp, demanding minds in full strength" and marked by "rigorous,
stimulating, original thought with obedience to the laws of reason" Le Goff, J.
1993. Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers): p.
92.
187: By the early 17th century, it was more noted for its labyrinthine systems
teased out of gross oversimplifications and for the arcane terms and subtle
debating points one had to master to achieve academic distinction. Cottingham,
J. 1986. Descartes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
187: De Wulf, M. 1956. An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy (NY: Dover
quotes a number of vitriolic descriptions of scholasticism: Vives (ibid., p. 4):
"[They] rave and invent absurdities that only they themselves can understand."
Taine (ibid., p. 5): "Three centuries at the bottom of that gloomy abyss did not
add a single idea to man's intellectual inheritance." Bacon (ibid., p. 4):
"Their science degenerated into subtle, vain, and unwholesome questions like a
decomposing organism."
188: "It is a platitude of the sociology of intellectual professions that the
more demanding the technique, the more arcane the vocabulary, and the more
inaccessible the professional discussion become to mere laymen, the higher both
the prestige of the specialty and the starting salaries of appropriately
certified novices." Lekachman, R. 1980. "Introduction." in W. J. Samuels, ed.
The Methodology of Economic Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books): p.
ix.
189: "Non-mathematical contributions to economic analysis tend to be fat,
sloppy, and vague Clarity of thought characterizes mathematical
economics." Klein, L. R. 1954. "The Contribution of Mathematics in Economics."
The Review of Economics and Statistics, 36: 4, pp. 359-61, p. 360.
189: "The justification for the use of mathematics in any field is its
efficiency as a method of analysis." Dusenberry, James S. 1954. "The
Methodological Basis of Economic Theory." The Review of Economics and
Statistics, 36: 4, pp. 361-3, p. 361.
189: "The mathematical presentation of axioms, reasoning, and deductions is a
discipline which, strictly followed, will pinpoint assumptions, expose weak
logic to expert scrutiny, and confine the conclusions to their profit limits
. to express their argument shortly and reveal its structure may demand the
use of a condensed notation and an appeal to known general theorems at an
advanced level. To translate axioms, proof, and results all into prose would,
