Section
The seven liberal arts
A guide for young adepts: how to read closely, reason soundly and speak honestly, how number, form, sound and the heavens train the mind, and why all learning ends in knowing oneself. The old curriculum of the schools, read anew as a tool for the present.
The beginning
Trivium
- 02Grammar: reading closelyThe first art: what is really written there, who says it and how does he know? How Isaac Casaubon dated the supposedly ancient Corpus Hermeticum in 1614, how old famous secret writings really are and why a late date says nothing about worth.
- 03Dialectic: reasoning soundlyThe second art: when does something really follow, and when does it only sound as if it does? The difference between true and valid, the commonest fallacies to test oneself on, and what 'As above, so below' can and cannot do.
- 04Chance and patternWhoever searches long enough finds 7, 12 and 24 everywhere. An experiment with random buildings, the pyramid measurements of the nineteenth century, the strong law of small numbers and four questions that tell real patterns from chance, on this website too.
- 05Rhetoric: speaking honestlyThe third art has two sides: to speak well and truly oneself, and to recognise when one is being talked into something. Plato against the sophists, Aristotle's three means of persuasion, the silence of the Pythagoreans and why a good speaker must first be a good person.
Quadrivium
- 06Arithmetic: number in itselfThe first art of the quadrivium: why Plato thought counting a school for the soul, what the pebbles of the Pythagoreans teach and a path through the pages on numbers, divisors and primes.
- 07Music: number in relationThe second art of the quadrivium was no teaching of music-making but the study of ratios. What the ear knows about numbers, why the legend of the blacksmiths' hammers cannot be true and a path through the pages on sound and harmony.
- 08Geometry: magnitude at restThe third art of the quadrivium, after which the Freemasons interpret their letter G: what compass and straightedge teach about thinking, what is true of the inscription over Plato's Academy and a path through the pages on figures and solids.
- 09Astronomy: magnitude in motionThe fourth art of the quadrivium joins number, form and time. Why Plato did not mean stargazing, how observation decides about beautiful theories and a path through the pages on the heavens.