james bradley thayer writes about the a law of super heroes
james bradley thayer
teacher of evidence
My student Jay Hook tells me:
Thayer’s talk, “Trial by Jury of Things Supernatural” was originally giving
to a ‘dining group’, then published in Atlantic Monthly (April, 1890, Vol. 65,
p. 465). Later it was one of the articles in Ezra Ripley Thayer (ed) Legal
Essays (Boston, 1908).
In the paper, J.B. Thayer reports two trials from the 1600’s in England and
Scotland which put down the legal foundation for the Salem witch trials over
here. In each, jurors were asked to decide whether young women’s afflictions
were caused by the supernatural machinations of people called witches.
Thayer’s concern is the extent to which judges do or should control the
information going to the jurors. He points out that the law of England at that
time explicitly recognized the supernatural as ‘real’, a fact that made the
non-believing judge’s task a bit more complicated than it would be today (i.e.
in 1890). Also, at that time the jury’s decision on the facts was final
whether they acquitted (like now) or convicted (not like now), at least in
criminal cases.
thayer is a “realist” as the “word” is canonized by david kennedy and terry fisher
what is the true meaning of this word
what the core idea
My student Steve Kalnoki tells me that in “On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense” Neitzsche says:
“Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. [. . .] What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
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who would be curious enough to participate in this venture
