From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/5937 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Michael Barr Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: The humility topos Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:49:48 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: Michael Barr NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1277774317 23708 80.91.229.12 (29 Jun 2010 01:18:37 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2010 01:18:37 +0000 (UTC) To: Categories list Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Tue Jun 29 03:18:36 2010 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OTPT7-0000dw-JN for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:18:33 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1OTOx2-0001mq-T1 for categories-list@mta.ca; Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:45:24 -0300 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:5937 Archived-At: Yesterday's NY Times magazine had an article about the British experimental novelist David Mitchell. Mitchell told a story to the author of the article about how, after an event in New Zealand a woman, a medievalist there asked him if knew about the humility topos. I imagine that Mitchell came across as very humble. At any rate she went on to say, and I quote because I am not certain how to parse it, "in the medieval era humility was seen as a great virtue. The humility topos was used for those abbots...who were actually monsters of arrogance, but were always banging on about how humble they were...". The woman said to him, "Watch out for the humility topos" and then disappeared. Aside from wanting to know what was meant here, should the first quote have put humility topos in quotes, for example, I would also like to know what is the subobject classifier of the humility topos. Michael [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]