Re: The humility topos

[Dusko Pavlovic <dusko@kestrel.edu>]

It might be fair to remember that "Topoi" is the title of 6th book or Aristotle's Organon. "On Categories" is the title of the 1st book of Organon. 

Both concepts were very actively used by scolastic philosophers. Maybe we are their heirs of some sort ;)

It would be interesting to know about the motivations of people who introduced these terms into mathematics. I think that MacLane said at one point that there was a terminological link through Rudolf Carnap, thus through neokantians. The notion of categories plays a prominent role in Kant's first Critique. But it is even more interesting if the term topos was introduced with an intentional reference to *dialectics*, which is what that part of Organon is about.

-- dusko

On Jun 28, 2010, at 12:49 PM, Michael Barr wrote:

> 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


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