Add citation for Morphy's encounter with Löwenthal

posts/child-prodigies.md

@@ -11,17 +11,17 @@ tags: post
 
 ![Detail of painting of Mozart as a child.]({{ '/img/child_mozart.jpeg' | url }})
 
-In the mid 1800s, everybody knew that the greatest chess players came from Europe. So when a Hungarian chess master visited New Orleans and was invited to play against a local 13 year old, he had no reason to think he would lose. The boy, who had been the strongest player in New Orleans since he was nine, bested the Hungarian handily. A decade later he had stormed through Europe, winning against all the strong players there too. One of his greatest opponents complained, "I win my games in seventy moves but Mr. Morphy wins his in twenty, but that is only natural ..." Having returned home with no opposition left to beat, he retired at age 22 and from that point on refused to talk about chess.
+In the mid 1800s, everybody knew that the greatest chess players came from Europe. So when a Hungarian chess master visited New Orleans and was invited to play against a local 13 year old, he had no reason to think he would lose.[^3] The boy, who had been the strongest player in New Orleans since he was nine, bested the Hungarian handily. A decade later he had stormed through Europe, winning against all the strong players there too. One of his greatest opponents complained, "I win my games in seventy moves but Mr. Morphy wins his in twenty, but that is only natural ..." Having returned home with no opposition left to beat, he retired at age 22 and from that point on refused to talk about chess.
 
 According to the historians, there had never been a child like her. As an adult, she used to say that she lived for philosophy; when young, that philosophy lived for her. She was born in Lampsacus on the coast of the Hellespont. At seven, she had read the _Republic_ and was taken by her parents to Athens to study with Speusippus in the Academy. At nine, she participated in the grown-ups' dialectics. At ten, she produced works on nature and comedy. It was of her that it was said, "The daughter of Athena is a Lampsacene." Her bright eyes and quick wit dazzled those who met her. When she was eleven, the Athenians judged her worthy of a bronze statue. But by fourteen, she had to dress as a man in the Academy lest anybody think she was a hetaera.
 
-Who were these children? They were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Paul Morphy and nobody. The third person is nobody because I have never heard of a child prodigy philosopher, so I had to invent her[^3]. Wikipedia has [lots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies) of child prodigies in chess, music and mathematics[^4] but few outside those fields, and, as far as I can tell, no philosophers, historians or theorists.
+Who were these children? They were Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Paul Morphy and nobody. The third person is nobody because I have never heard of a child prodigy philosopher, so I had to invent her[^4]. Wikipedia has [lots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies) of child prodigies in chess, music and mathematics[^5] but few outside those fields, and, as far as I can tell, no philosophers, historians or theorists.
 
 I mean by child prodigy here somebody who shows great proficiency at some activity in childhood, that is before puberty. Four years is the age that most kids learn to lace their shoes – Mozart wrote musical compositions. Five years is the age that most kids learn how to dress – Mozart gave performances. The question: Why does it seem like we never have child prodigies like Mozart or Morphy in philosophy?
 
 Here is my (very speculative) sketch for an answer. In _Lives of the Eminent Philosophers_, Diogenes Laertius paraphrases or summarises Plato:
 
-> Of the arts there are three kinds. The first includes mining and forestry; for these provide materials. The second includes metal-working and carpentry, which transform the materials; for the smith makes weapons out of iron, while the carpenter uses timber to make flutes and lyres. The third division puts what is made to use; horsemanship, for example, uses bridles, warfare uses weapons, and music uses flutes and the lyre. Thus of art there are three kinds: the first, the second, and the third.[^5]
+> Of the arts there are three kinds. The first includes mining and forestry; for these provide materials. The second includes metal-working and carpentry, which transform the materials; for the smith makes weapons out of iron, while the carpenter uses timber to make flutes and lyres. The third division puts what is made to use; horsemanship, for example, uses bridles, warfare uses weapons, and music uses flutes and the lyre. Thus of art there are three kinds: the first, the second, and the third.[^6]
 
 I interpret these to be something like
 
@@ -53,18 +53,29 @@ This can be stated more pithily as
 2. doing applied philosophy; and
 3. acting.
 
-Mozart and Morphy were child prodigies because they showed, in their respective areas, excellent aptitude for the third art and some skill at the second. Like other child prodigies[^6], they had marvellous working memories, which helped them in practicing the third art, because that is where we actually apply things in the world; working memory is crucial in guiding behaviour and decision-making. But as for the first art, they did not practice it until they were considerably older.
+Mozart and Morphy were child prodigies because they showed, in their respective areas, excellent aptitude for the third art and some skill at the second. Like other child prodigies[^7], they had marvellous working memories, which helped them in practicing the third art, because that is where we actually apply things in the world; working memory is crucial in guiding behaviour and decision-making. But as for the first art, they did not practice it until they were considerably older.
 
 Philosophy is an art of the first (and sometimes second) kind. That is why, for any X, there is also a Philosophy of X. Philosophy envelops and buttresses all other activities. Or maybe it lies hidden under the surface of every other activity. Either way, it requires the practitioner to probe more deeply than most other activities, to understand not only how to achieve an activity's goals, but to find out what those goals are and why they are worth pursuing in the first place.
 
-There is a difference between knowing and understanding: understanding a thing means being aware not just of the _what_ but also the _why_ and the _how_. "Understanding involves knowing what is a good argument", Jonathan Baron writes in _Thinking and Deciding_. "We must have certain standards for this, and these standards are likely to change as we become more educated. A young child often accepts an argument if it is merely consistent with the possibility being argued. An older child, in accepting the argument, often also insists that the argument be _more_ consistent with this possibility than with some other possibility. It appears that understanding must be renewed as we become more sophisticated about arguments. There seem to have been no child prodigies in philosophy. This domain, by its nature, insists on the highest standards of evidence and therefore cannot be understood at all in an immature way."[^7]
+There is a difference between knowing and understanding: understanding a thing means being aware not just of the _what_ but also the _why_ and the _how_. "Understanding involves knowing what is a good argument", Jonathan Baron writes in _Thinking and Deciding_. "We must have certain standards for this, and these standards are likely to change as we become more educated. A young child often accepts an argument if it is merely consistent with the possibility being argued. An older child, in accepting the argument, often also insists that the argument be _more_ consistent with this possibility than with some other possibility. It appears that understanding must be renewed as we become more sophisticated about arguments. There seem to have been no child prodigies in philosophy. This domain, by its nature, insists on the highest standards of evidence and therefore cannot be understood at all in an immature way."[^8]
 
 Of course, I am only groping towards something here.
 
 [^1]: Solomon, M. (1991). Mozart: The myth of the eternal child. _Nineteenth-Century Music_, 95-106.
 [^2]: ibid.
-[^3]: If you think it was especially improbable that I made her a _woman_ philosopher, given what we know of the subjugation of women in Ancient Greece, you should know that we know of two women who did attend Plato's Academy, Axiothea of Phlius and Lasthenia of Mantinea; however, neither is known to have been a child prodigy.
-[^4]: Mathematics may be a border zone. John von Neumann could perform complicated calculations in his head and speak Greek at a young age, and he was an impressive student, but he did not make any important contributions until his late teens; Blaise Pascal wrote a treatise describing his eponymous [theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_theorem) at age 16; Carl Friedrich Gauss was prodigious at math as a boy and completed _Disquisitiones Arithmeticae_ at 21. But, as far as I know, none of these produced groundbreaking work until their mid-to-late teens.
-[^5]: Laertius, D. (2018). _Lives of the eminent philosophers_. Oxford University Press.
-[^6]: Ruthsatz, J., & Urbach, J. B. (2012). Child prodigy: A novel cognitive profile places elevated general intelligence, exceptional working memory and attention to detail at the root of prodigiousness. _Intelligence_, _40_(5), 419-426.
-[^7]: Baron, J. (2000). _Thinking and deciding_. Cambridge University Press.
+[^3]:
+    Amusingly, Löwenthal, his opponent, makes still makes some excuses a decade later in a short biographical essay about Morphy:
+
+    \> When only thirteen years of age he was a really good player. At that early age he was victorious in one or two games with the Editor of this work, who was then paying a short visit to New Orleans, and though the latter was at that time depressed in mind and suffering in body, and was also prostrated by the climate, yet the achievement of the young Paul argues a degree of skill to which it is wonderful that a child could have attained.
+
+    Other sources give Morphy's age when he beat Löwenthal as 12, e.g. Edge (1859). Possibly Löwenthal preferred to remember Morphy as a teenager at the time in order to lessen the sting of defeat.
+
+    Löwenthal, J. J. (1872). _Morphy's games of chess: being the best games played by the distinguished champion in Europe and America_. Bell & Daldy.
+
+    Edge, F. M. (1859). _Paul Morphy: The Chess Champion: an Account of His Career in America and Europe: with a History of Chess and Chess Clubs and Anecdotes of Famous Players_. William Lay.
+
+[^4]: If you think it was especially improbable that I made her a _woman_ philosopher, given what we know of the subjugation of women in Ancient Greece, you should know that we know of two women who did attend Plato's Academy, Axiothea of Phlius and Lasthenia of Mantinea; however, neither is known to have been a child prodigy.
+[^5]: Mathematics may be a border zone. John von Neumann could perform complicated calculations in his head and speak Greek at a young age, and he was an impressive student, but he did not make any important contributions until his late teens; Blaise Pascal wrote a treatise describing his eponymous [theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_theorem) at age 16; Carl Friedrich Gauss was prodigious at math as a boy and completed _Disquisitiones Arithmeticae_ at 21. But, as far as I know, none of these produced groundbreaking work until their mid-to-late teens.
+[^6]: Laertius, D. (2018). _Lives of the eminent philosophers_. Oxford University Press.
+[^7]: Ruthsatz, J., & Urbach, J. B. (2012). Child prodigy: A novel cognitive profile places elevated general intelligence, exceptional working memory and attention to detail at the root of prodigiousness. _Intelligence_, _40_(5), 419-426.
+[^8]: Baron, J. (2000). _Thinking and deciding_. Cambridge University Press.