Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2009 June 12

= June 12 =

Can anyone recognize these three philosophers?
The following picture appears in Japanese Wikipedia's Portal:Philosophy: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Portal_Tetsugaku.JPG. I am wondering about the identity of three of the people depicted in it. The ones that I have recognized are: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, (Marx), Nietzsche, ???, Russel, Nishida Kitarō, ???, ???, Foucault, Derrida. Who are the rest of them? (I did ask the editor who created the picture this question but I never received an answer, so I decided to ask here.) --Omnipaedista (talk) 04:00, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * THe one to the right of Hegel is Karl Marx (this exact pic is in our article). --Jayron32. talk . contribs  04:24, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Third from the right on the bottom is grainy and hard to see, but it may be Claude Lévi-Strauss. Compare to this google image search:  --Jayron32. talk . contribs  04:29, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply. Funny.. I didn't recognize Lévi-Strauss even though I had watched an (old) 1-hour TV interview of him a week ago. This leaves two of them unidentified. (In my original post, I forgot to include Marx but he is not one of the three =)). --Omnipaedista (talk) 05:33, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I think the one between Nishida and Lévi-Strauss is Emmanuel Levinas. The moustached one next to Nietzsche looks familiar, but I can't place him. ---Sluzzelin  talk  09:45, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Second row, second from left: could it be a young Bertrand Russell? 4th from left, Karl Popper? Second from right is Michel Foucault. End right, Jacques Derrida. 3rd from right could be Mortimer Adler, but could also be Gilbert Ryle. --TammyMoet (talk) 10:24, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Update: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, ???, Russel, Nishida, Levinas, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida. Only one left: "the moustached one next to Nietzsche". (He's gotta be either German or French; none of the Anglophones mentioned so far looks like him.) --Omnipaedista (talk) 11:04, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * No, the moustached gentleman is in fact from the anglosphere: It is John Dewey, though viewed from a low angle and slightly squashed to fit in the collage, making his face look rounder. Here is the original portrait. ---Sluzzelin talk  12:22, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Weird. I didn't recognize it as Dewey, though I have read his works more than anyone else on the list (as a teacher myself, I find his work to be eminently applicable).  I guess this one is of him as a younger Dewey, since most of the pics I have seen of him is as an older man.  --Jayron32. talk . contribs  12:30, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * In addition, he's usually shown wearing spectacles, even in his younger years. ---Sluzzelin talk  12:34, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * And I was wondering where were the American Pragmatists in this "timeline". So, in short, the answer to my query is Dewey, Levinas, Lévi-Strauss. Last (witty) remark: despite the fact that superficially this was an unessential quizz, I believe that effectively it made us all refresh our knowledge of the history of philosophy and put some faces to some names or, in this case, to some inherently "impersonal" philosophical ideas. --Omnipaedista (talk) 14:09, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I had similar thoughts while searching, Omni, and I always enjoy this type of sleuthing at the reference desks. Only late in the game did I realize it was a strictly chronological timeline by date of birth, meaning the mysterious moustache man had to be born between 1844 and 1872. I did find a similar picture here, albeit with glasses, but I also hovered around Julien Benda for a while (see this picture, for example :-). ---Sluzzelin  talk  14:31, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

JK Rowling's sources of income
JK Rowling's wiki biography mentions the rather subtantial fortune she has earned from her writings. Is it known what proportion of this came from actual book sales, and how much from movies? I'm particularly wondering the movie amount. Thanks. 67.122.209.126 (talk) 04:53, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I googled on "JK Rowling" and "movie earnings" and found the same question asked in another forum, and there was an answer citing a Times article from last October. The answer is no, her movie earnings have not been disclosed. --Anonymous, 05:30 UTC, June 12, 2009.
 * You would also need to allow for the amount she has made through merchandising, which I suspect is rather a lot, given the pervasion of the Harry Potter brand. Gwinva (talk) 02:29, 13 June 2009 (UTC)


 * This People Magazine article from 2003 gives the rather precise claim that US$238.7 million of her US$445.5 million came from book sales. Her wealth had more than doubled since then as of the Forbes 2007 list.  Hard to say if the ratio has changed since then.  She may have been able to get higher royalty rates from the later movies.  Merchandise revenue has presumably decreased a lot (I think it peaked around 2001 when the stores were saturated with Harry).  Tempshill (talk) 02:48, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Verifying a Goethe quote
There' a quote attributed to Goethe floating about there, but never seems fixed to one of his writings or another. Trying to figure out if it's really a Goethe quote, and where to source it from, has been driving me quietly crazy for quite some time. "If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul." Can any of you eminent scholars help me out here? Failing that, I'll take some bum with a half-remembered title to a magazine article. In Valandic. -Toptomcat (talk) 07:40, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * "Im ganzen ist der Stil eines Schriftstellers ein treuer Abdruck seines Innern: will jemand einen klaren Stil schreiben, so sei es ihm zuvor klar in seiner Seele; und will jemand einen grossartigen Stil schreiben, so habe er einen grossartigen Charakter." It is from "Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1827. Found it in Google Books.--Rallette (talk) 08:39, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Amazing, there are quotes floating about the Internet that are real.--Mr.K. (talk) 12:07, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Oh, they're all real. Just misattributed in many cases; sometimes deliberately, sometimes in good faith.  --  JackofOz (talk) 12:24, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you kindly. -Toptomcat (talk) 22:01, 12 June 2009 (UTC)