Not long after reading this blog-pastiche of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as performed by the Marx Brothers (give up all hope ye who enter the comment stream), I ran across the following passage in Barbara Reynolds’s wonderful book Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man. Reynolds notes that Dante, in the Convivio, identifies a “sickness of the mind” that she characterizes as “a boastfulness that leads people to believe that they know everything and to affirm as certain things that are not.” She quotes Aquinas: [T]here are many who by their natural dispositions are so presumptuous as to believe…Read More