Desiderius Erasmus, Betty Radice (translator) · 1511 · EPUB · Calibre ID 626
Resurfaced in The Averaged Self (2026-09-27).
Role in the triad
The machine takes the floor: a personification delivering her own encomium, refusing definition, mocking the universals debate, and finally forgetting who she is.
Why this book
Breen stops at the 14th century; Folly is what the device does next. A daemonic type who satirizes the realists and nominalists whose quarrel defines her, with a Psychomachia-like household turned into a court.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “It’s in praise of myself, namely, Folly.” (p. 11)
- “Who could portray me better than I can myself? Unless, of course, someone knows me better than I know myself.” (p. 11)
- “they still boast that they can see ideas, universals, separate forms, prime matters” (p. 85)
- “so that you’d extricate yourself faster from a labyrinth than from the tortuous obscurities of realists, nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists and Scotists” (p. 88)
- “But I’ve long been forgetting who I am, and I’ve ‘overshot the mark’.” (p. 134)
- “When I wanted to play the fool, I assumed the character of Folly, and just as in Plato Socrates masks his face in order to sing the praises of love, I too have played my comedy in character.” (Letter to Dorp, p. 143)
- Excerpt pp. 12–13 (refusal of definition)
Themes
folly · mock encomium · persona · personification · scholasticism · self-praise · universals