Steven Parmenius

  A 17th Century scholar named Alexander Ross was having none of this nonsense about unicorns. He has been ridiculed as a fool, of course, but this is winner’s history for his observations on the matter are quite reasonable. While his bitter rival Thomas Browne mused about modern unicorn powder coming from any number of monocorns (such as the rhino or narwhal) Ross insisted that the substance that circulated in his day as unicorn powder was the same substance to which the ancients attributed such marvelous properties. He was adamant that the unicorn question was not to be resolved by simple semantics in spite of the confusion on the question. Moreover, he accepted these properties of unicorn powder as a well attested fact. Why? By what criteria? Testimony! As far as he was concerned the testimony of the ancients was broad and consistent as to the use of the powder and this would not have been the case if the powder had been ineffective (the notion of placebo does not seem to have b...

  Mandy (I can’t remember her last name) was a bright, perfectly pleasant young woman who insisted that unicorns existed and that her belief in unicorns was neither symbolic nor allegorical but literally factual. I suppose one might say this was a basic abandonment of intellectual responsibility for a person who was, after all, a grad student being trained for a future as an academic. This is true in terms of the socialization of academics. As an academic Mandy is responsible for investigating the assertions she makes. This would involve reading up on the history of unicorns and finding that it was an animal only ever talked about and never actually seen. In the middle ages it was an animal used largely as an allegorical entity to symbolize the Christian mysteries. Of course, for a medieval person the unicorn existed in a kind of dream state or demi-world between the symbolic and literal and depending on context could land on either side. A medieval person did not really need to m...