Pascal, Pensées, S 254–328

March 4, 2021 – 3:53 am

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By David Pierce | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Pascal, Pensées, S 1–114

March 2, 2021 – 8:07 pm

Obtained as fragments 115–82 were, in this post from Pascal’s Pensées are Sellier fragments 1–114. Their use of raison was the subject of the first post in this Pascal series. That post could have been part of this one, but I had not recognized the ease of converting a whole pdf file of the Pensées into html.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Pascal, Pensées, S 183–254

February 25, 2021 – 9:00 am

By the account of Martha Nussbaum, philosophy is one of two things:

  1. A form of inquiry pursued through conversation among equals.

  2. An activity of “a lonely thinker of profound thoughts.”

Nussbaum prefers the first, though having appeared in a film that promotes the second.

I watched and enjoyed the film, which is by Astra Taylor and is called Examined Life (2008). I first found it through a touching fragment, featuring a stroll in San Francisco by Judith Butler and Taylor’s sister Sunaura. Because they have a conversation at all, and on the theme that we all need one another’s help, the film becomes less subject to Nussbaum’s charge:

Portraying philosophers as authority figures is a baneful inversion of the entire Socratic process, which aimed to replace authority with reason.

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By David Pierce | Posted in “God is a circle …”, Philosophy | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Pascal, Pensées, S 115–182

February 23, 2021 – 9:37 am

This document contains fragments

  • 80–149 of the Lafuma,

  • 115–182 of the Sellier

edition of Pascal’s Pensées, in modernized French and the following sections:

  • Raisons des Effets

  • Grandeur

  • Contrariétés

  • Divertissements

  • Philosophes

  • Le Souverain Bien

  • A [Port-Royal]

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Reason in Pascal

February 23, 2021 – 9:05 am

In some of the Pensées, Pascal contrasts reason with instinct, passions, folly, the senses, and imagination.

Here I investigate Pascal’s raison, after one session of an ongoing discussion of the Pensées that is being carried out on Zoom.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Philosophy | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Feminist Epistemology

January 29, 2021 – 6:47 am

I

By character count, the bulk of this post, in the third and final part, is my notes on

  1. Elizabeth Anderson, “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, February 13, 2020. 61 pages.

There are things I already thought, owing to philosophers such as Robin George Collingwood, Mary Midgley, and Robert Pirsig, if not Henry David Thoreau.

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By David Pierce | Posted in “ceases to be a mind”, Collingwood, Descartes, Midgley, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mathematics, Principles of Art, Sex and Gender | Tagged | Comments (0)

Words

January 9, 2021 – 11:08 am

This post is based on recent readings, often on or through Twitter, especially of

  • Lilith Saintcrow on “Domestic abusers, white supremacists, and religious bigots”;

  • C. S. Lewis on gulling the educated, and objectivity as a dubious value;

  • Marilynne Robinson on consensus as concealing the objectively true;

  • Neil deGrasse Tyson on objectivity as a good value;

  • Plato on seeming wise, without being so;

  • Mark Vernon on imagination in William Blake;

  • whoever wrote an “Open Letter Concerning Transphobia in Philosophy,” signed by many professional philosophers;

  • Kathleen Stock, the subject of the “Open Letter”;

  • Agnes Callard on how philosophers shouldn’t be signing petitions;

  • Rebecca Reilly-Cooper, on the incoherence of the notion of gender identity;

  • Aaden Friday, on what’s wrong with Reilly-Cooper and other such women;

  • Brian Earp, on declaring pronouns;

  • John Steinbeck, on being a man;

  • Christa Peterson, on what gender identity might be.

I have edited and augmented this essay since originally posting it on January 9, 2021; the current version is from January 19.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy, Plato, Sex and Gender | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Law and History

December 29, 2020 – 3:17 pm

I learned about Peter Turchin recently through his profile in the Atlantic by Graeme Wood. I had learned about the Atlantic article from historians on Twitter such as James Ryan, who does “Turkish history and other stuff,” according to his own Twitter profile, and who tweeted in response to Wood’s article,

This is really interesting research, but, uh, it is only history in the way that a particle physicist does history.

In response to that, a thread began:

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Collingwood, History | Tagged , | Comments (2)

The Asıl of the Iliad

December 20, 2020 – 7:02 pm

Etymologically speaking, the asıl of a thing is its root. The Arabic root of the Turkish word means bitki kökü, “vegetable root,” according to Sevan Nişanyan’s Turkish etymological dictionary.

In the Iliad, why is Achilles so affronted by Agamemnon as to refuse to help the Greeks, even as their attack on Troy is becoming a defensive war, at the wall that they have erected about their own ships? If the answer is to be found through study, then Book IX of the Iliad is what to study.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Homer | Tagged | Comments (0)

Automatia

December 15, 2020 – 9:56 am

One day during the Trojan War, Apollo and Athena decide to give the combatants a break. The general conflict is to be replaced with a one-on-one. The Olympians induce Helenus to tell his brother Hector to take on whichever of the Greeks is up for it.

Only Menelaus will accept the challenge at first. His brother Agamemnon makes him withdraw. When none of the other Greeks comes forward, Nestor chides them. After a story of his former prowess, he utters the words that Chapman renders as two couplets:

O that my youth were now as fresh, and all my powers as sound;
Soone should bold Hector be impugn’d: yet you that most are crownd
With fortitude, of all our hoast; euen you, me thinkes are slow,
Not free, and set on fire with lust, t’encounter such a foe.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Aristotle, Grammar, Homer, Language | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)