Monthly Archives: February 2022

On The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt 2

February 28, 2022 – 10:18 am

Index to this series

CHAPTER II The Public and the Private Realm [1]

Contents

There are four more sections in the chapter, and these constitute the next reading: 7 the public realm: the common; 8 the private realm: property; 9 the social and the private; 10 the location of human activities.

Graffiti: “Now or never” and “Oku” (that is, “Read”) on a wall by a street with a parked car; skyscrapers in the distance

Beşiktaş, February 15, 2022
Oku = “Read” (second-person singular imperative)

History and law

A significant passage in this reading lies on page 42 (¶ 6.9):

… the significance of a historical period shows itself only in the few events that illuminate it. The application of the law of large num­bers and long periods to politics or history signifies nothing less than the wilful obliteration of their very subject matter.

My post “Law and History” took up something like this argument. Continue reading →

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

On The Human Condition of Hannah Arendt 1

February 24, 2022 – 6:29 pm

Here begins a series based on the 1958 book by Hannah Arendt (1906–75) called The Human Condition. The publisher classifies it as philosophy and political science. I sense a kind of similarity with a book that I have devoted many blog posts to: The New Leviathan (1942) of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943).

Collingwood wrote about European civilization as a war threatened to end it. Arendt managed to escape that war, and she went on to write about civilization in her own way in The Human Condition. Today, February 24, 2022, a new war for territory in Europe begins.

Red-themed cover of The Human Condition against dull green cloth

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments (15)

Gödel, Grammar, and Mathematics

February 14, 2022 – 8:01 am

Preface

This attempt at exposition of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was inspired or provoked by somebody else’s attempt at the same thing, in a blog post that a friend directed me to. I wanted in response to set the theorem in the context of mathematics rather than computer science.

Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Posted in Exposition, Fowler, Grammar, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)