Author Archives: David Pierce

Mathematician & logician; amateur of philosophy; relation of journalists; alumnus of St John’s College (USA); living in Ankara & Istanbul since 2000

On Knowing Ourselves

March 3, 2018 – 4:47 am

In 2012 posting called “Strunk and White” in this blog, I criticized a 2009 essay about the pair called “50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice.” Strunk and White had not been trying to give grammar advice. They wrote not the elements of grammar, but The Elements of Style. They gave style advice by precept and example. The advice is good, if well understood; the critic should recognize that, as I wrote, “Rules of style are supposed to induce thinking, not obedience.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Archeology, Art, Books, Collingwood, Philosophy, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Tree of Life

February 12, 2018 – 3:19 pm

My two recent courses at the Nesin Mathematics Village had a common theme. I want to describe the theme here, as simply as I can—I mean, by using as little technical knowledge of mathematics as I can. But I shall talk also about related poetry and philosophy, of T. S. Eliot and R. G. Collingwood respectively.


An elaborate binary tree, with spirals

Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Collingwood, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Psychology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Şirince January 2018

February 4, 2018 – 4:54 am

In the Nesin Mathematics Village recently, I was joined at breakfast one morning by a journalist called Jérémie Berlioux. He knew Clément Girardot, the journalist whom I had met in the Village in the summer of 2016. This was before the coup attempt of July 15, but after the terror attack at Atatürk Airport on June 28. I wrote about this attack the next day in “Life in Wartime” on this blog. Then I headed off to Şirince to join a “research group.” My wife and colleague came along, though not to be part of the group; afterwards we headed up the coast for a beach holiday. We were at the beach when the coup attempt happened, as I wrote in my next blog article, “War Continues.” I contrasted politics with mathematics, which was an inherently nonviolent struggle. This was the kind of struggle engaged in by the research group in the Math Village.

Large clay pot against dark vines

Outside the Nişanyan Library


Continue reading →
Posted in Collingwood, Mathematics, Nature, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (2)

What Philosophy Is

November 21, 2017 – 3:54 pm

The essay below has been edited and expanded from an email of June 2, 2015. With my presumptuous title, I imitate Arthur Danto’s What Art Is (2013), mentioned in my last post, “Some Say Poetry.” The book is fine, and I have learned from it; but Danto could have learned from Collingwood’s Principles of Art.

Picasso, The Tragedy (1903), National Gallery of Art, Washington Continue reading →

Posted in Collingwood, Education, Philosophy, Pirsig | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Some Say Poetry

November 6, 2017 – 5:00 pm
Potted palms with plaster farm animals on hillside behind

Kuzguncuk, 2017.11.05

I originally set out to preserve here, for future reference, a poetry review that I liked. A remark on being a student had drawn my attention:

In My Poets, a work of autobiographical criticism with occasional ventriloquial interludes, McLane recalls two “early impasses in reading,” freshman-year encounters with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara. She writes about not “getting it” but wanting to get it, about a desire to get it that was left wanting by code-breaking and analysis and satisfied by hearing and feeling.

I shall try to say more about learning and creating, in poetry and also in mathematics, after quoting the review in its entirety. It constitutes the second half of a “New Books” column by Christine Smallwood, in the Reviews section of Harper’s, July 2017.

Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Books, Collingwood, Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Women and Men

October 11, 2017 – 2:26 pm

This began as an update to “Confessions,” which concerns the man called G. H. Hardy and the woman called Sylvia Plath. I had originally included a photograph of the subjects’ respective books. On Hardy’s, the author poses reluctantly; on Plath’s, a woman applies powder in a compact mirror.

Plath’s book was the 2013 Faber and Faber 50th Anniversary Edition of The Bell Jar, and the cover is controversial. See Alexandra Topping, “The Bell Jar’s new cover derided for branding Sylvia Plath novel as chick lit” (The Guardian, Friday 1 February 2013). I learned of the controversy from Emily Van Duyne, “Sylvia Plath Looked Good in a Bikini—Deal With It,” in Electric Literature, hosted by Medium (October 9, 2017). Medium had promoted the essay to me when I read Brian E. Denton, “The World Will Not Quarrel: Day 282 of A Year of War and Peace.”

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Mathematics | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Fascism As Abetted by Realism

October 10, 2017 – 10:07 am

Fascism is class warfare waged on behalf of the capitalists. This should be realized by anybody who is attracted to accidental features of Fascism such as nationalism, racism, or militarism. The Fascists are not on your side, even if they share your nationality or “race” or fascination with weaponry and military discipline.

Continue reading →

Posted in Collingwood, History, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Romance

October 8, 2017 – 2:14 pm

At the end of Shakespeare’s romance called The Tempest, Prospero plans to retire to Milan, where “Every third thought shall be my grave.” I remember these words, from reading the play in school and college. I also have thoughts of my grave. Their frequency may increase as the years pass. However, for each of those thoughts, I seem to have more that are based on memories of youth and childhood.


Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Travel | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

NL XXV: The Three Laws of Politics

September 28, 2017 – 10:48 am

Index to this series

A pervading theme of the New Leviathan is freedom of will. Whether we actually have it is only a pseudo-problem (13. 17). Some persons have been fooled into thinking it a problem, perhaps by the misleading myth that free will is a divine gift, like life itself, breathed into our nostrils when, in Genesis 2:7, God forms us of the dust of the ground. As Collingwood observes at the end of Chapter XXIII, “The Family As a Society,” we are born neither free nor in chains. We have to grow up. Growing up is becoming free.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb (New York: Norton, 2009)

Continue reading →
Posted in Collingwood, Education, New Leviathan, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad, Book IX

September 23, 2017 – 7:49 am

Index to this series | Text of Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

Book IX of the Iliad is easily summarized. Chapman does it in four lines.

TO Agamemnon (vrging hopelesse flight)
Stand Diomed, and Nestor opposite:
By Nestors counsell, Legats are dismist,
To Thetis sonne, who still denies t’assist.

These lines hide a wealth of thought. To suggest some of the gems of the book, I expand the summary.

Dog and seaweed on shore opposite Lesbos, 2017.09.14

Continue reading →
Posted in Books, Collingwood, Homer, New Leviathan, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)