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Recent Posts
Author Archives: David Pierce
Emotional Contagion (Iliad VIII)
January 19, 2023 – 6:07 am
On the day recounted in Book VIII of the Iliad,
- on earth, the Achaeans are twice driven behind their new walls;
- during the first rout,
- Odysseus does not hear when Diomedes urges him to come to the aid of Nestor;
- Hector thinks he will be able to burn the Achaean ships and kill all the men;
- Agamemnon prays for mere survival;
- the second time, Hector calls for fires to be lit, lest the Greeks try to escape in the night;
- during the first rout,
- in heaven, Zeus
- weighs out a heavier fate for the Achaeans;
- declares that it shall be so until Achilles is roused by the death of Patroclus;
- warns Hera and Athena not to interfere (though they try to anyway).
I wrote a fuller summary in 2017. Because I was reading it, I also talked about Huysmans, Against Nature, and the belief of the main character that the prose poem could
contain within its small compass, like beef essence, the power of a novel, while eliminating its tedious analyses and superfluous descriptions.
Now I shall find reason to bring up Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Thoreau, and Freud, and especially William James and Collingwood on the subject of emotion.
On Homer’s Iliad Book VII
January 14, 2023 – 9:25 am
Biological History
January 9, 2023 – 9:39 am
“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity,” says Glaucus to Diomedes in the Iliad (Book VI, line 146, in Lattimore’s translation). However, leaves are normally considered biologically; humanity, historically. I touched on the distinction in the previous post; now I want to say more. I shall be looking again at R.G. Collingwood’s notion of biological history as a kind of mistake. Continue reading
On Homer’s Iliad Book V
December 26, 2022 – 5:58 am
Creative destruction
Arpa Suyu Sokağı, Şişli, Istanbul
Thursday, December 22, 2022
In Book V of the Iliad, the battlefield deaths that started in Book IV continue. Some of them are caused by Diomedes.
Parenthood and Sex
December 22, 2022 – 12:43 pm
Each of us has two biological parents. In my case, those parents are not my real parents, namely the ones who raised me. Nonetheless, according to the theory that everybody seems to accept, including myself, each of us has grown up from a zygote, which was formed by the union of two gametes. Moreover, one of those gametes was an egg cell; the other, a sperm cell. The gametes came from gonads: an ovary and testis, respectively. Ovaries are possessed by females of our species; testes, by males. Being female or male is called sex.
We are also distinguished, when children, as being boys or girls. Boys grow up to be men; girls, women.
It is usually assumed that men are male and women are female. Some of us may insist that this is always so, by definition of the words in question. In that case, I will argue,
- the definitions can admit of exceptions, at least in principle;
- an exception cannot be granted, merely at the request of the person who asks for it.
On Homer’s Iliad Book IV
December 19, 2022 – 7:14 am
Last time I mentioned what I had remembered most from the Iliad, after reading it in high school: the metaphor in Book VI of humans as leaves dying in the fall, to be replaced by new ones in the spring. I also remembered how often men died at the hands of their fellow men:
On Homer’s Iliad Book III
December 12, 2022 – 5:23 pm
Yeniköy (Νιχώρι) on the Bosphorus
Sarıyer, Istanbul, December 11, 2022
The Paphlagonians must have passed by here
on their way to join the Trojans
as they did according to Iliad II.851–5
as mentioned in the Wikipedia article “Cytorus”
created by me in 2010
In Book III of the Iliad, we learn about Menelaus, Paris, Hector, Helen, and Priam. Having learned about Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus in the first two books, now we know all of the players in the following summary of the epic.
On Homer’s Iliad Book II
December 4, 2022 – 9:34 pm
As I proposed last time, Achilles performs the greatest act in the Iliad by not killing Agamemnon in Book I. He then takes himself out of the action for a while. We are not going to see him again till Book IX, when he receives the embassy of Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus (chosen by Nestor in lines 168–9).