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

Mood

March 10, 2020 – 5:53 pm

Executive summary. The English grammatical moods—indicative, imperative, subjunctive—were not understood till the nineteenth century, according to an 1882 doctoral dissertation, On the Use of the Subjunctive Mood in Anglo-Saxon. Considering illustrative passages that happen to be from Plato, Alfred Douglas, Evelyn Waugh, and especially John Donne; looking ultimately at John McWhorter’s 2015 essay, “English is not normal”; I review the subjunctive mood, grammar in general, and my own lack of understanding till I was in college.

Copyright page and table of contents, side by side, of Concise Oxford Dictionary Continue reading →

Posted in Grammar, Plato, Poetry, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Doing and Suffering

March 2, 2020 – 6:35 am

Edited March 30, 2020

To do injustice is worse than to suffer it. Socrates proves this to Polus and Callicles in the dialogue of Plato called the Gorgias.

I wish to review the proofs, because I think they are correct, and their result is worth knowing.

Loeb Plato III cover

Or is the result already clear to everybody?

Whom would you rather be: a Muslim in India, under attack by a Hindu mob, or a member of that mob?

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Posted in Collingwood, dialectic, Euclid, Pirsig, Plato | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Salvation

February 24, 2020 – 7:06 am

Because Herman Wouk was going to put physicists in a novel, Richard Feynman advised him to learn calculus: “It’s the language God talks.” I think I know what Feynman meant. Calculus is the means by which we express the laws of the physical universe. This is the universe that, according to the mythology, God brought into existence with such commands as, “Let there be light.” Calculus has allowed us to refine those words of creation from the Biblical account. Credited as a discover of calculus, as well as of physical laws, Isaac Newton was given an epitaph (ultimately not used) by Alexander Pope:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

I don’t know, but maybe Steven Strogatz quotes Pope’s words in his 2019 book, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. This is where I found out about Wouk’s visit with Feynman. I saw the book recently (Saturday, February 22, 2020) in Pandora Kitabevi here in Istanbul. I looked in the book for a certain topic that was of interest to me, but did not find it; then I found a serious misunderstanding.

book cover: Steven Strogatz, Infinite Powers Continue reading →

Posted in Archimedes, Calculus, Euclid, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Evolution of Reality

February 17, 2020 – 4:50 am

I enjoy and recommend Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter, which presents thought on both American politics and thought itself.

Tiny green plants on red tile roof, cloudy day

In a 2017 post of this blog, I quoted Wright’s 1988 article in The Atlantic Monthly about Edward Fredkin. Somewhat differently from Fredkin, I spelled out my title, “What Philosophy Is,” without actually being a professional philosopher. I touched on a theme that I shall take up now: that thinkers today could benefit from knowing the thought of R. G. Collingwood.

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Posted in Collingwood, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Sex and Gender

December 30, 2019 – 8:01 am

A certain thesis is reasonable to me, and yet it would seem to anger persons whom I wish to respect. I am trying to understand why it does.

The hypothesis of the homunculus in the sperm
by Nicolaas Hartsoeker, 1695

Perhaps the manner of expression of the thesis is the problem. Thus one person tweets:

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On the Odyssey, Book II

November 24, 2019 – 7:08 pm

Having been put to bed by Eurycleia at the end of Book I of the Odyssey, Telemachus gets up in the morning and has the people summoned to council, at the beginning of Book II.

Three books with beads

There is no mention of a breakfast. Perhaps none is eaten. On the other hand, Telemachus probably relieves his bladder at least, and there is no mention of that either.

Telemachus straps on a ξίφος, but arrives at the assembly with a χάλκεον ἔγχος in hand. Wilson calls it a sword in either case; for Fitzgerald and Lattimore, the first weapon is a sword, but the second a spear and a bronze spear, respectively. Cunliffe’s lexicon supports the men; however, for Liddell and Scott, an ἔγχος can also be a sword, at least in Sophocles. For Beekes, ξίφος is Pre-Greek, and ἔγχος may be so. Continue reading →

Posted in Homer, Maugham | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Ordinals

November 16, 2019 – 3:07 am

This is about the ordinal numbers, which (except for the finite ones) are less well known than the real numbers, although theoretically simpler.

The numbers of either kind compose a linear order: they can be arranged in a line, from less to greater. The orders have similarities and differences:

  • Of real numbers,

    • there is no greatest,

    • there is no least,

    • there is a countable dense set (namely the rational numbers),

    • every nonempty set with an upper bound has a least upper bound.

  • Of ordinal numbers,

    • there is no greatest,

    • every nonempty set has a least element,

    • those less than a given one compose a set,

    • every set has a least upper bound.

One can conclude in particular that the ordinals as a whole do not compose a set; they are a proper class. This is the Burali-Forti Paradox.

Diagram of reals as a solid line without endpoints; the ordinals as a sequence of dots, periodically coming to a limit Continue reading →

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On the Odyssey, Book I

November 9, 2019 – 7:25 am

  • In reading his rendition of the Iliad, having enjoyed hearing Chapman speak out loud and bold;

  • having enjoyed writing here about each book, particularly the last ten books in ten days on an Aegean beach in September of this year (2019);

  • having taken the name of this blog from the first line of the Odyssey;

  • having obtained, from Homer Books here in Istanbul, Emily Wilson’s recent translation (New York: Norton, 2018);

    • Book on table, Wilson's Odyssey Continue reading →

Posted in Collingwood, Homer | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

Computer Recovery

November 2, 2019 – 8:13 am

I record here how I fixed my computer, because

  • I am pleased to have been able to do it, and

  • I may have to do it again.

Briefly, when Windows on my laptop failed, I installed Ubuntu, but this failed. Somebody else installed Ubuntu again, and this worked for a while before failing. I managed to fix that problem for myself; but later an upgrade failed. Now I have fixed that.

Computer on table by window at dawn

This post is some kind of laboratory notebook. Continue reading →

Posted in Istanbul, Pirsig | Tagged , | Comments (2)

On the Idea of History

October 20, 2019 – 6:48 am

Our environment may influence our feelings, but what we make of those feelings is up to us. Thus we are free; we are not constrained by some fixed “human nature”—or if we are, who is to say what its limits are?


Rembrandt van Rijn (and Workshop?), Dutch, 1606-1669,
The Apostle Paul, c. 1657, oil on canvas,
Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art

Insofar as we humans have come to recognize our freedom, we have done so after thinking that what we did depended on our class—our kind, our sort, even our “race.” We might distinguish three stages of thought about ourselves.

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Posted in Collingwood, Euclid, History, Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)